The World is a Composition: Beaux-Arts Design and Internationalism in the Age of Empire, 1867-1914

Abstract

This dissertation explores how the transatlantic and colonial dissemination of Beaux-Arts architecture shaped the rise of international order during the Age of Empire. During the second half of the nineteenth century, waves of aspiring architects from Europe, the Near East, and the Americas traveled to the Paris École des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) for its design methods, which they used in a wide variety of commissions around the world. Scholars have focused on the school’s prominent alumni and their designs for state institutions in discrete national contexts. My approach departs from nationalist frameworks to resituate Beaux-Arts design within a parallel phenomenon: the rise of “universal” systems to bolster connections between nation states and colonial empires. Recent decades have witnessed a “global turn” in nineteenth-century studies, yielding new research on transnational phenomena ranging from standardized time to deep-sea telegraphy cables to global commodities like cotton. Architecture, however, has yet to be examined through this lens. Using perspectives of global history and decolonial theory, I analyze the universalism attributed to the school’s key design method known as composition, asking how its protocols of spatial organization dovetailed with emerging forms of social and racial hierarchy. My project tracks the circulation of Beaux-Arts composition across borders with the support of primary sources consulted at archives, libraries, museums, and architectural sites from over a dozen countries in Europe and the Americas. By exploring the contradictions within Beaux-Arts composition – promoting universalist ideals through imperialist violence – this dissertation maps a network of actors, objects, and images as they produced highly uneven connections across the Atlantic World. What emerges from this study is a new understanding of architecture as an instrument of polity between and beyond states. Moreover, this dissertation argues that composition’s promise of crystalline harmony was undercut by local and interregional hierarchies of its own making.