arhitectura, structura si ornament gotic. anne-marie sankovitch

7/29/2019 Arhitectura, Structura Si Ornament Gotic. Anne-Marie Sankovitch

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Structure/ornament and the modern figuration of

architecture.

From: The Art Bulletin | Date: 12/1/1998 | Author: Sankovitch, Anne-Marie

In architectural writings from about 1830 to the present a great many buildings areconsistently described as divided between structures that represent one period style and

ornament another. Why are Romantic historicists, early twentieth-century formalists, and

contemporary contextualists all in agreement about the binary nature of these buildings?An examination of the literature on one such monument, St-Eustache in Paris, considers

the covert, problematic function of "structure/ornament" as a spatially conceived

narrative device; its relationship to "transitional" architecture; its (often unacknowledged)

figurative significations; and its status in contemporary discourse as a discovery ratherthan a historically contingent invention.

Roman architecture often reduced the Greek orders to mere ornament applied to arcuatedstructures.

The Lombard chapel piled up ornament on the purist structure of the Florentine model.

In the nineteenth century a building was made a structure to receive an envelope ofsurface ornament.

To be authentically modern was to strip categorically from structure all ornament.

Few readers would find anything remarkable about the prominent use of structure andornament in such statements, which resemble actual passages of innumerable modernwritings on architecture. These two words seem to describe unproblematically only what

is physically there; "structure/ornament" appears to embody the very nature of much built

reality. We do not in general question, or even feel that it is necessary to question, whatstructure and ornament actually signify, or to ask why they so typically appear as an

oppositional pair. Nor do we often seriously reflect on the historical origin of the pair

(which is generally grossly misdated) or study the implications of that origination. In the

absence of such critical analysis, we fail to realize how pervasive and compelling afiguration of architecture the structure/ornament pair is, and that it determines in massive

ways much of how we think and write about many aspects of architecture and its history,

and even to a large extent how we build. To initiate such an analysis is the primary aim ofthis essay, which is intended not to resolve issues attending specific historical sites butrather to excavate and closely scrutinize certain assumptions and problematics that

pervade and frame structure/ornament, and thereby to put to critical questioning the

seemingly transparent nature of much recent and current architectural discourse.

St-Eustache as Structure/Ornament Paradigm


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Architectural history today frequently seeks to interpret buildings as objects shaped by

and expressive of their social meanings and historical contexts. The function of a buildingis consequently understood as primarily representational and often as actively engaged in

defining the social world of which it is a part. It would be both unexceptional and

commendable to decide that the best way to grasp the realities of, for instance, a

fifteenth-century Florentine church is to chart the competing economic, political,religious, and cultural forces that brought it into being and to interpret it as a material

expression of the ascending wealth and status of the mercantile class during the period.

This alliance of contextualism and soft semiotics has been marshaled primarily as a

reaction against the formalism that generally dominated architectural discourse from thelate 1800s through the middle of the twentieth century and that coincided with

modernism and its distrust of history. Since the embrace of social history around 1970,

formalism and the internal history of architecture have been either rejected as elitist (or

worse) or, more benignly, regarded as having discharged their necessary but narrow taskso that we can now progress to a richer understanding of architecture in its full

multidisciplinary complexity. In the efforts to anchor architectural form in its historicalcontext, form itself has become self-evident and the procedures of formal analysis often

tend to be taken as a given.

That a critical inquiry into the interpretive problematics of the properly architectural hasbeen deemed irrelevant by many architectural historians is largely because the current

revisionism has tended to restrict itself to questioning the scholarship of the earlier part of

the twentieth century. Formalism is rebuffed because it is associated with an ahistorical

approach, not because its procedures are inherently flawed insofar as strictly formalquestions are concerned. The properly architectural is narrowly identified with the

formal, and the latter is understood to be well understood.(1)

Modern strategies of formal analysis originated, however, not in the heyday of modernist

formalism but far earlier in the historically attentive writings of nineteenth-century

theorists. The Romantics and their contemporaries created a two-part model forinterpreting architecture: buildings were located in the newly created, self-contained

historicity of the evolution of architectural form, and simultaneously they were

understood to be historically determined and contextually expressive objects.Architecture had its own immanent history, but this history was coordinated with social,

economic, and cultural history. It was in the service of this dual project - not the prim,

solitary demands of formalism - that new ways of conceiving and describing architectural

form were devised. When, in the years around 1900, the historical part of this enterprisewas suppressed, many buildings continued to be apprehended and described (if not

comprehended) in fundamentally the same way as they had been for nearly a century.

With the recent reemergence of history, many of the identical descriptions, with all their

formal-historical baggage, are again being repeated, having tacitly if nonreflectively beengranted apodictic status; prominent among these is the structure/ornament model.

The emergence in the nineteenth century of this immensely potent mode of architecturaldescription and its ongoing reiteration through the present day can be illustrated in a brief


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survey of the descriptive history of one building, the church of St-Eustache in Paris

[ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. In the first volume of the Dictionnaireraisonne de l'architecture francaise (1854), Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc wrote:

They wanted to apply the forms of ancient Roman architecture, which they knew badly,

to the construction system of Gothic churches, which they scorned withoutunderstanding. As a result of this indecisive inspiration the large church of Saint-

Eustache in Paris was begun and completed, a monument that is badly conceived, badlybuilt, a confused heap of debris borrowed from all over, incoherent and without harmony,

a sort of Gothic skeleton draped in Roman rags sewn together like the pieces of a

harlequin's costume.(2)

Viollet-le-Duc's words are perhaps the most evocative rendering of a new visual and

descriptive paradigm that configures St-Eustache as a building morphologically divided

between its "skeleton," or structure, and its "rags," or ornament. Before the earlynineteenth century such a two-part perception - even more, such a building - had been

unimaginable.

When St-Eustache was constructed (1532-1640) and for some time thereafter observers

were not much interested in allocating it a stylistic tag. Instead they saw (and esteemed) a

monument notable for the abundance of its spatial and material traits: the great quantityand variety of its sculptural decoration, the great number of its piers and chapels, the

great height of its vaults, and the unquantifiable spaciousness and richness of the building

as a whole.(3) This was a superlative St-Eustache, which was seen, somaticallyexperienced, and textually figured by the comparative grammatical framework whereby

"big, bigger, biggest" or "some, more, most" equals "good, better, best."(4)

This "superlative" discourse was eventually displaced by the classical mode that emergedin France in the middle of the seventeenth century. The new discourse, which sought to

separate the materiality of architecture from the idea it represents and to dissolve it into

language, was highly theorized in its procedures as concerned both the creation and theapprehension of architecture. One interpretive gesture, however, was left free of

theoretical elaboration, for it seemed self-evident: deciding to which of two possible

manners, Gothic or classical, a building belonged.(5) This most apparently stable(because most reflexively deployed) gesture, this first casual glance, which effortlessly

sees morphological traits that reveal the style of a building, proved imprecise and

mercurial in the writings on St-Eustache. Everyone looking at the architecture of Paris

"knew" that Notre-Dame and the Ste-Chapelle were Gothic, that St-Sulpice and thefacade of St-Gervais were classical, but no such fundamental consensus was arrived at for

St-Eustache. For some observers the building was Gothic,(6) for others it was classical or

"modern,"(7) while for a third group it was both.(8) St-Eustache deflected the classicalgaze and became an odd, unknowable building, inaccessible to the rational grasp of

normal architectural discourse.

The confusion now caused by St-Eustache can be seen in Marc-Antoine Laugier's

Observations sur l'architecture (1765). When he first writes about the building Laugier


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tells us:

The interior of this church is quite remarkable. The person who built it was strongly

attached to Gothic architecture, and had a few feeble notions about Greek architecture. In

this building he wanted to present some examples of the Greek orders. The result is those

little columns hoisted up on excessively elongated pedestals, and which can berecognized by their bases, capitals, and fluting as belonging to antique architecture. This

church marks an epoch in that it is only half Gothic, and, being like certain borderingprovinces where opposing habits and languages intermingle, it signals the moment when

Gothic architecture was about to die and Greek architecture was beginning to be

reborn.(9)

In this partly Gothic St-Eustache, Laugier identifies classicizing columns that reveal

themselves to his empirical scanning by their bases, capitals, and fluting. Although he

describes only these isolated classical traits and does not indicate what about the buildingis precisely Gothic, at first reading his text seems to reveal a cognitively lucid,

stylistically meaningful St-Eustache. But the building configured here is precarious, forits degree of Gothichess shifts as the text unfolds. First the church is strongly Gothic asthe architect has merely a "feeble notion" of the "Greek" style, then it is half Gothic, and

finally it is dying Gothic.

I would not insist on these distinctions, which follow a certain chronological logic and at

least consistently describe the building as partially Gothic, were it not for a subsequent

passage in Observations where a different St-Eustache appears, one that is entirelyGothic:

In our churches the vault is the principal object. It is there that the Gothic architect

deploys his most brilliant resources. . . . In all the churches that we have built since theRenaissance of Greek architecture the vault is heavy and massive. . . . If one enters Saint-

Eustache, there is nothing more elegant than the vault of this church. . . . If one enters

Saint-Sulpice, there is nothing more insipid than that naked barrel vault.(10)

Now St-Eustache (diametrically opposed to the "insipid" classical St-Sulpice) is regardedas a characteristic specimen of Gothic architecture, a style that declares itself by the

morphological feature of its distinctive vaulting. This abrupt visual realignment is

accompanied by a historical repositioning of the building: from that moment when Greekarchitecture was first beginning to be born the church is pushed back to the time before

this Renaissance. Is the St-Eustache of Observations Gothic and classical or purely

Gothic? The text as a whole describes an elusive and changeable structure, a shifting,

flickering architectural mirage where visuality is refracted and the most basic ofepistemological assumptions called into doubt.

The nineteenth century brought St-Eustache to heel; architectural critics of the time, suchas Viollet-le-Duc, now looked at and configured the building with a new architectural

gaze, one that continued to search for style-revealing traits yet divided that recognition

between the structure of a building on the one hand and its ornament on the other. It was


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just this possibility that the previous episteme was unable to entertain, and we should be

careful not to endow a false immanent prescience on those classical texts that claimed St-Eustache was both Gothic and antique.(11) That the forms of a single monument could be

composed of material traits from two distinct styles, with one category of traits

coalescing into a building's physical structure and another into its ornament, was

unthinkable and indeed was never stated.(12) Also, despite the fact that many eighteenth-century theorists (including Laugier) admired Gothic architecture or, more specifically,

Gothic methods of construction, that admiration was limited to isolated motifs such as

slender columnar supports, or to such resulting spatial effects as lightness and openness;it was not transposed to the recognition of a comprehensive tangible Gothic structure or

skeleton in the sense that Viollet-le-Duc would imagine, either in Gothic monuments or,

more to the point, in St-Eustache.(13)

It is only in the nineteenth century that a bipartite set of discursive spaces is produced,

which all material architectural traits are seen to inhabit, variously and unambiguously,either as part of "structure" or of "ornament." In place of the oscillating, unstable St-

Eustache that randomly proffered isolated details to the frustrated investigations of theclassical gaze, a building of crystalline certainty emerges. Its morphology is no longer the

object of uncertainty and, in fact, becomes a nonissue. The "structure/ornament"description seems to explicate and encompass the entire monument, apparently solving

the mystery of the style of St-Eustache.

In the twentieth century this St-Eustache (either in its metaphorical guise of a clothed

skeleton or its apparently literal one of an ornamented structure) is reiterated with the

hallucinatory regularity of a mantra: "Saint-Eustache is a church with a skeleton of theGothic type, overlaid with Renaissance adornment" (1910); "on a medieval structure

there is Renaissance clothing" (1923); "the task of the church-builder . . . was to clothe a

medieval skeleton in Renaissance flesh" (1926); "this new clothing covers an entirelyGothic framework of pointed arches and flying buttresses" (1944); "the medieval

structure of this church is ornamented to the point of absurdity with elements in the

Italian style" (1947); "this Gothic structure is . . . clothed in Renaissance forms" (1953);

"to this medieval structure was unfortunately added decoration in the Italian mode"(1958); "evidence of the Renaissance style . . . is limited to ornament applied to the

Gothic piers" (1978); "the whole church was submitted to the principle according to

which Renaissance ornament was applied to the Gothic structure" (1984); "an Italianisingornamentation was applied to a Gothic structure" (1987); "only the decoration is

representative of the Renaissance. . . . The structure is still entirely Gothic" (1989);

"Saint-Eustache . . . is entirely Gothic in structure, although its decoration uses a classical

vocabulary" (1997).(14) Furthermore, in the 1980s at least four authors cited Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire description, allowing his words (which are irresistibly quotable) to

corroborate or proxy for their own perception of the building.(15)

A St-Eustache is thereby produced that is virtually identical among the great majority of

twentieth-century texts; a disarmingly simple building has taken root in contemporary

scholarship with the tenacity of truth. How do we account for the strange success of thisGothic structure/Renaissance ornament St-Eustache, both as a construction in itself and


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as a phenomenon that continuously solicits duplication from the nineteenth century to the

present day?

This question is not unique to St-Eustache, which is far from being the only premodern

building that continues to be understood as divided between a structure that represents

one style and its ornament another. Much of the architecture of sixteenth-century Franceand of Renaissance Europe outside Italy in general has been similarly configured by this

binary concept. One author at the cutting edge of the antiformalist reappraisal ofarchitectural interpretation describes a style of sixteenth-century Spain as "a hybrid local

concoction of ornamental motifs applied without regard to the structure of the building,"

while another identified with formalist readings writes that in Germany "during most ofthe sixteenth century the Renaissance was simply a system of ornament . . . applied to

Late Gothic structures."(16)

Nor does Italian Renaissance architecture necessarily escape the structure/ornamentmodel. The Portinari Chapel at S. Eustorgio in Milan, for example, "represents . . . the

transposition of the Sagrestia Vecchia of S. Lorenzo into the formal idiom of Milan. . . .The interior with its polychromatic blurring of the structure . . . and its prolific ornament .. . is far removed from the structural austerity of the Sagrestia Vecchia."(17) The

Portinari Chapel differs from its transalpine colleagues mainly in that its blurred

Florentine structure and its blurring Lombard ornament represent two regional variants ofa single style, not two distinct period styles; yet like them it finds no place on the

canonical Florence-RomeVenice axis and consequently is a building that formalism has

perceived as marginal.

Moreover, since the early nineteenth century the history of architecture in general has

become littered with more buildings that are, topographically speaking, marginal or

peripheral and, temporally speaking, early, transitional, or late than buildings that haveapparently achieved stasis at the central, high, or classical point of their style. In a great

many of these cases the structure/ornament opposition is invoked as the buildings are

described as formally cleft between two different period styles, different regional styles,or different phases of a single style.(18) Thus, onto the "Romanesque structure" of

Bayeux Cathedral has been "grafted a heterogeneous collection of borrowings from early

13th-century Ile-de-France and English Gothic,"(19) and of the architecture offifteenthcentury France it has been said, "Never . . . has Western architecture come closer

to the luxuriant ornament of the East and to its fanciful profusion, which seems without

purpose, and is certainly unrelated to the structure."(20)

Non-Italian Renaissance, non-Florentine quattrocento, French thirteenth-century

architecture outside the Ile-de-France, and late Gothic architecture: it is precisely such

fields, which were apparently misunderstood or entirely overlooked by formalists, wherescholars have been particularly eager to follow the recent historical (re)turn in

architectural interpretation. In the current climate a respectable argument can be made

that the architecture of Renaissance Germany is not a lesser version of the Italian, not a

marginal reflection of the center, but a historically legitimate phenomenon deserving ofcritical attention on its own terms. Similarly, a thirteenth-century cathedral that displays


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an early Gothic or Romanesque structure need no longer be disdained as provincially

retardataire but can be interpreted as a declaration of regional identity, as responsive tothe particular qualities of local building materials and masonry traditions, as having a

contextually specific iconographic meaning or liturgical function, and so forth.

What present scholarship does not recognize, however, let alone encourage criticalspeculation about, is that such plunges into history often remain securely tethered to the

peculiar revenantlike presence of the structure/ornament description. It is precisely thisissue, and questions surrounding it, that I want to consider - that is, why nineteenth-

century Romantics, early twentieth-century formalists, and contemporary contextualists

are so frequently in agreement about the fundamental (structure/ornament) character ofbuildings about which they are otherwise in apparent disagreement.

The case of St-Eustache in modern architectural discourse is well suited to an inquiry into

the problemafics of structure/ornament as a descriptive pair used to figure historicalarchitecture. French nineteenth-century theorists were very much in the vanguard of the

movement that created the new strategies for thinking about buildings. They wrote for themost part about their national architecture, two main periods of interest being preciselythose relevant to St-Eustache: the Gothic and the newly defined field of the French

Renaissance. Thus, virtually from the moment the structure/ornament St-Eustache was

created, this identically configured building appeared in the texts of writers whocomprehended it in quite different historical terms depending on whether, like Viollet-le-

Duc, they understood the French Gothic to be the exemplary national mode of

architecture or instead assigned this role to the French Renaissance, as did many of the

Romantics. Furthermore, St-Eustache is a very large monument prominently located inthe center of Paris, so that even when the French Renaissance (or, more typically, the

church architecture of sixteenth-century France) has been the subject of little scholarly

interest, it is a building that is difficult to ignore. Anyone writing about the history ofParisian architecture, or of Renaissance or classical architecture in France, or about the

end of the Gothic has been more or less obliged to include St-Eustache, cumulatively

providing ample material for my analysis.

I do not propose to begin by critically dismantling the structure/ornament pair, for

although it is a truism that any attempt to describe an object will be a fundamentallyinterpretive and historically contingent act, by its very nature open to rigorous

reexamination, at the same time another often overlooked factor needs to be considered.

That is, any description of an object, in this case an architectural object, does more thandemonstrate that a building has been seen in a particular historically specific way: it also

produces a textual figuration or figure of the building. Such a figural building, whatever

may be its relationship to the physical building it is seeking to represent, has its owndiscrete existence. It is a cultural artifact of value worth studying in its own right. A

figural building is valuable in part because it has a certain utility. This utility is not

restricted to the ability of the figure to convey knowledge of a building but is also

specifically textual or literary in nature. Consequently, I temporarily want to leave thestructure/ornament St-Eustache intact and begin by undertaking this more positive line of


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inquiry and consider what useful function this figural building might possess.

Structure/Ornament and the Critical History of Architecture

When I say that the modern structure/ornament St-Eustache is a figurative building I

mean this literally. The binary structure of the concept is just that: a figurative structureor construction that is metaphorically composed of two closed and distinctly separate

spaces. Onto the apparently neutral surfaces and into the apparently empty spaces of thisfigurative structure a variety of observations can be placed. Structure/ornament is a

figuratively conceived heuristic device that provides architectural historians with spaces

to be filled, a structure to be embellished.

One useful consequence is that the structure/ornament St-Eustache is a wonderfully

genial building that makes itself available to a range of critical assessments. There is nopredetermined correspondence between the structure/ornament building and what is said

about it - what is placed in or on it - and the figured building confirms its own validity as

it remains stable from the early nineteenth century onward, despite its shifting criticalfortunes. For instance, Marius Vachon (1910) describes the church architecture of

sixteenth-century France in a manner antithetical in judgment to Viollet-le-Duc's harsh

characterization: "on a skeleton that is entirely Gothic, with traditional architectural

schemas, they toss, in a charming caprice of the imagination, a Renaissance garment andadornment."(21) And he writes of St-Eustache:

As a whole, Saint-Eustache is a church with a skeleton of the Gothic type, overlaid withRenaissance adornment. Of the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages it has the boldness

and majesty of construction; of the civic monuments of the sixteenth century it has the

fantasy, the grace and the elegance of sculptural ornamentation. And nothing more

luxurious, more delicate or more refined can be imagined.(22)

An imposing Gothic structure replaces Viollet-le-Duc's corrupted skeleton, elegantsculptural fantasy replaces Roman rags, and an architect of charming sensibility replaces

Violletle-Duc's depraved rag and bone picker scavenging in the debris of the past.(23)

Each author is in agreement about the essentially binary nature of the building and has soconfigured it, but in applying a different rhetorical veneer to its two separate parts is able

to persuade us that St-Eustache is either a miserable or fine work of architecture.

Moreover, in each text the persuasive rhetorical veneer applied to the structure/ornament

St-Eustache performs a narrative as well as critical function. The highly charged

language that compellingly characterizes the church serves as a supplement to the

narrative logic that organizes the story of the encounter of Gothic and Renaissance stylesin sixteenth-century France. In the Dictionnaire Viollet-le-Duc tells a sad story of the

decline, perversion, and eventual suppression of the French national mode as the

seductive foreign forms of Roman architecture are insinuated into a weakened Gothicsystem. Vachon's La Renaissance francaise, to the contrary, narrates a positive encounter

as a fertile medieval tradition nourishes and is in turn enriched by new architectural

forms.(24) Each plot verifies the assessment of the structure/ornament St-Eustache; by


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the same token, the bipartite building affirms the validity of the plot as the descriptive

terms that embellish it serve to sustain the historical story in which the building is apassing moment.

That the structure/ornament St-Eustache can accommodate (house and shelter) a variety

of historicized scenarios is crucial to its tenacious success, for in modern architecturaldiscourse narratives of the history of architecture - the historicity of the history of

architecture - often constitute the ground for critical evaluation of architectural form.That is, in stating that the modern St-Eustache can accommodate different critical

assessments, what I am really saying is that it can accommodate different dramatizations

of the Gothic-meets-Renaissance story. These alternatives can include stories thatcontradict Viollet-le-Duc's, even those that also subject the building to a negative

aesthetic appraisal.(25) Anthony Blunt, for example, writes:

It is to be expected that Gothic tendencies should survive longer in ecclesiasticalarchitecture than in secular, and this is amply borne out by St Eustache. . . . This Gothic

structure is, however, clothed in Renaissance forms. . . . the Italian impression dependsonly on the use of classical pilasters instead of Gothic. The orders are, it is true, used in away to horrify any classically trained architect. In some piers, for instance, the four main

faces are decorated with Corinthian pilasters, the height of which is perhaps twenty times

their breadth, and the corners of the piers are filled by three columns standing one on topof the other, all of somewhat bastard design [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2

OMITTED].(26)

The architectural hero of Blunt's Art and Architecture in France 1500-1700 is Viollet-le-

Duc's despised antihero, the French classical ideal. Blunt charts the fortunes of classicism

in a narrative of emergence, development, and triumph, in which the sixteenth century is

a period of origin and progress rather than finale and decline. The Gothic, no longer castin the role of Viollet-le-Duc's tragic victim, becomes an annoying, if historically expected

malingerer unwilling to recognize that its time is up.(27)

All this is apparent in the description of St-Eustache, where superannuated Gothic

"tendencies" are juxtaposed with badly proportioned and bastardized classical orders and

where Blunt is easily detected in his textual persona of a horrified "classically trainedarchitect." Blunt uses a historical narrative of progress to posit both the Gothic and St-

Eustache as problematic, not because Gothic equals bad architecture, but because in the

sixteenth century Gothic equals the past, what he calls "the old," and is therefore resistant

to progress, that is, to the future, to "the new" of classicism. Resistance is, however,manifest also in the badly conceived and poorly executed Renaissance ornament of St-

Eustache, which, nevertheless, announces the classical future and the ultimate futility of

resistance.(28)

Structure/Ornament and Transitional Architecture

The self-chronicling of the structure/ornament St-Eustache, that is, the correspondence

between the building on the one hand and the critical history of architecture on the other,


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is possible because just as every author sees and configures the same binary construction,

so too is every narrative predicated on the evolutionary concept of a transitional periodstyle: the building represents the passage of historical styles from the Gothic through the

Renaissance and toward classicism. For each author St-Eustache is in transit, neither

entirely departed from its Gothic origins nor fully arrived at its Renaissance or classical

destination.

As a result, Viollet-le-Duc is able to include the building in his story of Gothicarchitecture as persuasively as Blunt does in that of classical, and Vachon can narrow his

sights on the transitional French Renaissance. There is no epistemological contradiction

between the fact that they all see the same bipartite St-Eustache yet situate it in differentdramas; the transitional Gothic structure/Renaissance ornament building itself seems to

generate these alternate possibilities. It is all a matter of viewpoint provoked by the same

historical phenomenon of the transitionality of the building, which can be subject to

different dramatic spins and inflections.

There is a manifest correlation between the binary apprehension of St-Eustache ascomposed of a Gothic structure and Renaissance ornament and the historicalcomprehension of the building as a transitional one located at the end of the Gothic

period and the beginning of the Renaissance.

The evolutionary concept "transitional" presupposes continuous linear movement andnarrative. Similarly, it must be recognized that the organization of the pair

structure/ornament is not static or bidirectional but consistently sequential and thus

inherently narrativized and endowed with historicity. "Structure" has temporal priority

over "ornament," a status it enjoys both in the way the two words are normatively ordered(to speak of the ornament/structure concept would be deliberately perverse), and in the

way architecture is itself conceived and built in the modern period. The (metaphorical)

understanding of the history of architecture as being like a line in continuous forwardmotion dictates that Gothic moves transitionally toward (or through) the Renaissance,

while the temporal organization of structure/ornament confirms the duality of perception

on which the idea of transitional is dependent and the historical priority of Gothic, andalso affirms the sequential motion from the Gothic to the Renaissance.

Because of the homology between "structure/ornament" and "transitional," the material

building as perceived by modern observers and as figured in their texts can function as an

expressive synecdoche for the broad period of architectural history of which it is a

transitional fragment.

Laugier had also used a spatial metaphor when he sought to describe St-Eustache as

manifesting a style that was both classical and Gothic. He wanted to illustrate the dualityof the building by making use of the spatial example of "bordering provinces," and he

used space as a metaphor for time: the area where the languages and habits of two

provinces overlap is like the moment when St-Eustache appears. If this metaphor is


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pursued its logic cannot be sustained.

The space where neighboring provinces overlap is a nonspace with no internal integrity

and no outer borders of its own; ultimately, it belongs more to one territory than another,

or one territory will dominate and claim it. Indeed, a few traits from the classical

province are the only ones that Laugier describes with any acuity, whereas Gothic is anebulous, unspecified presence described as dying by the end of the passage. Finally, the

spatial metaphor collapses; the borderland is diminished to a border, a line without spacewhere no structures can be erected. When Laugier saw the building again he decisively

centered it in the space labeled Gothic.

With structure/ornament, space is again used as a metaphor for time, except now the

spatial metaphor is not a hypothetical place external to the building but is presented as a

faithful description of the building itself which naturally motivates it. The moment when

St-Eustache appears is like the figurative Gothic structure/Renaissance ornament buildingthat transcribes its own transitional status.

In other words, structure/ornament does more than accommodate historicized scenarios, it

a priori obliges them; the inherent temporalization of the structure/ornament figure not

only demands that the building be seen in strictly binary terms, it also functions as a

compelling narrative device. The figurative pair permits architectural historians to behistorians, allowing them to see and write about a building in such a way that it naturally

conforms to and promotes their desire to tell continuous histories of the history of

architecture. The primary textual utility of structure/ornament is that it is a figurativeconstruction whose sequential organization narrativizes the observations that are placed

on or in its two component spaces.

Furthermore, to avoid the structure/ornament St-Eustache is to avoid a historicalunderstanding of the building, to ignore its transitional place in the history of architecture

and the question of its period style. Such an evasion occurs in a description of St-

Eustache by Viollet-le-Duc in the 1867 Paris Guide:

In the interior, the piers present the strangest profusion of pilasters and columns that it ispossible to imagine. The effect of the whole of this interior, nevertheless, produces a

seductive impression of elegant grandeur. Those elevated side aisles flood the nave with a

beautiful, well-diffused light. There is certainly in all of this interior a theatricalaffectation, the evident desire to astonish, and if this vessel was entirely painted, if the

windows were furnished with lightly colored stained glass, the interior of the church of

Saint-Eustache would have all the appearance of a fairy palace, if not of a Catholic

church.(29)

Here, writing in the "nonserious" genre of the guidebook Viollet-le-Duc adopts a mode of

discursive visuality different from that of the Dictionnaire. This decidedly nonanalytical,nonrigorous, and poetic mode allows him to offer a generally sympathetic response to the

church by ignoring the question of its style, its place in the history of architecture, and its

material division into structural and ornamental traits.


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Conversely, to continue to rely on the structure/ornament figure will invariably serve to

affirm the transitionality - or the inherent temporality - of a building even if an authorseeks to avoid this term. Although such an escape has not been ventured for St-Eustache,

Willibald Sauerlander has recently attempted to do so for a group of medieval Rhenish

churches that since the early nineteenth century have been seen as transitionally situated

between the Romanesque and Gothic. Sauerlainder contrasts the formalist transitionalreading with what he construes as an alternate interpretation found in nineteenth-century

texts, an option he calls the "ethnogeographic." Carl Schnaase is cited as an example:

Schnaase . . . tended to explain art by the influence of climate, soil and local customs. . . .

He finds all sorts of features in the character of the Rhenish population and Rhenishlandscape, which explain for him the decorative exuberance and the picturesque quality

of the Rhenish transitional style. If one reads through Schnaase's pages one soon observes

that while he keeps the word transition, in reality he sees the Rhenish monuments not as

transitional but as creations of an autonomous regional style that leads not fromRomanesque to Gothic but has aesthetic value in itself.(30)

This is a misreading of Schnaase in its presumption of an opposition between"autonomous regional style" and "transitional." Schnaase is not incorrect in claiming that

he sees transitional architecture: he is deeply committed to this evolutionary stylistic

description - for which he provides a contextual scenario. No epistemologicalinconsistency exists between the evolution of architecture, which describes these

buildings as transitional, and contextualism, which examines the uniqueness - the

autonomy - of their particular transitionality as the manifestation of a singular historical

and cultural setting.

Also, explanations in terms of national identity and specific regional and material

requirements tended to be offered in the nineteenth century for transitional periods thatnegotiated simultaneously between a stylistic past and future as well as between local and

foreign styles, whether German Romanesque and French Gothic or, as in sixteenth-

century France, French Gothic and Italian Renaissance.(31)

Having distinguished between the two options, however, Sauerlander rejects both: "In my

view neither of the two perspectives - the transitional and the ethno-geographic - is reallysatisfactory. But, we may ask, is there no other alternative? For the answer we need to

take a fresh look at the monuments."(32) After a traditional formal analysis of a number

of buildings Sauerlander poses what for him is the crucial question and offers a possible

path toward its answer:

Why did Rhenish architecture only modernize decoration and not structure? I can't givean explanation but the answer given by those who refer simply to the German or Rhenish

mentality is no more than self-adulatory. It would need a closer look into economic

history, history of craftsmanship and technique, patronage and funding in order to come

perhaps closer to an answer.(33)

The avenues of critical inquiry proposed here do not differ in kind from those pursued by


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Schnaase. Rather than interpreting these medieval churches in the context of regional

identity, Sauerl/nder suggests a consideration of other contextual factors that might becalled the "econo-technical" rather than "ethno-geographic." Like Schnaase, Sauerlander

sees the buildings and their style, and he searches in an exterior context for an

explanation of what he sees. Of greater interest than his explanation, however, is the

question Sauerlander asks: "Why did Rhenish architecture only modernize decoration andnot structure?" If the implications of this question are followed they lead in a direction

the author certainly did not intend: Why are the structures old and the decoration new and

progressive? Why does structure belong to the Romanesque past and ornament tomodernity and the Gothic future? Why, in other words, are these buildings transitional?

In seeking to displace a concept that he sees as highly problematic, Sauerlander is

inexorably drawn back to it and to the hypnotic linearity of the history of architecture as

he employs an architectural description (also used by Schnaase) that perpetuates the

status of these Rhenish buildings as in fact nothing other than transitional. His reliance on"structure/ornament" and his advocacy of the "econo-technical" rather than "transitional"

and the "ethno-geographic" duplicate the interpretive strategies of Schnaase and do notmove beyond them. While an inquiry into the "econo-technical" might be productive, it

cannot be productive in the way Sauerlander hopes - that is, as capable of offering aninterpretation of the buildings that would escape the conceptual structures of the

nineteenth century - as long as these structures and their figurative guises are not

themselves recognized and critically confronted.(34)

History and Architectural Metaphors

That architectural historians remain blind to the figurative nature of the

structure/ornament pair is not only because the figure has effectively assumed the status

of a true transcription of much historical architecture but also because since the earlynineteenth century, history in its two dominant guises (the self-contained evolution of

architectural history and contextualism) has often been posited as the singular and stable

ground for architectural analysis and interpretation. Architecture is the object ofknowledge; history is the mode knowledge takes to access this object. In the debates

about what kind of historical or historicized narratives should be told about architecture,

what has gone largely unnoticed is the way that architecture and the language ofarchitectural discourse have provided figures to think about architecture itself.(35)

The preeminence accorded history by nineteenth-century theorists of architecture and by

twentieth-century architectural historians is well known. We hardly need Michel Foucaultto tell us, "History, from the nineteenth century, defines the birthplace of the empirical. . .

. History has become the unavoidable element in our thought."(36) To study the practice

of modern architectural discourse, particularly as it was originally formulated in thenineteenth century, is to encounter history and its metaphors at every turn as we are

offered archaeology, history, historicity, continuity, progress, linearity, narrative, and

temporality with a vengeance. Derailed histories of architecture are narrated; architecture

is conceived as an object of historical knowledge and as an entity whose fundamentalessence is historical (whether located in the diachronic movements of the history of


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architecture or synchronically correlated to "real" history); theories of architecture are

now based on the study of history and on archaeology (that is, on a positivist, historicizedempiricism rather than the idealized empiricism of earlier studies of historical

architecture); these architectural theories are often written as histories, and architects

conceive of their own work in historical terms?

But this aggressive foregrounding of history obscures the role that architectural and

spatial metaphors play in much architectural discourse in both the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries. A historian writing (in 1986) about French architectural theory of the

nineteenth century states, "It was a discourse conducted in metaphorical terms; structured

by the language of history and archeology."(38) This observation is partly right:architectural discourse of the 1800s and 1900s is conducted in metaphorical terms, but it

is not - cannot be - structured by the language of history and archaeology. Properly

speaking, "structure" belongs to architectural discourse; only as a metaphor can it make a

transterritorial migration and "structure" historical language.(39)

It would be more accurate to say that the language, assumptions, methods, and theories ofhistory and archaeology, the diachronic movements of the one and the synchronicprobings of the other, are themselves structured, ordered, and conceived in terms of

architectural and spatial figures, so that in a partly self-reflexive movement architecture is

involved in the process that sees itself. The ascending and descending, forward orcyclical motions of the line of the history of architecture, for instance, cannot be charted

unless there also exists a metaphorical structure or spatial matrix that allows that line to

be plotted. In modern discourse, architecture and history are often mutually engaged in a

nonseparable affirmation of the perception, conception, and description of architecture,whether historical, historicist, or historicized. Architectural metaphors (such as

"structure") and architectural figures, such as structure/ornament, serve as spatial models

that collaborate with historicized concepts, such as transitional. But a spatial model canbe dangerous, for, as Jacques Derrida warns, "When the spatial model is hit upon, when it

functions, critical reflection rests within it. In fact, and even if criticism does not admit

this to be so."(40)

Structure/Ornament as a Narrative Device: A Closer Look

As a spat'lal model that also has the advantage of temporality, structure/ornament is fated

to preserve the transitionality (or earliness or lateness) of buildings it configures, even if

"criticism does not admit this to be so." By the same token, its temporalized bipartite

structure permits and encourages different stories about a building to be written fromthose that concern the linear history of architecture. If a building is described as cleft

between these two categories of traits, any observation about such a building will be

located in one of its two component parts - its two figurative spaces - that are kept rigidlyseparate and always appear in the same chronological sequence, permitting and

controlling narratives and ensuring that all observations are in fact narrativized.

To illustrate this more inclusive narrative or historicist role of the structure/ornament pair

and to consider further its relationship to the transitional, I begin with a comparison of


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different accounts of St-Eustache that appear in Albert Lenoir and Leon Vaudoyer's

critical history of French architecture, "Etudes d'architecture en France," which wasserialized in the Magasin pittoresque between 1839 and 1852.(41) The first occurs in

their discussion of the end of Gothic architecture, where the builders of St-Eustache are

favorably contrasted with their contemporaries at the cathedral of Beauvais. The Parisians

had the good sense to face the historical music and accept that Gothic had had its day,and therefore they made the appropriately enthusiastic effort to embrace the new Italian

Renaissance forms [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. Their colleagues at

Beauvais, however, foolishly clung to the Gothic because they were "jealous of thesuccess that Michelangelo obtained with the construction of the cupola of Saint-Peter's in

Rome, and wanted to prove that the Gothic style could not only equal but surpass the

great achievements of Greek and Roman architecture."(42) That their ambitious,staggeringly high crossing tower collapsed is noted by Lenoir and Vaudoyer as the hardly

surprising result of such hubris.

The eager beavers at St-Eustache, meanwhile, were caught in a double bind:

In this church where the Gothic skeleton is preserved in its entirety, they wanted to applythe decorative elements which had been newly restored to honor; the round arch was

substituted for the pointed arch in all the bays (with the exception of the apse) and the

look of antique orders was introduced for all the supporting members; but was thisattempt truly successful? And although at first glance this church offers a very seductive

overall impression, are we not soon struck by the absence of harmony that must

necessarily result from the application of these orders, the proportions of which are fixed

by strict rules, to these immense Gothic piers, which are destined to support vaults whoseskyward flight remained without limits? . . . Was it possible to introduce into such a

complete creation . . . elements borrowed from an entirely differently constituted art? . . .

We don't think so; and since the art of the West had to succumb to the influence of theItalian Renaissance, it is certainly in religious architecture that this may be regretted.(43)

In other words, the builders had to do what they had to do and if that resulted in badarchitecture, well, that's progress for you: St-Eustache, trapped in a history beyond its

control, was just as doomed to fail as Beauvais. Both the collapsed tower of the latter and

the Gothic structure/Renaissance ornament St-Eustache serve the same evidentiarypurpose, proving that in early sixteenth-century France the Gothic was finished and the

formal dominance of the Renaissance inevitable, whether this future was resisted or met

head-on.

What I want to draw attention to about this first account is that in it St-Eustache is

entirely accommodated to the closed, unbroken story of the history of formal evolution in

architecture; its facture is told exclusively in these monosystemic terms, and no social orcontextual narrative is included. For reasons that I will soon consider, Lenoir and

Vaudoyer do not call St-Eustache transitional. Yet their description of it conforms to the

concept understood in its normative sense, and there is a perfect alignment between this

evolutionary term and the structure/ornament building.


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A very different scenario unfolds when Lenoir and Vaudoyer return to St-Eustache in

their discussion of church architecture of the French Renaissance.(44) Here thecontinuous narrative of period styles completely breaks down. St-Eustache is now

perceived as a drag on the movement of architecture because of the presence of its Gothic

structure; moreover, all ecclesiastical construction of sixteenth-century France is so

characterized. In the first place, we are told, there was very little church building in thisperiod; second, much of what did get built was Gothic; and third, in those few instances

where new Renaissance forms were taken up by a handful of enterprising architects, their

efforts consisted of little more than the casual application of decorative features"accidentally thrown here and there" onto unchanged Gothic structures.(45)

This combination of Gothic structures and superficial Renaissance ornament was

repeated again and again, from the beginning to the end of the century, in such works as

the apse of St-Pierre in Caen, the transept facade of Ste-Clotilde in Le Grand-Andely, and

the west facade of St-Michel in Dijon [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 4-6OMITTED]. The unhappy result is that "in France we still do not possess a complete

church of the sixteenth century conceived entirely according to Renaissance principles;St-Eustache was not even finished [until the seventeenth century], and, moreover, even

there one sees but a church where the skeleton remained Gothic and which they wantedto dress in the fashion of the time."(46) In that one exceptional instance at St-Eustache

when architects were given the opportunity to create not a piece of a building but a whole

new important work in the Renaissance mode, the same solution is reproduced: a newGothic "skeleton" is constructed and "dressed" in Renaissance decoration.

Others have been able to see a progressive (if often faltering and recalcitrant) classicismin the church architecture of sixteenth-century France, but Lenoir and Vaudoyer, who

desperately want to see progress and development, change and continuity in the history of

architecture, are stymied.(47) For them each effort represents a first step in the evolutionfrom Gothic to a true Renaissance mode of church building, a first step that is endlessly

reiterated. There is never any next step, never any follow-through. No developmental

sequence can be imposed on this static series of identical and largely fragmentary

gestures, and the history of sixteenthcentury church building shatters into a nonhistory, astory that should have happened but never got past page one.

I would argue that it is for this reason, rather than the described qualities of any given

work, that both the individual projects and the period as a whole are viewed as

problematic by Lenoir and Vaudoyer - and that they refuse to call St-Eustache and the

church architecture of its time transitional. Unlike current scholars who reject"transitional" as outmoded and conceptually flawed, for nineteenth-century Romantic

theorists it was a new and critically positive term used to describe periods of particular

interest where both the evolutionary processes of architecture and the causal links

between history and architecture were laid bare for analysis - and emulation.(48) Twosuch periods were the Italian Renaissance (by which was meant the trecento and

quattrocento) and the French Renaissance minus its church construction. In fact, the

"Etudes d'architecture" championed the secular architecture of the French Renaissance asthe French national mode of building, whose principles, corrupted and then abandoned in


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the sterile architecture of seventeenth-century classicism, should now be revived to serve

as a model for contemporary architecture.(49)

Lenoir and Vaudoyer write approvingly, for instance, of the early sixteenth-century

chateau of Gaillon [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED]:

In examining the fragments of this chateau . . . one sees that the style of its architecture

was mixed. Next to the reproduction of the orders borrowed from antique art, certaindetails indicated that the Gothic influence was not yet without effect. . . . there is nothing

shocking in the mingling of these styles, and this freedom of ornamentation created a

very picturesque and very gracious impression. . . . the remains of this building areextremely precious for the history of art, and as complete models of this transitional

period they may be profitably studied.(50)

Whereas the "mixed" style of St-Eustache is condemned for its lack of harmony, at

Gaillon a similar phenomenon is perceived as charming and worthy of the most careful

study. Read by itself the original lengthy description of St-Eustache cited above (to whichthe authors constantly refer in later discussions) might well suggest that Lenoir and

Vaudoyer criticize St-Eustache because it represents, in the words of a scholar writing in

the 1980s, "an unwitting or forced marriage of distinct and unrelated styles."(51) But

their stand on French Renaissance secular architecture belies any such interpretation.

We can also consider their thoughts on early Italian Renaissance church construction as

echoed in the words of their fellow Romantic advocate of transitional architecture,Leonce Reynaud:

These were still Gothic buildings, but with purer and more graceful forms, overlaid as it

were by an alien veil, a veil rich and diaphanous, which decorated without concealing.There was a delightful blending of art and naivete in all this architecture, an exquisite

taste and a great refinement. There was even originality, the borrowing from antiquitynotwithstanding; for, if some details had been imitated, they had been brought together in

a new way; there had been nothing servile in the copying, and especial care was taken not

to alter in any way the general forms called for by the customs of the time.(52)

There is certainly room in this type of analysis, which speaks of "naivete" rather than

"faults," to accommodate favorably St-Eustache as an individual monument. But thishistoricizing gaze does not see buildings individually; rather, it evaluates them according

to their contribution to the continual progress of architecture. To resist this role, as St-

Eustache and its contemporary church structures do in the texts of Reynaud and Lenoir

and Vaudoyer, is to cause profound epistemological anxiety.(53)

In these texts what can be seen to distinguish the buildings of the Italian trecento (and

quattrocento) and French Renaissance secular architecture from French ecclesiasticalconstruction is that in the former cases the promise of progress signaled in each separate

transitional monument is subsequently fulfilled, and the buildings can be strung together

in a motivated linear sequence. In each work the future heraided is a future that arrives.


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Thus, in the "Etudes d'architecture," the transitional secular architecture of the reign of

Louis XII is said to evolve into the less transitional architecture of the early years of thereign of Francis I, and eventually into a truly French Renaissance mode during the later

years of Francis and the time of Henry II.(54) Of the early sixteenth century Lenoir and

Vaudoyer wrote, "they still proceeded by trial and error, and as this is to be expected in

transitional periods, matters of taste not yet having been stabilized, they indiscriminatelymixed all the styles; the majority of buildings still preserved numerous traces of the

Gothic style, which was only progressively abandoned."(55) It was precisely this

progressive letting go of the Gothic that they were unable to plot in contemporary churcharchitecture, which could not, therefore, be seen as properly and commendably

transitional.

Furthermore (and contrary to the stated intentions of the authors), what makes the Italian

and secular French works praiseworthy is that the promise of progress in each building is

not necessarily or even primarily either a stylistic or social progress but a narrative one:point A always leads to point B, even if point B is only narratable as a decline (as

happens when first in Italy and later in France the "transitional" Renaissance periodseventually give way to a rigid and doctrinaire classicism). It is this narrative role that

Lenoir and Vaudoyer find themselves unable to assign St-Eustache in their discussion ofthe sixteenth century. The main problem posed by St-Eustache is not that it offends a

theoretical position about style in architecture but that it thwarts the authors' efforts to

move the story of architecture along: it does not "go" where they want it to; indeed, itdoes not go anywhere.

Yet if St-Eustache cannot contribute to the formal plot of the "Etudes d'architecture," thedescription of the building as stylistically divided between its Gothic structure and its

Renaissance ornament indicates that despite Lenoir and Vaudoyer's refusal to call the

building transitional (an evasion to which they certainly do not draw attention), theynevertheless fundamentally recognize the church as transitional. That their pro-

transitional, pro-French Renaissance and anti-classical arguments could easily be adapted

to St-Eustache was realized by many of their contemporaries. One mid-nineteenth-

century admirer of the building, for example, asserts:

Renaissance style is the name commonly given to that transitional architecture where thepointed arch flattens and gives way to the round arch of the Greeks and Romans. Saint-

Eustache is assuredly the most beautiful expression of this architecture, which was born

in Italy at the end of the thirteenth century, but which soon lost its proper forms to servile

imitation.(56)

Toward the end of the sixteenth century when, according to Lenoir and Vaudoyer, the

principles of the French Renaissance were foolishly rejected by the classicists whomechanically imitated the architecture of antiquity, the narratives of French church and

secular architecture reunite. Until that point is attained, however, they must camouflage

the sizable gaps that occur in the history of church building as it breaks down into an

inert chronicle of isolated and identical efforts scattered over the course of a century.They also feel obliged to explain why French church architecture could not emulate the


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route traced by Italian church architecture, which negotiated so successfully between the

medieval and the revived antique (and which led rather than followed developments insecular building), and above all, why it did not keep pace with the admirable, socially

responsive efforts apparent in transitional French chateau and civic construction.

Lenoir and Vaudoyer now have little choice but to turn to contextualism, which offersthem a multitude of explanations: France was already blanketed with churches and the

demand for new ones was consequently low; unlike the Italians, who had a strongnational affinity for the antique, which allowed them to make a clean break with the

Gothic, antiquity had no comparable meaning for the French; more important, because of

the rise of Protestantism the sixteenth century was a period of religious crisis, "of warsand endless massacres," and the French clergy had other things to worry about besides

the commissioning of new churches, nor were they willing to risk weakening the position

of the Catholic Church by encouraging substantial changes in their architecture; unlike

Italy, where the Renaissance of architecture corresponded to a religious renewal, noparallel phenomenon occurred in France, where the new style primarily satisfied material

rather than spiritual needs and found itself most vigorously developed in residentialarchitecture.(57) In their words: "The Renaissance of French architecture . . . was a

protest of sensual inclinations against the mortification imposed by Christianity andagainst the rigorous austerity of medieval mores."(58)

Lenoir and Vaudoyer were great advocates of the view that architecture and history were

involved in a dialectical process:

The particular character that distinguishes each of the major periods of history can be

easily determined by that of the art that corresponds to them, and reciprocally, the

successive transformations of art can only be truly appreciated when we link them to the

social principles of which they are the consequence.(59)

Church architecture of the French Renaissance, however, defeats their desire to chart the

reciprocal relationship between architectural and historical forces, and they are driven torely exclusively on the latter to describe the nonprogress of church building in this

period; contextualism here assumes the function of a dissembling prosthesis that allows a

broken formal history to be made apparently whole.

In the "Etudes d'architecture" the structure/ornament St-Eustache appears in two verydifferent stories: the first is effortlessly told in terms of the continuous evolution of period

styles; in the second this seamless narrative falls apart and recourse to historical

explanation and contextual narrative is made urgently necessary. The structure/ornament

figure houses not only two different narratives but also two fundamentally distinct, evencontrary, lines of argument concerning the facture and historical meaning of StEustache.

According to one, the presence of both the Gothic structure and Renaissance ornament is

unproblematic and entirely comprehensible as the building embodies the passage from

the Gothic past to the Renaissance future. According to the other, the Gothic structuresignifies the resistance, inherent conservatism, and lack of will on the part of the clergy in

sixteenth-century France, while the Renaissance ornament, no longer interpreted as a


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laudable desire to obey the historical mandate of progress, becomes a banal attempt to

evoke the current architectural fashion, to be "a la mode du temps." In each case thephenomenologically stable building is subject to the identical aesthetic evaluation, but the

terms of inquiry belong to two different modes of analysis, each of which is, however,

coordinated to and controlled by the sequential narrative structure of the

structure/ornament pair.

Each narrative also grants a different figurative status to St-Eustache. When it istransitionally located in the evolution of architecture it becomes a synecdoche

designating the historical totality of which it is a part. As a synecdoche St-Eustache is

indissoluble from the historical panorama it represents, whereas in the contextualnarrative a gap appears between the building and its historical context; St-Eustache now

becomes an extended metaphor or allegory of the troubled and conflicted times that

produced it.

Structure/Ornament and the Multiple Narrative

In the "Etudes d'architecture" the two narratives about St-Eustache, one of formal

evolution, one concerning social, religious, and cultural history, are kept apart in separate

essays (appearing, in fact, in different issues of the Magasin pittoresque). But other texts

use the sequential, binary organization of structure/ornament to graft together multiplediscourses and narratives about the building, allowing this figurative structure to blur

contradictions and permitting a variety of visual and critical viewpoints to be offered

simultaneously. Such a use of structure/ornament can be seen if we reexamine AnthonyBlunt's account of the building.(60) When cited above, Blunt's text was abbreviated in

order to foreground his primary narrative of stylistic progress; a closer and more

comprehensive consideration reveals that his reading of the building is far from

homogeneous.

Blunt opens with a laconically cryptic historical interpretation of why church architecture

in sixteenth-century France did not capitulate as quickly to the new Renaissance mode asdid secular: "It is to be expected that Gothic tendencies should survive longer in

ecclesiastical architecture than in secular and this is amply borne out by St Eustache."

The stress on surviving Gothic "tendencies" speaks to the historicist ideal of continuousprogress in architecture, which is here thwarted (by unnamed historical contingencies),

and also to the passivity of a building apparently unable to control its destiny within that

progress.(61)

He then continues, "It represents, however, a remarkable compromise between new and

old, quite different from St Pierre at Caen. Here the plan, structure and proportions arenearer to High Gothic than Flamboyant. The plan is almost exactly that of Notre-Dame. .

. . The proportions of the nave again recall the thirteenth rather than the fifteenth

century." Having opened with a story of stylistic survival, Blunt shifts to a tale of

architectural revival, as the designers of the building turn away from the most recentphase of Gothic (that is, away from the Flamboyant style that "survives" into the

sixteenth century in works like the apse of Caen) and instead evoke the cathedral


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architecture of three hundred years previous. In addition, a specific source, Notre-Dame,

is posited for the plan of the church. If Blunt first interprets the Gothicness of St-Eustacheas the unconscious persistence of a past mode of architecture, he then sketches a wholly

different scenario where the intertwined stories of the forward movement of architecture

and its (enigmatic) historical context are now rejected in favor of the more circumscribed

story of the design process of the building, where conscious intent and the deliberate useof sources necessarily come into play. What allows his conflicting interpretations to

cohere is that they are placed in the same figurative space and are thereby provided with a

counterfeit kinship, a likeness that is in name - Gothic structure - only.

Blunt draws no conclusions from his observations, nor does he call attention to hiscontradictory survival-yet-revival schema. Instead, he continues, "This Gothic structure

is, however, clothed in Renaissance forms." This phrase, articulating the transitionality of

the church, and which seems to describe its actual fabrication, also forms a textual

transition as Blunt moves from a contemplation of the structural to the ornamental traitsof the building, summarizing (and simplifying) what has been said - it all boils down to a

generic, uniformly observed "Gothic structure" - and introducing what is to come:

The ornament . . . is very simple, and the Italian impression depends only on the use of

classical pilasters instead of Gothic. The orders are, it is true, used in a way to horrify any

classically trained architect. In some piers, for instance, the four main faces are decoratedwith Corinthian pilasters, the height of which is perhaps twenty times their breadth, and

the corners of the piers are filled by three columns standing one on top of the other, all of

somewhat bastard design.

Whereas the structural traits were simply observed and their possible sources identified,

Blunt submits the ornamental forms to a crit'lcal aesthetic appraisal based on a normative

ahistorical ideal of classicism.(62) Taken as a whole it can be seen that Blunt's textinterprets each "part" of the building as resistant and aberrant, but for different reasons:

the Gothic structure for simply being there, a historical hangover out of its proper place,

the Renaissance ornament for violating the classical ideal. That he evaluates the two"halves" of the building according to two essentially unrelated modes of analysis - one

concerned with the ideal of formal progress and the specific historicity of the building,

the other with transcendental aesthetic ideals of classicism untrammeled by specifichistoric considerations - is masked by the temporal organization of the structure/ornament

figure, which imposes a narrative (and historicized) coherence on them. Also, even if

Blunt does not explicitly relate his observations about the classical elements to the ideal

of formal progress, the structure of structure/ornament conveniently and implicitlyaccomplishes that for him. The building is thereby allowed to conform to his overarching

narrative of the gradual emergence and final triumph of French classicism in the

seventeenth century.

But Blunt is not entirely satisfied; he continues:

And yet, in spite of these eccentricities, the interior of St Eustache has a grandeur of

space and proportions not to be found in any other sixteenth-century church in France. It


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is true that in these features it follows a medieval rather than contemporary tradition, and

it must also be noticed that the church was to have no influence on the general evolutionof French architecture; but as an isolated work it remains of great importance.

This passage begins with a return to a consideration of the Gothic structure of the

building. That Blunt is primarily looking at this aspect is clear, for what he praises - thesingular "grandeur of space and proportions" of the building - is attributed to "a medieval

rather than contemporary tradition." What he means by "contemporary tradition,"however, is confusing, for according to him, "church architecture during this period was

in the main limited to additions and alterations to existing buildings." All these projects

are described as fundamentally medievalizing, the Renaissance presence restricted toornamental forms and the superficial use of the classical orders.(63) By "contemporary

tradition," I would suggest, Blunt does not mean the actual historical reality of

ecclesiastical building during this period but rather what this reality should have been,

that is, less medieval and more devoted to the development of a classical mode of Frenchchurch architecture.

Such a critique is presented in the concluding phrase: "as an isolated work, it remains ofgreat importance." Isolated? From what? Here Blunt leaves no room for doubt: isolated

from the history of architecture, from a consideration of the building's contribution to

stylistic progress, from the recognition of its failure to abandon the medieval tradition andits inability to influence "the general evolution of French architecture." If we can forget

that the building's ties to the past are too strong and its impact on the future nil, if we can

momentarily suspend our serious scholarly faculties and suppress that St-Eustache is an

evolutionary aberration, if we can blur our vision and see only its "grandeur of space andproportions," then we can conclude it is a work "of great importance."

In the final remarks the text flickers between two perspectives: one looks withanatomizing scholarly precision at the entire structure/ornament building and sites it in

the evolution of the history of architecture; the other, which is barely allowed to function,

looks through squinted eyes at the generally "medieval" (rather than specifically"Gothic") structural aspects of the building alone yet interprets these historically qualified

traits in an isolated, dehistoricized context. This stepping out of history to view St-

Eustache through a nonanalytical perspective is of course similar to what Viollet-le-Ducdoes in his description of the church as a "fairy palace." Such a self-consciously

nonrigorous, ahistorical response occasionally appears in modern literature on the

building, most often, as with Blunt, offered as an "on the other hand" view subordinate to

the serious critique of the structure/ornament transitional building? Even Lenoir andVaudoyer preface their critical analysis with the disclaimer that "at first glance this

church offers a very seductive overall impression." These intermittent glimpses of a

grand, seductive, and sometimes unreal church emerge from a discourse that might be

called "irrational," for it appears as an inferior alternative to the dominant "objective"discourse by which the building is "rationally" seen and permits authors to articulate an

affective response to aspects of St-Eustache that escape hard critical reflection - what

they notice before they are compelled to move beyond that "first glance" and seriouslygaze at the monument.


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If Blunt's reading of the building as a whole is governed by the story of continuity and

progress in the history of architecture, at the same time he splices into this controllingmaster narrative a number of other narratives and modes of analysis. In this action he is

aided by the figurative structure of the structure/ornament pair that remains intact

throughout, allowing the transitionality of the building to dominate, while also providing

a framework for his multiple interpretative modes and viewpoints. This temporalizedbinary structure imposes a de facto narrative coherence on his heterogeneous

observations (which are sometimes presented as little more than fragments, as in "It is to

be expected . . ."). But if he is aided, he is also coerced. The diachronic structure ofstructure/ornament, with its two adjacent spaces that are sealed off from each other and

that always appear in the same temporal order, both permits and insists that St-Eustache

be seen separately and sequentially in terms of an uncompromising dualism, and it bothallows and compels narrativized interpretations of the building.

In modern discourse, structure/ornament generally figures architectural form in such away that a building synecdochically, metaphorically, or allegorically narrates and

displays its own design process and fabrication, its location in the linear movements ofthe history of architecture, and its contextual motives and meaning. To varying degrees

these possibilities are all realized in Blunt's exceedingly complex and nuanced, if erraticand contradictory, account of St-Eustache.

Looking for the Structure/Ornament St-Eustache

That the structure/ornament St-Eustache has dominated serious looking at the buildingsince about 1830 is no testament to the veracity of this construction; rather, it pointedly

underscores that the structure/ornament figure was and has remained the common point

of departure for analysis, not its conclusion. It exists prior to research and looking,

predetermining the shape that visual and discursive responses to the building will take.This a priori spatial model is a powerful one: by fracturing the building into two parts that

cannot overlap, it permits no observation that bears on a structural element to seep into

the space called ornament. Once the structure of St-Eustache is called Gothic (ormedieval, or French), nothing ornamental can be claimed by that term; once its ornament

is called classical (or Renaissance or Italian), all structure is removed from that domain.

The implications of this cleavage multiply as the definition of each space is refined. Once

a perceived desire for Renaissance modernity on the one hand or for historicist evocation

on the other has been identified at St-Eustache, neither can inform both the Gothic

structure and the Renaissance ornament of the building. Once its ornament has beencalled classical, no structural trait can be so named and Gothic itself must be understood

as an architecture that is completely evacuated of all possible classicism.

If historians are unaware of the figurative nature of structure/ornament, it cannot be said

that this figure is suppressed and hidden away. Instead, like the purloined letter, it is

concealed through the simplest of camouflages: hidden in plain sight, it is openlydisplayed in the guise of a literal architectural description that masquerades as a

transcription of what is really there. Structure/ornament allows the historicized gaze of


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modern viewers to see a building in historicized terms, at the same time that they are

encouraged to forget the status of the pair as an a priori figurative construction. Modernarchitectural discourse would have us believe that its historical inquiries, its discovery of

the historicity of architecture, of the phenomenon of transitionality, or of the historical

forces that shape architecture are fundamental to the clarified view of St-Eustache as

composed of two categories of morphologically identifiable period style traits. Again,history is foregrounded as the foundation for architectural knowledge, and a figurative

structure, which is equally implicated in this process, is denied complicity by its

presentation as a self-evidently literal description.

At this point, we may well ask: How literal is the structure/ornament St-Eustache meantto be? Certainly there is nothing in any of the texts cited to suggest that their authors do

not mean what they say. But what do they mean? The material structure/ornament

building is in fact a very difficult one to pin down. As soon as we try to take it at face

value and seriously examine it, its apparent simplicity and clarity fall away; we findourselves mired in contradictions and false starts, following avenues of analysis that turn

back on themselves and discovering that apparently straightforward terms are in need ofqualification.

Problems begin before the church itself is looked at, when we try to define the terms

structure and ornament as descriptive of material architecture. In a strictly literal sense,that is, in architectural discourse, when we say that a building has a "structure," this noun

signifies the material realization of the tectonic principle by which load, support, and

thrust are accommodated, as distinct from the rest of the building. On the other hand, the

word structure in English (as opposed to French) still retains one of the original Latinmeanings of structura that allows it to denote literally the entire structure, the complete

work of architecture itself, and it is a word used interchangeably with building, edifice,

monument, and so on.(65) In this sense, structure includes the system of statics indicatedby the more strictly tectonic meaning of the word, and it also encompasses the building's

ornament. Structure thus describes a self-sufficient entity, the building as a closed object,

a unified and autonomous presence.

Ornament possesses a different lexical status, for it does not belong first and foremost to

the language of architecture. Derived from the Latin ornamentum, ornament is"anythingthat decorates or adorns; an embellishment. . . . a group of notes that

embellishes a melody, . . . . one whose qualities adorn or confer luster on those about

him," "any adjunct or accessory . . . equipment, furniture, attire, trappings."(66)

Ornament can be as insubstantial as a rhetorical flourish or as weighty as the portico,temple, and colossus that Leon Battista Alberti tells us are the proper ornaments of a

harbor.(67) Lexically parasitic, ornament only moves from the realm of the general and

conceptual to the specific and physical when we know what it is applied to or where it

appears.

In modern architectural discourse this lexical dependency mirrors the relationship

between built structure and built ornament. Just as ornament depends on structure fordefinition in the structure/ornament pair, so too is the architectural object "ornament"


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seen to need built structure, without which it is but a fragment - whether a literal

fragment, as are found at ruins and building sites, or images of fragments, as are found inbooks on architectural ornament (which proliferated in the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries).(68) Detached from its setting, ornament is a relic, a fetish, a sculptural

souvenir - indeed, as Viollet-le-Duc sought to demonstrate, a memory of a whole object.

Architectural ornament cannot become meaningful and achieve a wholesome,nonfragmentary presence unless it appears on a structure to which it is an adjunct or an

accessory, secondary and contingent.

When considering the diachronic narrativized structure of structure/ornament the fiction

could be maintained that we were dealing with two coequal entities. If ornament isliterally placed in second place, its lesser status nevertheless seemed incidental; its

function was equivalent to that of structure as it provided an equally spacious area for

"half" of the building and stories about it to be located. But the pair is more than simply a

binary one predicated on the mutual exclusivity of the two terms: it is also an implacablyhierarchical one where ornament appears as a lexically and materially dependent feature,

as an entity that is incomplete and inessential in and by itself.

At the same time, however, whereas ornament seems to achieve a stable meaning within

the structure/ornament pair, the same cannot be said for structure. By itself structure may

define an autonomous architectural presence, and does so whether it refers to the physicalstructural system of a building or to the building as a totality. But a third and far less

secure meaning attaches to structure when it is paired with ornament, that is, when it

occurs in the context in which

arhitectura, structura si ornament gotic. anne-marie sankovitch

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