598
ARCHITECTURE
Turning to the Continent, we find in France, still the lead- portant events in connexion with architecture, for even ing artistic nation of the world, that the art of architecture the temporary buildings erected for them showed an has been in a most fiourishing and most active state during amount of architectural interest and originality which the last quarter of a century. It is true that there is not the same variety asnor in France. m0( jem English architecture, have there been the same discussions and experiments in regal’d to the true aim and course of architecture which have excited so much interest in England; because the French architects, unlike the English, know exactly what they want. They have a “ school ” of architecture ; they adhere to the scholastic or academic theory of architecture as an art founded on the study of classic models ; and on this basis their architects receive the most thorough training of any in the world. This predominance of the academic theory deprives their architecture, no doubt, of a good deal of the element of variety and picturesqueness ; a French architect ymr sang, in fact, never attempts the picturesque, unless in a country residence, and then the results are such that one wishes the attempt had not been made. But, on the other hand, modern French architecture at its best has a dignity and a style about it which no other nation at present reaches, and which goes far to atone for a certain degree of sameness and repetition in its motives; and living under a Government which recognizes the importance of national architecture, and is willing to spend public money liberally on it (with the full approbation of its
Fig. 23.—Salle des Cariatides, Hotel de Ville, Paris.
Fig. 25.—Ecole de Medecine, Paris. (Gindin.) public), the French architects have opportunities which English ones but seldom enjoy—the predominant aim with a British Government being to see how little they can spend on a public building. The two great Paris exhibitions of 1889 and 1900 may be regarded as im-
could be met with nowhere else, and which in each case left its mark behind it, though with a difference ; for while in the 1889 exhibition the main object was to treat temporary structures—iron and concrete and terra cotta—in an undisguised but artistic manner, in those of the 1900 exhibition the effort was to create an architectural coup cVceil of apparently monumental structures of which the actual construction was disguised. In spite of some eccentricities, the amount of invention and originality shown in these temporary buildings was most remarkable ; but fortunately the exhibition left something more permanent behind it in the shape of the two Art-palaces and the new bridge over the Seine. The two palaces are triumphs of modern classic architecture; the larger one (by MM. Thomas, Louvet, and Deglane) is to some extent spoiled by the apparently unavoidable glass roof; the smaller one, by M. Girault, escapes this drawback, and, still more refined than its greater opposite, is one of the most beautiful building-s of modern times; while the
