ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM Ij6O TO THE PRESENT DAY

96. CLAUDE NICOLAS LEDOUX: ONE OF THE CITY GATES OF PARIS, DESIGNED BETWEEN
1784 AND 1789.
The same faith in the bare surface but not the same elegance ap-
pears with a much more aggressive force in the work of a few French
architects of the time of the Revolution. Claude Nicolas Ledoux
(1736-1806) has only within the last fifteen years been rediscovered.
He was an eccentric, cantankerous and quarrelsome. But his designs
since 1776 are amongst the most original ever conceived by any
architect, original sometimes to the verge of mania: a completely
spherical house, a pyramidal house, fantastic projects for vast com-
munity buildings. His planning is as boldly Baroque as Soane's. His
predilection for the squat Doric column also connects him with
Soane (fig. 96). He was no doubt influenced by England, and the
publication of his work in 1804 may have influenced England in
turn.
Friedrich Gilly (1772-1800), the Soane of Germany, was certainly
inspired by Ledoux. He had his training in Berlin, one of a small
group of young architects who about 1790 discovered the force of
the true Doric order in Italy. Gilly himself however never saw
Italy, and went to Paris and London only after he had designed one
of die two masterpieces which are left us to bear witness of his genius
—left, however, only in drawings. Neither was ever carried out. The
first is the National Monument to Frederick the Great (1797), the
second a National Theatre for Berlin—clearly a conception of the
Goethe age (pi. xcix). The Doric portico without a pediment is
a strong and grave opening. The semicircular windows, a favourite
motif of the revolutionary architects of Paris, though imported from
England, add strength to strength, and the contrast between the
semicylinder of the auditorium walls and the cube of the stage is
functionally eloquent and aesthetically superb. Here again we are
close to a new style of the new century.
Why is it then that a hundred years had to pass before an original
''modern" style was really accepted? How can it be that the I9th
196