Colour, too, contained one of his greatest secrets: his love affair with Sophie Dupuis. He did countless scenic views of the events that transpired around him during his long career. Fontaine – often considered the serious, ‘less colourful’ foil to the more creative Percier – loved painting in watercolours. Fontaine’s model appears to show everything necessary for reconstructing an octagonal room from Consulate France, but excised is the issue of who the room was for, and where it was located (we can guess that it was probably for someone in the First Consul’s entourage).Īnother glance at the model shows a pointed interest in developing colour across a range of surfaces and materials. It never gives, nor can it give, a total picture of a project’. Its power to represent is always partial, always more or less abstract. Linked and fully folded up, the drawing shows the walls of the room forming a hermetically sealed, dollhouse-like space.Įvans used the developed surface to argue that architectural drawing, far from being conceptually autonomous, was a historically and socially porous artefact that ‘makes it possible to see some things more clearly by suppressing other things: something gained, something lost. Fontaine kitted this model out with tabs. Favoured by Robert Adam in his domestic commissions, the technique ‘became a way of turning architecture inside-out, so that internal rather than external elevations were shown’. By contrast, this coloured model appears somewhat archaic – especially if we consider Robin Evans’s claim that the ‘developed surface’, a term he used to describe a method of representing rooms with the walls folded out as adjacent surfaces, was primarily a phenomenon of mid-18th-century Britain. His views featured in their most famous publication, Recueil de decorations intérieures (1801–12). Though he designed many interiors for the elite of post-revolutionary France with his inseparable partner Charles Percier, interior projections and perspectival views were his forte. Paper models are rare among Fontaine’s oeuvre. Described as a music salon because of the instruments on the wall, this unusually shaped space more probably represents a small cabinet or bedroom (beds were not a common feature of music salons). Between the windows, a commode is tightly wedged between two green panels decorated with winged torches and vases. These reflect the view of two windows, just opposite, dressed with yellow drapes. On a cross axis to the entryway, an alcove with a bed covered in yellow silk is set between two mirrors. On the opposite strip is the fireplace and mantel, above which a large mirror is stationed behind a gilt-bronze clock and two vases under glass jars. The doorway is decorated with white stucco ornaments of vases and musical instruments. When raised vertically, each strip shows a portion of the inside walls. Eight strips of paper (one with two flanking side strips) splay outwards like tentacles from the points of a star drawn on the wooden octagonal floor. It represents a simply decorated room coloured in shades of apricot and light green. French architect Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine made this cut-out paper model of an interior in or before 1804, the year in which his famous client, Napoleon, became emperor. The square and compass have long been architecture’s symbols of the trade, but practitioners sometimes used scissors to shape space. Order your copy through our webshop or purchase directly from the publisher. Republished to celebrate the release of Architecture through Drawing, edited by Desley Luscombe, Helen Thomas and Niall Hobhouse, published by Lund Humphries. ![]() Pen, ink and watercolour on paper, 120 × 185 × 144 mm. Common scales in the US include 1/4"=1' and 3/32"=1'.– Iris Moon Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853), Drawing model for a Music Room, c.1803. ![]() There are a variety of scales that might appear on blueprints.They use whole-integer ratios like 1" = 10' (one inch equals 10 feet) or 1" = 50' (one inch equals fifty feet). Engineer scales, or civil scales, are used for public water systems, roads and highways, as well as topographical endeavors. ![]() Many are presented in fractions: 1/4" = 1' (one-fourth inch equals one foot), 1/8" = 1' (one-eighth inch equals 1 foot).
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