Edward Eigen

  • View of “Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light,” 2013. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar.
    print May 2013

    Henri Labrouste

    THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH ARCHITECT Henri Labrouste is best known today for designing places of learning: libraries of unsurpassed beauty, clarity, and drama, structured by a tense but serene rationality. Indeed, to prepare himself for the task, he staged a “revolution on a few elephant folio sheets of paper,” as his compatriot Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc described the heterodox reimaginings of ancient structures Labrouste produced while still a student at the École des Beaux-Arts. But if Viollet-le-Duc tested the limits of architecture as a textural practice with his famous ten-volume

  • Henri Labrouste, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, 1838–50, Paris. Photo: Michel Nguyen.
    previews January 2013

    “Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought To Light”

    In his essay for the volume accompanying the Museum of Modern Art’s 1975 show “The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts,” Neil Levine sought to recover the “architectural legibility” of Henri Labrouste’s self-consciously precise drawings, which, Levine ruefully noted, had been “rarely unrolled and examined in detail.”

    In his essay for the volume accompanying the Museum of Modern Art’s 1975 show “The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts,” Neil Levine sought to recover the “architectural legibility” of Henri Labrouste’s self-consciously precise drawings, which, Levine ruefully noted, had been “rarely unrolled and examined in detail.” This first solo exhibition in the United States of the challenging nineteenth-century French architect’s work is the occasion for unrolling them once again at moma, in a gathering of two hundred items: rarely seen