Iconic Collaborations
In this series, we will look at an early root of contemporary architecture and planning: the Palace of Versailles. The differences with projects today vary greatly, but many of the problems and requirements the architects and administrators faced at the time remain concerns we deal with today. To understand where we are today, we have to look back at the history of architecture and planning.
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Part 1
In part one we will discuss the beginning of work at Versailles, why people thought it was not an ideal place for building, and how landscape architects and engineers tried to make it viable.
We’ve come a long way from this time period. Today, understanding site conditions and having a clear idea of how big a building needs to become are essential before a project gets underway. Software like Arcol allows designers to validate a site for a building by unifying requirements and design at the early stages, so we have a good idea of what a building will be like before any construction begins.
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A Grand Building
Known worldwide, Versailles has captured the imagination of generations, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every year to see the stunning details of the palace and its grounds. It is a structure famous for its grandiosity, representing the wealth and supreme power of the early-modern French kings.
Built primarily between the 1660s and 1710s, the structure sprawls with grandeur in the French countryside.
It is forever associated with the man whose will led to its instruction, King Louis XIV “The Sun King”, as he gathered around him the wealth and power of the French kingdom, the most populous country in Europe at the time.
To execute such an immense vision, Louis relied on the know-how and collaboration of several different architects, ministers, furniture makers, craftspeople, and landscape architects.
It is a structure that represents unimaginable wealth and power, but also the growing need for improved technologies and methods as buildings grew in scale and complexity. Architects and their collaborators needed to rise to the demands of the king to forge a new style and role for architecture in an increasingly modern world.
In some ways, the Palace of Versailles is a city in its own right. It has changed over time to meet the needs of the growing population that resided, the introduction of new fads and phenomena, and even the turnover of whole states and political systems. Many different additions and their architects sometimes competed, as is often the case in projects that begin with no single goal or end.
Why Versailles? An Undeserving Favorite
Nine miles outside of the borders of Paris, the countryside was hilly, with agricultural fields spread between groves of trees such as poplars, sycamores, and ash. Nearby were the famous forests used for centuries by the French kings in their hunting excursions.
It is said that the nobles who eventually lived full-time in Versailles were confused about Louis’ selection of place. In the countryside outside of Paris, it was adjacent to famed hunting grounds but otherwise, there wasn’t much there.
The lack of water, its sandy ground, and the absence of a proper town in the vicinity made it hardly suitable for one of the many country manner houses enjoyed by the nobility, let alone for a palace that would eventually become the political center of the whole country.
It was Louis XIV’s father Louis XIII who first fell in love with the area as a young man and later built a country residence there that served as a country lodge and was rarely used for hosting.
During Louis XIII’s life there was a small hamlet and a church in the area, and there were a few inns as it lay off one of the main roads connecting Paris to Normandy.
The original lodge was built on a sandy patch of what was largely marshland. Some Parisians associated the area with unhealthy air.
As it was being built some of the people of Louis XIV’s court referred to the king’s obsession with Versailles (he had daily reports on the palace written and delivered even while on campaign during his wars). As he began to build, some even referred to it as the king's “undeserved favorite.”
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Stakeholder coordination is essential for making sure that all the requirements of a project are being met at various points during the project. Now, with software, we can dial into these benchmarks, seeing visually what’s happening with a project. Of course, collaboration is still done on a person-to-person level, but now there’s far less ambiguity over where a project stands and if what one party wants is event possible.
Despite these limitations, Versailles grew into the marvel that we think of today. Louis XIV adopted his father’s attraction to the area, and in the early 1660s, work began on expanding the property.
However, there were a number of challenges that needed to be resolved, some natural and some presented by Louis XIV's unquestionable authority.
Engineering the Landscape
Europeans of the 17th and 18th centuries took gardening very seriously and, naturally, the French royalty had an established royal gardener who oversaw the planting of properties owned by the king.
Andre Le Notre, a landscape architect from a family of gardeners, transformed Versailles into a plane of walkways and greenery laid out with clean geometric proportions. Le Notre helped shape some of the most famous properties in France, from the Champs-Elysees to the Tuileries Garden in Paris.
In the fields of landscape architecture and urban planning, Le Norte is still an important figure. Contemporary architect Georges Farhat has said that techniques epitomized by Le Notre, such as long avenues and playing with different perspectives and levels to emphasize the scale of the radiating paths, were precursors to many principles of contemporary city planning.
The planners of both the Capitol complex in Washington, D.C., and the 911 memorial in New York reference Le Notre as an inspiration.
At Versailles and in his other projects, Le Notre designed long avenues with radiating paths that provided space for different pavilions and installations.
The design required for these features is most clearly seen in the extensive networks of water fountains that pump water into dazzling arcs. At its height, there were more than 2,000 fountains surrounding the palace.
The amount of water required to fuel the fountains at Versailles was a massive and ongoing project during its construction and for centuries after its initial completion in the 1710s.
In the end, Louis XIV and Notre had to figure out how to bring a massive amount of water to a location far from the river.
There were multiple projects attempted but the most audacious was a massive hydraulic system called the Marly Machine built in the early 1680s. Hydraulic technology had not improved much since the innovations of the Romans nearly two millennia before.
Engineer Arnold de Ville was tasked with creating the system, utilizing the experience that he’d gained from pumping water out of mines. The Marly Machine was placed in the River Seinne and featured 14 gigantic water wheels that powered pumps. These pumps brought water up a steep hill to massive aqueducts that transported the water four miles to the palace grounds.
The machine and the other aqueducts built to bring water to Versailles were wonders of engineering and showed just how far Louis XIV was willing to go to complete his masterpiece.
These engineering projects were always trying to catch up to the ambition of the king. A difficult client to have!
Today, we rarely have to contend with a project that follows the whims of someone with absolute power, but if we did, we could utilize Arcol to show the impacts of their decisions in real time —> Get in touch with our team to see how Arcol can bring clarity to projects
In part two, we will look at the succession of architects and planners that made their mark on the architecture of Versailles and how that related to French architecture and construction in general at that time.
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