The impressive Henri Labrouste exhibit at MoMA is called Structure Brought to Light, to celebrate the architect's pioneering use of exposed structural steel, most famously at the Bibliothèques Sainte-Geneviève and nationale in Paris. Here slender steel posts lift roofs high and open walls to great expanses of glass. Much of the exhibit is devoted to drawings, models and photographs of these two buildings, and to historical artifacts from their construction. We even see the architect’s cloth-bound construction journals, filled with his lean, leaning script. But the real treasures are Labrouste’s student drawings, which fill the first gallery. They’re huge, yellowing sheets with renderings in black ink and soft, sepia-toned washes. The drawings depict classical monuments Labrouste visited while traveling through southern Europe on the Prix de Rome, and some of his early speculative designs, like a bridge connecting France with Italy, and a tomb for Napoleon, all in conventional neoclassical styles. Despite the fidelity with which these drawings depict masonry (and all of these structures are masonry), they are entirely weightless. The heaviest ink lines are finer than hairs, and the colored washes, laid with exquisite evenness, feel as if they might evaporate from the page.
Labrouste’s student drawings are faithful, cataloging every crevice between stone blocks in a wall, and every millimeters-wide turn in the profile of a corinthian column capital, and also dreamy, unrooted in time and place. The images float on the page, cushioned by empty space, unmoored from landscape and geography. We know precisely what this memorial looks like, how it was built, how to enter it, and what it might look like inside, but we have no idea where it is. Is it off the coast of Elba, at the center of a park in London, or in a back yard in Beverly Hills? In the way the drawing highlights symmetries and geometries of the monument it’s highly rational, and yet it's tempered with romanticism, a yearning for the faraway time and place where the building stands.
There has always been, for architects, a seductive freedom in drawings, where vision is given free reign, unchecked by realities of construction. One of my architecture teachers used to say, “All that’s needed to do architecture is a pencil and paper." Labrouste’s student drawings are a compelling argument for the fullness of paper architecture. They have the geometric clarity of drawings by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée, the shadowy melodrama of renderings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and the unsettling emptiness of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. Labrouste’s position within modern architectural history is that of an enlightened pragmatist; a man working at the cusp of Modernism, pushing contemporary construction one small, bold step away from Medieval masonry traditions. From the evidence of these drawings, he is also a dreamer.