Space, Time And Architecture: Henri Labrouste

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French architect, Henri Labrouste (1801–1875), studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. Labrouste’s work was esteemed by Auguste Perret, Viollet-le-Duc beheld his work as a ‘revolution’ and Giedion wrote that, “Henri Labrouste is without a doubt the mid-nineteenth-century architect whose work was the most important for the future” in his book Space, Time and Architecture (Giedion, 1944). Henri Labrouste was one of the first architects to integrate his rationalist view into architecture by incorporating the then new material, cast iron, into the architectural expression his buildings, not just as structural elements.
The concepts that Labrouste explored through his buildings can be traced through history to the high-rises in the United States of America. Labrouste became a leading architect of the nineteenth century because of his revolutionary ideas and scrutinization of orthodox French architecture theories. The inspiration that Labrouste drew from his early years in Italy lead to the rise of a new concept of architectural composition. …show more content…

Labrouste’s typological, technical, and spatial solutions spread to America and can be traced through works by McKim, Mead and White, Louis Sullivan, and Henry Hornbostel— each of them display École des Beaux-Arts identities. Labrouste’s statement that, “in architecture, every form has its rationale and its logical consequences ... that a work of art has meaning, that its form is the result of a set of deductions that come in sequence, that it satisfies a need, and that it expresses an idea” (Bergdoll, 2012) appears to have influenced Sullivan and then resonated through history to the tall, steel-framed buildings in the United States of America. The modern code of expressed metal structure and lightweight casing appeared in the iridescent vaults of the Bibliothèque

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