Germain Boffrand

French architect

• Born: May 16, 1667
• Birthplace: Nantes, France
• Died: March 19, 1754
• Place of death: Paris, France

Boffrand developed an approach to interior design resulting in rooms where architecture, sculpture, paintings, and furnishings all interacted to convey a unified mood. His concern with the interrelationship between each room, the building plan, and the overall site resulted in works of visual, intellectual, and emotional harmony.

Early Life

Germain Boffrand (zhehr-ma boh-frahnd) conceived of architecture as environmental sculpture, in part as a result of his early training. His father was a provincial sculptor who apprenticed his son in 1681 to François Girardon, the most honored official sculptor during the second half of the seventeenth century in France. Boffrand never denied his training in sculpture. Indeed, toward the end of his career in 1745, he published a treatise on the casting of Girardon’s monumental bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV.

Girardon had worked with architectJules Hardouin-Mansart at Versailles, which may have been the means by which Boffrand became an apprentice at the Royal Office of Architecture, Service des Bâtiments du Roi, under Hardouin-Mansart in 1685. Boffrand was only nineteen when he began work on the early drawings for the Place Vendôme. The experience Boffrand gained in this project would be useful for him after 1732, when he joined the federal department of bridges and roads, of which he eventually became the director.

Boffrand’s connection with the theater during his youth perhaps had an impact on his ability to produce an architecture that conveyed a particular mood and idea. Boffrand’s theatrical architectural space is not surprising for an eighteenth century French architect trained in the Royal Office of Architecture, since the major architectural patron of the seventeenth century in France was Louis XIV. Louis’s palace, Versailles, was the stage upon which this king’s play of absolute monarchy and controlled court life was enacted, and Versailles was, in part, the travail of Hardouin-Mansart, Boffrand’s teacher.

Life’s Work

Contemporary information about Boffrand’s career comes from official documents in the French archives of state and from his buildings. There also exist accounts of his works and character from French and other European architects, including the letters of Johann Balthasar Neumann, written on a study trip to Paris in 1724, and from Boffrand’s own book Livre d’architecture (1745; English translation, 1950’s).

Between about 1702 and 1719, Boffrand worked under conditions that allowed him a certain amount of freedom of design. His patrons were non-French nobility, including the duke of Lorraine and Maximilian II Emanuel, elector of Bavaria. Being French gave Boffrand an elevated status distinct from that of the local architects. In addition, he maintained his contacts in Paris and erected speculative buildings in the districts of Saint Germain and Saint Honoré. These new areas of the city, developed on the left bank of the Seine River, became the most fashionable addresses in Paris.

Yet Boffrand’s freedom probably was one of necessity, since there were few government commissions between the death of Louis XIV and the coming of age of Louis XV. While he was often experimental, he was also literate, exhibiting a knowledge of architectural theory written by his contemporaries as well as the books of earlier architects, particularly the late Renaissance Italian Andrea Palladio.

From 1702 to 1722, Boffrand worked for the duke of Lorraine on many projects, including the palace Château Lunéville. Beginning at Lunéville as the representative of his architectural mentor Hardouin-Mansart, Boffrand eventually became first architect to the duke in 1711, three years after Hardouin-Mansart’s death. Two aspects of Lunéville are experimental, while also revealing an interest in the literature of architecture—the chapel and the design of the corps-logis, or main body, of the palace. Like the chapel at Versailles, which Hardouin-Mansart initiated but which was completed by his brother-in-law, the chapel at Lunéville consisted of a tall, open nave ringed by aisles and galleries that stood on load-bearing, free-standing columns. Such a design takes its origin from the Greco-Gothic ideal described by the Abbé de Cordemoy in his Nouveau Traité de toute l’architecture (1706). R. D. Middleton singled out the chapel at Lunéville as the first work to put Cordemoy’s ideas into practice. Using load-bearing columns at Lunéville, Boffrand focused the weight of the building on slender supports, allowing the walls and interior space to be more open, as was the case in Gothic interiors. Rather than use complex Gothic colonettes, Boffrand employed classical columns for support. The understanding of structural engineering revealed in the chapel at Lunéville is similar to the thinking followed by nineteenth and early twentieth century architects in creating the curtained, walled skyscraper.

Palladio’s influence is obvious in the hunting lodge Boffrand built for the elector of Bavaria in 1705. This structure, Bouchefort, was an octagon with four porticoes set in the center of a circular courtyard, which was the terminus of seven avenues leading into the forest of Soignies, near Brussels. The plan of the central pavilion was inspired by Palladio’s Villa Almerico, called Rotonda, which was a square with four identical porticoes.

Other innovative plans by Boffrand were the x-shaped Malgrange II, never built but perhaps related to the Althan Palace in Vienna of around 1693, by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, and the Hôtel Amělot de Gournay, one of the speculative structures Boffrand erected in Paris in 1712. At Amělot de Gournay, Boffrand took a rectangular lot and organized the structure around an enclosed oval courtyard, articulating the space with ovals and polygons into a convenient, rhythmically organic design.

Received directly into first-class membership in the Academy of Architects in 1709, Boffrand also rejoined the royal building service in that year. His primary contributions to the development of the rococo-style interior began with a French royal commission in 1710—the salon of the Petit Luxembourg Palace. At Luxembourg, he used a continuous band of molding, the impost, in a new way. The impost, set below the ceiling, curved up over the doors, windows, and mirrors, visually uniting the room and giving no indication of the corners where one wall joined another. With this innovation, Boffrand eliminated the box-shaped room. At Malgrange I, he continued this process of unification in the oval salon of 1711, linking the walls and the ceiling as well through the use of decorative floral-relief sculpture. Although the design elements were complex, Boffrand maintained unity through the use of symmetry and repetition. Boffrand’s masterpiece in rococo design was the salon of the princess of Soubise, where all the design elements work together, projecting a remarkable sense of light and harmony.

During the economic crisis of 1719-1720, known as the Mississippi Bubble, Boffrand lost his fortune. In addition, his affiliation with the court of Lorraine ended. Although he did continue some activities in the private realm, most of the second half of his career was devoted to public projects and consultancies. He served as architect and member of the board of the general hospital system in Paris from 1724, worked on the restoration at Nôtre Dame de Paris between 1725 and 1727, and joined the central administration of the French bridges and highway department in 1732. He consulted with Austrian architect Neumann over the design of the Würzburg Residenz in 1724. François Cuvilliés consulted with Boffrand in the 1730’s and took the salon of the princess of Soubise as his inspiration for the salon of the Amalienburg hunting lodge in Munich.

Significance

Germain Boffrand’s Livre d’architecture encapsulates his career and sheds light on his interests as well as those of his contemporaries. Dedicated to the king of France, the chapters reveal Boffrand as an architect and an intellectual. The first chapter, a dissertation on good taste, is followed by a statement of principles of architecture extracted from Horace, an ancient Roman poet and critic. An essay on the shape and use of Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian forms and decorative systems is followed by comments on interior furnishings and plans, on elevations, and on his own buildings.

Defining good taste as the ability to distinguish between the good and the excellent, Boffrand praised the ancient Greeks, crediting them with developing enduring principles of architecture based on observation of nature and thoughtful reflection. The Greeks, he believed, began with utilitarian rustic huts, which they developed into convenient, efficient, well-proportioned structures. These principles were absorbed into Roman culture and were lost, according to Boffrand, with the fall of Rome.

Boffrand’s ideas about classical architecture were not original, but his perceptions of Gothic architecture put him in the avant-garde of his time. In his Livre d’architecture, Boffrand suggested that the Goths used branches, vines, and leaves as the inspiration for their high, decorated vaults. He pictured Gothic vaults as a forest where the tree branches joined overhead. With this image, Boffrand likened the origin of Gothic architecture to the origin of ancient Greek architecture as explained by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, since both began with the natural, rude hut. Boffrand’s text may have been an influence upon Marc-Antoine Laugier, who proposed the primitive hut as the source of all good design.

Boffrand concluded his introductory chapter with remarks on his interests in building sites and the importance of expressing the spirit of the owner of a house in architectural terms. These concerns bring to mind Boffrand’s readings of Palladio’s four books on architecture and Boffrand’s applications of these ideas in his buildings. Boffrand’s thoughtful, humane understanding of how climate, setting, and ornamentation of a building could affect the mood and spirit of its inhabitants is his legacy to later generations of architects and builders.

Bibliography

Blomfield, Reginald. A History of French Architecture: From the Death of Mazarin Until the Death of Louis XV, 1661-1774. Reprint. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1973. This two-volume set is very accessible to English readers, but much of the information is out of date and inaccurate. It should be read in conjunction with Wend von Kalnein’s work.

Blunt, Anthony, ed. Baroque and Rococo Architecture and Decoration. London: Elek, 1978. The chapter on France by Christopher Tadgell is concise and insightful. The other chapters set Boffrand in the context of German and Austrian rococo architecture.

Boffrand, Germaine. Book of Architecture Containing the General Principles of the Art and the Plans, Elevations, and Section of Some of the Edifices Built in France and in Foreign Countries. Translated by David Britt, edited by Caroline van Eck. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002. An English translation of Boffrand’s Livre d’architecture, in which Boffrand presents his aesthetics of architecture. Includes an introduction and notes by Eck, placing Boffard within the context of eighteenth century architectural theory. Illustrations, including all of the illustrations published in the original edition of the book.

Garms, Jörg. “Projects for the Pont Neuf and Place Dauphine in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 26 (1967): 102-113. This essay on two of the major city-planning projects in eighteenth century Paris reveals the context in which Boffrand’s design project for the Place Louis XV can be understood.

Kalnein, Wend von. Architecture in France in the Eighteenth Century. Translated by David Britt. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995. A new edition of the book originally published in 1972. The treatment of Boffrand is evenhanded and quite complete, including illustrations of floor plans as well as photographs of buildings.

Kimball, Sidney Fiske. The Creation of the Rococo Decorative Style. New York: Dover, 1980. By focusing on establishing which French architect was the first to begin the development of the rococo style, Kimball tends to diminish the importance of Boffrand’s work. Yet there is much information on rococo architects quoted verbatim from the French state archives that can be found only in France or in this book.

Middleton, R. D. “The Abbé de Cordemoy and the Graeco-Gothic Ideal: A Prelude to Romantic Classicism.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 25, nos. 1/2 (1962): 278-320. An exhaustive and excellent account of the interest in medieval architecture in France from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Traces Boffrand’s interest in Gothic architecture and explains the relationship between his chapel at Lunéville and eighteenth century architectural theory.

Thoenes, Christof, and Bernd Evers, eds. Architectural Theory from the Renaissance to the Present. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2002. An essay about Boffrand is included in this illustrated collection of important and influential essays about architecture published since the Renaissance.