Ecole des Beaux-Arts
Authors: O'Connell Lauren 
Published: February 2020

The term “École des Beaux-Arts” refers to a French arts institution and the building that housed it; the name also refers to its Curriculum and Pedagogy, and the impact of both on the teaching and practice of architecture—in its day and to the early 21st century. Originating in the royal academies established in the 17th century, the École des Beaux-Arts evolved through multiple iterations over the course of two centuries. Its architecture section, the focus of this bibliography, dates to 1671, the year of the founding of the Académie Royale d’Architecture. It was temporarily suppressed during the French Revolution (1793), resumed in altered form under the aegis of the Institut National in 1795, and definitively reestablished under Louis XVIII, who granted it permanent quarters on the Rue Bonaparte in 1816 and formally articulated its new mandate and structure in 1819. A major reform was attempted amid pitched debate in 1863 and a decree of 1903 decentralized the architectural education it purveyed by establishing a system of Écoles Régionales d’Architecture. The architecture section of the Paris École was ultimately dissolved by ministerial decree on 6 December 1968 in the wake of the revolutions in May of that year. The ensuing reorganization of architectural education created autonomous but coordinated unités pédagogiques, which are now gathered under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture and Communication, under the rubric École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture (ENSA). Today’s École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) at the Rue Bonaparte location is devoted to the nonarchitectural fine arts. Originally housed in an old regime convent reclaimed in the 1790s by arts aficionados to hold spolia of the Revolution, the École compound was expanded by one of its star progeny, Félix Duban, in the 1830s and became the center of an arts neighborhood, heartbeat of artistic production later in the century. The instructional core of the school, the so-called système des Beaux-Arts, featured an atelier structure, with students clustered in studios run by influential patrons; and a competition-based model of practice, with all exercises culminating in multiphased contests pitting students against one another for coveted prizes. The ultimate prize, the annual Grand Prix de Rome, won the laureate several years residency at the Villa Medici, headquarters of the French Academy in Rome. The Beaux-Arts education bore a distinctive relationship to drawing, to history, and to design values exemplified in antiquity. The stylistic impact of its architectural taste in France took a variety of forms, from a revivified classicism to eclectic recombinations of historical precedent and protomodern experimentations in space and light. In the United States, “Beaux-Arts” style came to be characterized by the sumptuous civic creations of a flush late-19th-century Gilded Age and, in the 20th century, by its opposition to modernism. The École’s most profound and wide-ranging influence lies in the particularities of its approach to the teaching of design—at once rigorously systematic and flexibly adaptable to circumstance.