Scholars agree that Beaux-Arts classicism was the dominant architectural language of empire. Though typically associated with the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Beaux-Arts architecture manifested in various contexts and across geographies, languages, identities, and cultures. This style—a recognized design language with a set of rules and standards—has been translated, repeated, and transplanted. Students from across the globe, especially from the Americas, came to study at the École, bringing back what they had learned to their communities of origin. In settler colonial societies, like the United States, the style appears among the enclaves of the marginalized, like Black Americans asserting their national identity at state and city fairs. Britons used Beaux-Arts-inspired civic and commercial buildings across their empire from Ireland to Africa to make their geographic reach visible. In the global south, like Japanese colonial-era Taiwan, the colonized locals appropriated the styles of planned Beaux-Arts districts to create their own modern vernacular. Beaux-Arts architecture as a global phenomenon appeared well into the twentieth century.
As such, as historians concerned with globalizing our profession, studying the Beaux-Arts allows for documentation of this style’s widespread effects on individual cultures and regions. How did subaltern architects employ Beaux-Arts principles of order, rationality, symmetry, and typology in their own contexts, even after liberation? Did the monumentality of classicism take on new meanings in recently transformed societies, and (if so) how?
With this history in mind, each speaker will explore the globalization of the Beaux-Arts by recentering this style within architectural history. These case studies rely on archival research and close attention to visual form to highlight the duality of agency and coloniality in Beaux-Arts empire building.
Session Organizer: Charlette M. Caldwell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Papers and Presenters:
Anchors of Empire: The Neo-Baroque from Northern Ireland to South Africa, Pollyanna Rhee, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Faces of A Colony: Japanese Colonial Planning in Taiwan and the Emergence of a Modern Vernacular, Meng-Hsuan Lee, Columbia University
The Argentine Pavilion’s Transatlantic Voyage: A Transplanted Beaux-Arts, 1889, Rebeca Yuste, Columbia University and Dumbarton Oaks
Beaux-Arts Jim-Crowism: William Sidney Pittman’s Negro Building at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, Charlette Caldwell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Colonial Compositions: Beaux-Arts Designs on the Maghreb, c.1878, David Sadighian, Yale University