Les Invalides

The Hôtel des Invalides was built as a veterans' hospital with large church on the Left Bank in the 1670s,  during the reign of Louis XIV, by architects Libéral Bruant and Jules Hardouin-Mansart. It's a huge complex  dominated by Hardouin-Mansart's beautiful church dome, with a large lawn on either side of the street leading up the entrance. Nonetheless, it hadn't been a high priority of mine to visit earlier, perhaps because I just assumed that it was a large but otherwise dull institution. Also, part of it is a military museum, and military history isn't really a strong interest of mine. Maybe it wasn't foolish on my part to have been dismissive, because otherwise I might not have been so pleasantly surprised today.

On either side of the interesting arched entrance bay, the roof features dormer windows shaped quite remarkably (and appropriately) as knights' armour! Each one is unique.

The Court of Honour.

The dormers overlooking the Court of Honour are shaped like coats-of-arms; my sense is that each one refers to a great individual or family who supported the king or army.

A view of the Court of Honour from the upper gallery. The ground-floor galleries lead to various parts of the Military Museum. I checked out just one part of the collection of uniforms, weapons, etc., and was really impressed by just how much material there was---especially from the Napoleonic wars. They even had Napoleon's favourite Arabian horse on display (stuffed, of course)!

The church of Saint-Louis-des-Invalides was divided in two at the altar. The long nave in the photos above formed the soldiers' church, while the domed structure on the other side of the altar was reserved for the king and other royals when they attended mass "with" the soldiers...

... But now, the domed church serves as the tomb of none other than Napoleon I, whose sarcophagus is in an interesting "pit."

The entrance to the lower part of the tomb is in the back of the domed church's altar.

A Modernist Saturday

It was a beautiful, cloudless day last Saturday, which was just the weather I'd been waiting for to visit the Fondation Le Corbusier, which displays Le Corbusier's Maison La Roche and the architect's own apartment at Porte Molitor.

Maison La Roche was built in the mid-1920s for an art collector client at the end of a small cul-de-sac. The house adjoins the Maison Jeanneret which was built for Le Corbusier's brother, and which now houses the Fondation's offices and archives. I didn't get any decent photos of the houses from the outside, but the Maison Jeanneret and part of the La Roche form a single block, which is connected by a full-height entrance hall to the La Roche painting gallery. The gallery is a famous and beautiful volume raised up above the garden on pilotis or small columns; it's airy and bright, with a curved ramp leading up to the client's library. The house was restored with all its original wall colours. 

Le Corbusier did not conceive of buildings to be statically looked at, but rather as large, complex objects to be engaged with. Raising the gallery off the ground and giving the house a roof garden "exposes" all sides of the building; meanwhile, the interior slowly changes appearance as you move through it in what the architect called a "promenade architecturale," where you're offered different views of spaces from a variety of heights and perspectives. This makes it a surprisingly complex house, and it was enjoyable to wander through.

The entrance hall.

 

Prague: Too Much is Just Enough

After almost four full days in Prague, I have very few photos taken around town. About five, in fact. I started shooting some colourful, wonderfully-ornamented facades at the start of my first day when I realized that there was colour and wonderful ornamentation all over the city and everywhere you looked. 

Vienna: Youth Style

A hundred years ago, Vienna was culturally a very exciting place. In reaction to the dominant conservatism of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire, an avant-garde of artists, architects and composers experimented with new aesthetics ranging from Egon Schiele's erotic expressionism to Adolf Loos' upright austerity. This mood was most famously embodied by Jugendstil or "Youth Style," the Central European branch of Art Nouveau which found support from an enthusiastic segment of the bourgeoisie. Thus, so the legend goes, fast-growing pre-WWI Vienna was a crucial laboratory of early Modernism.

Of course, most legends of energetic fin-de-siècle capitals make innovative culture sound like a widespread expression of an enlightened moment, when it was in most places a rather edgy, minor (though not marginal) phenomenon. Thus Frank Lloyd Wright indeed had a thriving practice in contemporaneous Chicago, but most houses in that booming town were still decidedly traditional; and while Paris' metro station entrances are indeed writhingly Art Nouveau, similarly-styled apartment buildings, though found all over the city, need to be distinguished from their more numerous academic-classical neighbours. 

The same can be said for Vienna, but nonetheless I was surprised at how much more of the city is of century-old avant-garde stock, compared with Paris, Chicago, and elsewhere I've seen. (Prague, however, has Vienna beat in this regard, but that's another story...) It seemed hard in the nineteenth-century districts of Vienna to find a street without several Jugendstil buildings, no matter how modest their ornamentation. A number of the finest examples are by Otto Wagner, one of those architects with a rare combination of talent, vision, professional skill and sheer luck, attaining the top of his profession and respected in nearly every way. Wagner's prolific contribution to Vienna was, without exaggeration, frequently evoked by my co-host as we explored the streets: "Here is an Otto Wagner house ... Here is another Otto Wagner house ... These railings were designed by Otto Wagner ... All the metro stations on that line are by Otto Wagner ... This ring of roads was planned by Otto Wagner," and so on.  

For all of Vienna's beautiful old central district and pompous nineteenth-century monuments, then, it has enough Jugendstil to make the city appear elegantly progressive.

These are some well-known buildings mixed in with some of the other random details that caught my eye. This is another long post, by the way.

Here's a paired apartment building by Otto Wagner. The stair hall's stair treads are surprisingly gentle to climb.

Dandytown

Vienna has a refined, dandyish streak, as you can see in these exquisite storefronts in the central shopping district. (Most of these are, naturally enough, jewellers.)

Vienna 2

Here are some more pictures of various places in Vienna. Be warned that this is another long posting.

A traditional Viennese hof or court.

Vienna 1

A few photos from Vienna.