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History, Geometry and Stereotomy in the Vaults of the Halle au Blé

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Abstract

This paper analyses the history, cultural background, geometric configuration and stereotomic apparatus of one of the most interesting buildings in the urban landscape of Paris between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Halle au Blé in Rue de Viarmes, also known in English as Corn Exchange. This building, which over the years underwent several formal, functional and structural transformations, is particularly interesting to scholars because of the innovations researched and designed by the French architect Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, who tried to solve some novel geometric and constructive issues drawing from available treatises, probably most of all that of Frézier. His contribution to the Halle au Blé includes the invention of particular vaulted surfaces assembled by blending stone ashlars and bricks.

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Reproduced by kind permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)

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Notes

  1. On the life, architecture and treatises by Le Camus, see (Pelletier 2000).

  2. To solve this problem, and to use the central courtyard for recreational purposes, Le Camus submitted a project for a stone and brick dome just after the construction of the Halle. From his section drawing (see Viel (1809): 99, his design appears impossibly ambitious: a huge dome with big openings and a central oculus, standing on giant columns, in stone and bricks and nonetheless very thin and light, appears more like a formal and conceptual ideal, with the Pantheon (and maybe Frézier; see 1737–1739, 3, 170, plate 92) as a reference, than something feasible. In 1782 François-Joseph Bélanger (1744–1818) proposed to build a metal dome and, later, the architects Jacques-Guillaume Legrand (1753–1807) and Jacques Molinos (1743–1831) designed, and then built, a wooden dome in 1782–1783, destroyed by fire in 1802. To replace it, in 1808 a new dome was built according to Bélanger’s previous idea. On the history and projects of the dome, see (Viel 1809; Wiebenson 1973; Pérouse de Montclos 1989).

  3. The architects Jacques-Guillaume Legrand and Jacques Molinos accused Le Camus of having built the Halle too quickly, without considering the effects of subsidence and of the settling of stone ashlars. The accusations were written in a 1782 report about the state of the building, before they built the dome. The roof built by Le Camus was covered with black painted tiles to simulate slate. The tiles were fixed to the ridge with iron elements, but this soon required expensive and frequent extraordinary maintenance. The first remaking of the entire roof dates already to 1774.

  4. The copy of the rare in-folio consulted for the reconstructions is that at the Library of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London (cat. 5564).

  5. See (Migliari et al. 2008: 158–159).

  6. There are other two kinds of arrière-voussure: that of Marseille—with a trapezoidal plan and an external three-centered arch—and that of Montpellier—with a trapezoidal plan and an external arch lintel (Frézier 1737–1739).

  7. Scholars can rely on very few photographic documents, especially of the upper floor seen from inside. One of the most relevant is John Hill’s 1806 aquatint of a painting by John Claude Nattes (one copy is at the British Museum: reg. 1870, 1008.364).

  8. See note 7.

  9. Further investigation would suggest looking in different geographic and cultural contexts, especially in Spanish stereotomy.

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De Rosa, A., Bergamo, F. & Calandriello, A. History, Geometry and Stereotomy in the Vaults of the Halle au Blé. Nexus Netw J 22, 871–893 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00004-020-00517-w

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