Speculating on architecture : morality, the new real estate, and the bourgeois apartment industry in late nineteenth-century France

Abstract

The topic of architecture as a commodity-something that can be possessed and traded-has been largely ignored within the discipline of architectural history, or even written off altogether as an inevitable consequence of modem capitalism. But the history of the commodification of architecture is by no means as simple as it may seem. It has its roots in Haussmann's Paris, and the speculative property market of the 1860s, where we see, for the first time, a complex intermingling of new mortgage structures and residential typologies, the use of standardization, and the proliferation of discourses concerning apartment decoration. The project also treats reactions expressed by architects, aesthetic theorists, and religious and political figures over the course of the Third Republic against speculation practices and their architectural effects. The changes brought by property's increased circulation-the very idea of apartments designed for unknown future occupants-were compounded by the perception of a real estate market held in the grips of commodity culture. The possibility that anyone could own property was unsettling for some political and religious authorities; perhaps even more so was the sense of an assault on the way in which property had traditionally stood as a representation of individuality. Speculative architecture brought about a separation of the subject (the particular owner of an apartment) from its object (the apartment unit now rendered ubiquitous). The powerful critique of modem capitalism and the ostensive ill effects on private life that emerged from all of this was bound up in liberal and Catholic ideologies, as I argue in my dissertation. I look at a set of figures from vastly different professions who, perforce, collectively developed and implemented rules governing finances, architecture, decoration, and, ultimately, human conduct. These include developers like the Saint-Simonien Emile Pdreire, whose experimental Credit Mobilier sponsored standard models for residential architecture, democratized credit, and underwrote the design and construction of thousands of new apartments. These also include taste-makers like Charles Blanc, director of the Academie des beaux-arts, whose works included decoration manuals. And finally, these include politicians such as Frederic Le Play, the Catholic modernist and proto-sociologist who insisted on the connection between private property and morality, and Jules Simon, the conservative republican who linked the security of the family to that of the nation state. The reactionary moralization of design, to be detected in Catholic dogma, metaphysical philosophy, and the republican politics of the time, stands as one of the great unacknowledged precedents for the proselytizing ideology of architectural modernism at the dawn of the twentieth century.