page_title: Pierre Contant d'Ivry
section_title: Palais-Royal
hierarchical_section_title: Pierre Contant d'Ivry / Palais-Royal
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Entrée et façade du Palais Royal donnant sur la rue de Valois. Vues depuis la place de Valois. English: The northern section of the Rue-de-Valois wing of the Palais-Royal, designed by Pierre Contant d'Ivry and built for Louis-Philippe the Fat, Duke of Orléans, in the 1750s, is the one of the oldest surviving structures in the Palais-Royal complex. The large balcony brackets and inventive detailing of the avant-corps (shown in this photograph) combine with the classical solidity of its massing to produce a hybrid of the decorative Rococo style of the early 18th century with the more restrained neoclassicism of the latter half of the century. [Ayers, Andrew (2004). The Architecture of Paris, p. 47. Stuttgart; London: Edition Axel Menges. ISBN 9783930698967.]
context_page_description: Pierre Contant d'Ivry, was a French architect and designer working in a chaste and sober Rococo style and in the goût grec phase of early Neoclassicism.
context_section_description: Later Contant d'Ivry worked for Louis-Philippe, duc d'Orléans, for whom he transformed interiors of the Palais-Royal, Paris, in 1754, designs that were widely admired and published by Diderot and d'Alembert in the Encyclopédie, 1762, where Jacques-François Blondel praised their "correct middle pathway between two excesses, that of the heavy weight of our ancients and that of frivolity". Surviving examples include the dining room of the Duchesse d'Orléans (now the Salle du Tribunal des Conflits of the Conseil d'État), which is in a neo-classical style with pilasters, and another of her rooms (now the Salle des Finances), in which his surviving decoration of the ceiling and door panels is lighter and more reminiscent of the earlier French Regency period. Contant d'Ivry was also responsible for the exteriors of the northern part of the east wing (now on the Rue de Valois), the avant corps of which, "with its giant balcony brackets and rather inventive detailing, combines Rococo-style decorative charm with a certain Classical solidity in its massing."
  In 1763 a fire which started in the east wing in the opera house, the Salle du Palais-Royal, destroyed not only the theatre but also the adjoining sections of the palace. While the municipality of Paris was responsible for the opera house and hired its own architect, Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux, who also designed the new facades on the Rue Saint-Honoré side of the building, Louis Philippe engaged Contant d'Ivry, who designed the interiors of the reconstructed corps de logis, the facades of the Cour d'Honneur (on the garden side), and a grand staircase, the "splendid escalier d'honneur, [which] with its domed covering and dramatic curved descent, is justly famous."
caption: Contant d'Ivry's avant corps on the Rue de Valois
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