CAPTAIN SHAW said that was a point to which he wished to call attention, as party walls formed a matter of very considerable importance in the present day. It every day and night happened that a great deal of trouble had to be taken to protect the houses on either side of one that was on fire, showing that the party walls were not what they should be, since the fire penetrated continually even those of quite recent erection, as his own experience enabled him to testify. As a general remark on the subject of warehouses in London, he would say he thought the greatest measure of safety was to be found in the proper subdivisions of the premises, and the separation and classification of the large stores of inflammable materials there deposited. In reply to what had fallen from Mr. Papworth on the subject of steam-fire engines, he would only say he was extremely sorry to hear any disparaging remark made upon those machines, on which more than on anything else perhaps the safety of London from fire at present depended. The supply of water was regulated according to the discretion of those experienced in such matters. It was ordinarily delivered through nozzles, varying from one-sixteenth of an inch to one and a half inch; and he knew of no instance in which just complaint could be made of an excessive quantity of water being thrown. The men got as close as possible to their work, and stopped playing in such good time, that they always had to go on again; and in valuable buildings he might say the greatest care was invariably taken not to throw more water than was absolutely necessary. In conclusion he would remark that in the buildings of the present day in London, carried up to so great a height, due provision ought always to be made for serving a supply of water in cisterns elevated well above the roof, as even with the great power of the engines now employed, they would be of little service in attacking a fire at so great a height. These might be made sufficient to keep the fire in check till the engines arrived. He thanked the meeting for the courtesy with which he had been received, and congratulated Mr. Lewis most cordially on his success in a lecture, touching on many important points hitherto but little attended to or understood.

Mr. THOMAS MORRIS, Associate, remarked that all the facts brought before them this evening accorded with one rule of science. It was well known that confined air was a non-conductor of heat; and in all the cases mentioned where there had been air-tight compartments formed by accident in floors or walls the fire failed to penetrate, and it was to such physical conditions he thought they must mainly look for an abatement of the usual destruction by fire. They found that iron was not a trustworthy material, nor indeed any other material which was a conductor of heat. In the consideration of this subject the earthy materials and glass had been left out. It might be taken that in non-conducting properties one inch of glass was equal to thirty inches of iron. The old practice was to break open the door of the house on fire, to send the firemen in, and then to break all the windows with the jets of water, and they seldom heard of a house so treated not being completely burnt down. The proper mode in a case of fire, no doubt, was to master it if possible from the top.

The vote of thanks was then passed to Mr. Lewis for his paper, and a similar compliment was paid on the proposition of the President to Captain Shaw, for the practical information with which he had favoured the meeting, which then adjourned for the Easter recess.

ON THE PRESENT TENDENCIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND
ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION IN FRANCE.

BY GEO. R. BURNELL, Fellow.

Read at the Ordinary General Meeting of the Royal Institute of British Architects, April 24th, 1865.

THE maxim is as trite as it is true, that the intellect of a great nation is most correctly judged by the exhibition of its taste, in all the ways in which men strive to convey their impressions of the good, the beautiful, and the true; and in no instance is the truth of this maxim more powerfully impressed upon the observer than in the analogy to be traced between the forms of faith, and the principles of philosophy, on the one side, and the style there is given to architecture on the other. To perceive the connection between the two manifestations of intellect there is required, however, a degree of impartiality-a kind of freedom from the influences that may prevail in society-that can hardly be expected from the citizens of any country; and therefore a foreigner is more likely to read correctly the signs of the times than they who reciprocally act, and react, upon the expression of their taste. It is upon this ground that I have ventured to call your attention to the subject of the state of architecture, and of architectural education in France, at the present day, as I think that we might derive many lessons, both as to what we might well copy and what we should do well to avoid, from the experience of our very ingenious, and in spite of their asserted frivolity, of our very logical neighbours, who are now engaged in working out one of the greatest problems that the human intellect has ever undertaken.

As was to be expected, the present state of architecture in France, is to a great extent the result of the past generations, who "have left their footsteps on the sands of time" in an ineffaceable manner. The Romans first taught the Gauls to build, and to clothe their thoughts in the outward and visible signs of the solid, substantial, masonry which characterized the productions of the masters of the ancient world. It would be too long were I to endeavour to trace the influence of the Middle Ages upon the expression given to architecture; but I may say this, that the various styles that arose in France were, all of them, local manifestations of the informing spirit that inspired them; and that they were all strongly marked by the character of the ages when they arose. The Renaissance, in its turn, assumed a decidedly French complexion in its early days, and it only passed to the semi-classical school when the Italian taste became dominant in the earlier days of Louis the XIV. The French architects at this time seem to have adopted the principles of Vignola, and they have always been faithful to him, notwithstanding their occasional vagaries in the Rococo style of Louis the XV. or in the Greek style; until at length, in the reign of Louis the XVI., they fairly began to work out their architecture for themselves. This effort was simultaneous with the attempt then made to bring back society to its original basis; and, as the French people have been tossed about without a guide in their attempts to solve this problem, so the architects, who have striven to work out the mode of thinking of the society they were charged to represent, have been struggling in vain to discover the forms which would best represent the state of the public mind. In the days of the Republic, the architecture was as stiff and formal an imitation of the Greek and Roman principles, as the style of oratory which the admirers of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Ossian had introduced. In the days of the Empire, the style of architecture was a stilted yet a manly style, that was strongly characteristic of the man who ruled France with a rod of iron, and made every manifestation of her taste a reflex of his mind. In the days of the

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Restoration, the genius of the nation began to display itself more freely. And in those of Louis Philippe, that genius beamed forth with purer rays, in every instance where the inherent love of centralization, that is so distinctly marked in the French mind, would allow it to manifest itself. The influence of this latter spirit has only tended to develope itself more and more under the sway of the present Emperor, until at length the whole French architecture may be described as a reflex of the tastes of one man, acting upon a school that had been long prepared to receive the impress of his mind.

It must not be understood that, in thus seeking the effect of the centralization that prevails in France at the present time, the efforts of the past generations to introduce that system are lost sight of. On the contrary; as early as the reign of Henri IV., there were signs of the taste of the capital invading the provinces, which went on increasing in their significance during the reigns of the Bourbons, who succeeded him upon the throne. But in those days something of the spirit of local independance still survived, and there was an architecture of the neighbourhood of Marseilles that was as distinct from that of Paris, as was the architecture of Lyons, Bordeaux, Rouen, Nancy, and as were distinct from the political organization of the capital, the systems that prevailed in the different pays d'états, and the pays des elections. The provinces of France could then think for themselves, and they dared at times to assert their privilege, as we may see in the squares and places of Nancy, for instance, that were built in the reign of Louis XV., under the immediate patronage of Stanislas, King of Poland, who was provided with a refuge in that town, and did much to elevate the taste of the few subjects committed to his care. All this, however, was at the period of the Revolution ruthlessly destroyed, and the influence of the capital was substituted for all the local manifestations of intellect; until at last it was found to be literally true that France had become one nation, that derived all its ideas and modes of thought from one centre; and that the changes produced in this centre were immediately communicated to the whole mass of the nation, in all its parts and in all their strength and weakness. Emphatically Paris is France, and all the intellectual movement of that kingdom must be sought there, by whoever would endeavour to understand the various phases of the national mind. This tendency has its advantages, no doubt, but it has the inconvenience of substituting the taste that is, perhaps, well suited to the materials and the temperature of one climate and one condition of the soil, for the varying influences of nature affecting a whole country. And it has the effect of subordinating the local manifestations of genius to the influence of those who are in possession of power in the capital, which is always subject to the caprices and whims of those who obtain power by the strange political revolutions that we have witnessed in our days.

It seemed, during the period of constitutional government under Louis Philippe, that the French people would make some effort to throw off the spirit of centralization that was gaining ground with them in architecture as in other things; for, in that time, the Mediæval school became rather the fashion, and the local tastes were consulted as far as possible in the buildings that were then erected. M. Lenoir, Lassus, Viollet le Duc, Calliat, de Caumont, Didron ainé, and a host of enthusiastic revivalists were then employed, and the public mind seemed to be brought back to the tastes and the forms of other times, when France could boast of producing an architecture of its own, that was characteristic of the modes of thought, the faith, and the habits of the people that gave it birth. But this movement was not founded upon anything national; it was but a galvanic kind of vitality, that ceased as soon as the romantic movement on which it was founded had subsided. It in no manner answered to the wants and feelings of Frenchmen in the present times; and though there have been. executed in the so-called spirit of revival many remarkable works, amongst which the completion of the Church of St. Ouen, the restoration of St. Eustache, the St. Chapelle and Notre Dame of Paris, the restoration of the Cathedral of Auch, the building of the Church of Bon Secours near Rouen, that of

St. Clotilde in Paris, the Churches at Boulogne and at Belleville, &c., may be cited; yet there was about these works a spirit that, after all, was a distinctly modern one, and the effort to return to the past was but an attempt to revive "those old bones." There were attempts made to introduce the Mediæval style in some of the private houses of France, which were marked by great skill in the adaptation of the forms of an architecture that was not in accordance with the wants or the tastes of the actual generation; but this was decidedly an effort, and it required too steady an application on the part of both the architects and the public to succeed. The revivalists of the style of the middle ages have, therefore, nearly passed away from the scene, and they have left the followers of the modified Italian school in unlimited possession of the means of influencing the national taste,-whether for good or for evil remains to be seen hereafter.

At the latter part of this reign, and in the early days of the Republic and the Empire, there appeared two distinct phases in the development of architecture, that have had different kinds of influences upon the subsequent progress of the art. The first of these was the introduction of the style of art that had been invented, if such a term may be allowed, by M. Duban, and had been applied by him in the new buildings of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and in the Bibliothéque St. Genevieve, by M. Labrouste, his great friend; and the second was the invasion of the province of the architect by the civil engineer, which is still gaining ground, and menaces to exclude the former body of men from the exercise of their profession. The influence of M. Duban, assisted as it was by the efforts of Labrouste, Vaudoyer, Lebas, St. Armand, and others, was for a short time prevalent, and the French taste seemed to be fast leaning towards this manner of giving a "form and spirit" to the wants and feelings of the population; but, in spite of the undoubted merits of the style, it seems never to have taken a strong hold upon the mind of the nation; and, indeed, the additions that have been made of late to the Ecole des Beaux Arts, under the orders of M. Duban himself, are enough to disgust any one, who can at all think, with the principles upon which that gentleman worked. Mr. Papworth correctly described this style as "the bed post and valence style;" it looked like the production of an upholsterer; it was characterized by small mouldings, and hollow incised ornaments, and generally by a weakness of composition, that did much to indispose the public towards its adoption. This is to be regretted, because at any rate M. Duban, and the architects who followed in the style that he introduced, strove to eliminate one which should be in accordance with the wants of the society that surrounded them, and their failure has left little chance of the establishment of anything of the kind. The influence of this school of architecture may, however, be detected in the great attention to detail, and in the small character of the ornamentation that are now the fashion with the architects employed by the Government, or by the municipality of Paris; indeed, it may be suspected that much of the tasteor rather the want of that quality-that is displayed in the new Gare du Nord is to be accounted for by the influence of the style introduced by M. Duban, though it would hardly be fair to make this style responsible for all the faults of design that are there committed.

The other phase of the architectural development in France has produced effects which seem to be much more powerful upon the form which the national taste is about to take; and it is to be observed, too, that the same cause is at work with ourselves, and it is likely to produce the same results. I allude to the intervention of civil engineers in the designing of buildings that always were considered to belong to the province of architects. For my own part, I regard the distinction between the two professions as very minute, if there be any real line of demarcation. The fact that engineers are more directly concerned with the investigation of the laws which regulate the action of forces in motion, whilst architects have more to do with those forces in repose, seems to me utterly unworthy to establish the profound difference which it has done between engineers and architects. It may be that the

avocations of the first of these set of professional men being more immediately connected with the applied sciences, they are led to the cultivation of science to the exclusion of art properly so called; whilst the architect is led, by the natural exclusiveness of the human mind, to keep science subordinate to art in the buildings he designs. But so it is at the present day, and architects as a general rule, at least in France, do not cultivate in a proper spirit the sciences that enter into the various branches of their pursuit. It was not always so, however; and Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Da Vignola, Mansard, Wren, Herrera, Fra Giocondo, Perronet, Vanvitelli, and even Telford, may be cited amongst those who were equally distinguished as architects and engineers. Of late the distinction has been gaining ground very fast between the two professions, and it is sad to reflect that it is assuming the character of the exclusion of the scientific element from the studies of the architect, who seems to think that he must look upon the exercise of his profession as being simply the means of introducing an artistic expression in the buildings he is employed upon. This age is, however, essentially a material one, and the applications of science that it delights in are of a dry, hard nature, that lend themselves but little to the picturesque, or that are incapable of the introduction of much art, although they require the highest branches of knowledge to ensure their execution. The consequence of this has been that the architects have been cast aside and the engineers have been more and more employed in their place, until at length the distinction that has been allowed to grow up has been almost recognized as a real one, and the architects are no longer employed in those buildings where there is room for the application of abstract science, but the end and aim of their occupation is made to be "art for art." The exclusion of the body of architects has not stopped here, but it has been made to extend to the construction of buildings that are in any way connected with the daily applications of science, and we see now not only that docks, harbours, piers, canals, railways, gas works, and waterworks, are committed to engineers, but that architects are considered to be incapable of designing the bridges, aqueducts, viaducts, stations, or the thousand and one buildings that are incidentally connected with that class of operations. The administrative principles of the French nation had, long before the period that I allude to, tended to throw the construction of such buildings into the hands of the engineers of the Ponts et Chaussées; but about this time they were employed to design the buildings which were connected with the railways that then began to be executed in France, and in which the introduction of iron as a material of construction seemed to require a greater amount of scientific knowledge than the architects were thought to possess. The erection of the Entrepot des Marais, of the original station of the Northern Railway, of the Strasbourg Railway, of the roof of the Rouen Railway in the Rue St. Lazare, may be cited as proofs of this tendency; and it must be confessed that they were all of them marked by a high spirit of scientific knowledge, and by an earnest effort to give to the means employed the character which was most appropriate to the ends those buildings were designed to serve. The Strasbourg Railway Station, in fact, was an original, and a very successful attempt to design a new class of construction; and it did much towards settling the spirit in which that class ought to be treated; but the effect of the engineers being employed to design architectural works became thus more and more apparent, and people began to ask themselves what necessity there was for employing a special body of artists to design the buildings that, after all, were found to be nearly as well designed by the scientific men employed in the erection of the other parts of the work, se far as regarded the artistic effects that they were intended to produce.

The great works that have lately been executed in Paris, under the vigorous impulsion of the Emperor, supported as he has been by the singular administrative ability of M. Hausseman, the Prefect of the Seine, have, in their turn, done much towards the development of the spirit of centralization, and towards the habit of regarding the treatment of architectural compositions from what may be called