Henri Labrouste (1801–75) has one of the most durable architectural reputations of the modern era. His complex work has lent itself to regular interpretation and reinterpretation, allowing almost every generation to have the Labrouste that it wanted—to love or to hate. The recent luminous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art sought to define a Labrouste for our own times while preserving the traces of all the earlier Labroustes. That was a great deal to accomplish, and most of it got done.
Like many architectural historians born in the middle years of the twentieth century, I first encountered Labrouste in the pages of Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture.1 Giedion’s Labrouste was the architect of the iron book stacks of the Bibliothèque Nationale; he was portrayed as a rarity among the historical revivalists of the nineteenth century, one who dared to use the new materials of his era...
University of California Press