Of the many urban operations that contributed to making modern Paris, the construction of the Halles Centrales (Central Markets; 1854–74) was among the largest, most radical, and most influential projects undertaken as part of the Second Empire renovation of the city. Designed by the academically trained architect Victor Baltard (1805–1874), the Halles Centrales required the rebuilding of an entire neighborhood in the heart of the French capital. Planned on a regular grid and linked by covered streets, Baltard’s iron market pavilions were designed to provide for the efficient transaction of commerce and remained in operation until 1969. For a couple of years before their demolition began in August 1971, the pavilions served as a kind of fun palace. One pavilion survives, having been dismantled and reconstructed in Nogent-sur-Marne east of Paris. Likened to a group of huge, rectangular parasols, Baltard’s apparently lightweight metal structures derived from contemporary utilitarian building types such as railway sheds. Critiqued by the likes of Viollet-le-Duc for being nothing more than a sequence of hangers with no proper facade, the Halles was regarded by contemporaries as a behemoth that proclaimed its modernity through the nakedness and transparency of its iron structure. Some found this to be the building’s chief merit: Émile Zola made the Halles a central element of his novel Le Ventre de Paris (1873), published just as the tenth iron pavilion was being completed.

The boldness of the Halles’s design and its centrality to the reconstruction of Paris should have guaranteed Baltard a prominent place in the history of modernism, a place that might even have surpassed the one now occupied by his slightly older contemporary Henri Labrouste (1801–1875). Yet it is Emperor Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who have often been credited with forcing the reluctant Baltard to renounce his hopelessly archaic academic training and embrace the possibilities inherent in new, industrial materials. As the modern world took shape, the emperor and the prefect were the midwives who brought the Halles Centrales into being after a fraught and nearly abortive pregnancy. This was the narrative supplied by Haussmann himself in his Mémoires (1890–93) and which Siegfried Giedion took up in his hugely influential Space, Time and Architecture. Despite the significance he attributes to the Halles Centrales, Giedion damns Baltard to obscurity: unlike Labrouste, who is praised as a “great artist,” Giedion warns a few pages later that Baltard is “not by any means to be regarded as one of the great architects” (Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941, 165). Though both were educated at the École des Beaux-Arts, Labrouste managed to transcend this handicap. Despite the use of iron and glass throughout the Halles Centrales and their indisputable importance to later architecture, Giedion concludes that their design is merely a pastiche, “a derivative patchwork of other men’s plans” (165).

In a sequence of exhibitions and studies published since the 1970s, this narrative has been revised, and the architects trained at the École des Beaux-Arts whose work reshaped nineteenth-century Paris have been revealed as active participants in contemporary debates about the relationship of art to society. In their hands, architecture became a medium to explore the connection between history, technology, and modernity. Labrouste has come to exemplify most fully this new spirit of creation, one that sought to make manifest in built form the social and material potential of the nineteenth century. His Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and reading room for the Bibliothèque Impériale (now Nationale) are touchstones for understanding the renewal of architecture as a fine art allied with the distinctive needs of the modern world and infused with the possibilities offered by new technologies (see in particular the catalogue from the recent exhibition: Corinne Bélier, Barry Bergdoll, and Marc Le Cœur, eds., Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013) (click here for review). No work by Baltard comes close to achieving the aesthetic sophistication of Labrouste’s two great buildings, but a more detailed analysis of his career and designs substantially adds to an understanding of the conditions in which elite architects worked in nineteenth-century France.

Recently, Baltard’s career has been the focus of substantial scholarly attention: a monograph by Pierre Pinon covering the careers of both Victor Baltard and his father, Pierre-Louis, appeared in 2005 (Pierre Pinon, Louis-Pierre et Victor Baltard, Paris: Monum, Éditions du patrimoine, 2005); an exhibition devoted to Victor Baltard’s oeuvre curated by Alice Thomine-Berrada took place at the Musée d’Orsay in 2012–13 (Victor Baltard [1805–1874]. Le fer et le pinceau; October 16, 2012–January 13, 2013; see also, Alice Thomine-Berrada, Baltard, architecte de Paris, Paris: Gallimard, 2012); and now, a full-length monograph by Christopher Mead makes Victor Baltard’s career accessible to English-language readers. Building on the work of David Van Zanten, who included a chapter on Baltard and the Halles Centrales in his Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830–1870 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Mead’s recent book has been in process since the publication of his monograph on Charles Garnier in 1991 and is a logical extension of that project. Garnier succeeded to Baltard’s position in the Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1874 and wrote an important necrology of his predecessor. Having been a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1840s while Baltard served as professor of architectural theory, Garnier was well positioned to appreciate Baltard’s work and thought.

In his necrology, Garnier characterized Baltard as “a searcher, not in the vague sense of the word, but a searcher with a definite purpose, reached by force of will. He reasoned his art all the way through: implacable logic led him sometimes to formulate artistic expressions that sentiment alone would have abandoned” (23). Garnier was not alone in his appreciation of Baltard: Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier regarded his church of Saint-Augustin (1860–71) as an important essay in religious architecture, one that combined masonry and structural iron in its nave and dome, thereby eliminating the need for buttressing. A thread of intellectual continuity—consisting of a shared concern for the expression of structure and the formulation of urban typologies—links Le Corbusier back to Baltard via Julien Guadet, who was Perret’s teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts and Garnier’s assistant on the Opéra.

Prior to being appointed architect of the Halles Centrales in August 1845, Baltard engaged in contemporary debates through his lectures on architectural theory delivered at the École des Beaux-Arts beginning in 1842. Mead’s analysis of these texts shows how deeply Baltard’s thought was informed by Romantic aesthetics that shifted inquiry away from the search for a universal ideal grounded in ancient Greek art and toward an understanding of architectural form as the product of the historical, social, and material conditions of its making. It was a similar understanding that in 1830 landed Labrouste in hot water with the gatekeepers of French academic orthodoxy when he proposed in his famous reconstruction of the Greek temples at Paestum that the details of their construction revealed their adaptation to local conditions rather than a transcendent manifestation of an ideal beauty.

Instead of advocating for a single approach to architectural composition, Baltard proposed that the search for systematic solutions should be the architect’s chief method and that imagination was key to this process. The complexity of the modern world could not be captured by the rote application of a single, unchanging set of principles; the architect should thus be open to exploring the potentials inherent in the “immense resources” made available by industry. Here again, Labrouste (among others) had already paved the way for Baltard’s speculations, notably in his designs for the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Baltard’s concern that students of the École des Beaux-Arts engage with contemporary problems is apparent in the programs he formulated for monthly design competitions, including such modern building types as markets, train stations, schools, and bourgeois dwellings. Thus, at the time Baltard was appointed architect of the Halles Centrales, he was already thinking about modern building typologies and advocating for experimentation with new materials.

Mead’s study aspires to be more than a monograph, providing an analysis of the larger institutional frames that shaped Baltard’s career. Rising through the ranks of the municipal building administration, Baltard served from 1840 to 1860 as inspector of fine arts charged with supervising the restoration and decoration of some twenty-seven churches around Paris. The remaking of those churches reveals a complex process of adaptation that brought medieval and Renaissance structures into line with contemporary needs and ideas. Through his collaboration with a phalanx of artists, Baltard’s interventions transformed each church into a Gesamtkunstwerk that showcased the potential for polychromatic decoration to supplement architecture in creating a coherent narrative whole. The scope of Baltard’s work expanded significantly when he was appointed in 1848 as one of the chief architects responsible for public building in Paris. When the bureaucracy was reorganized in 1854 at the beginning of Haussmann’s administration, Baltard remained in place, and in 1860 he was promoted to architect-director reporting directly to the prefect with oversight over all municipal building projects. Dizzying in its complexity, Mead anchors Baltard’s public career within an architectural bureaucracy he came to preside over (if not embody), clarifying the scope of his responsibilities and the degree to which such an apparatus imposed a homogenizing character on public architecture throughout the city. More than imprinting a house style, the architecture of the city and the nature of urban space were conceptually transformed through Haussmann’s operations. Increasingly, the municipal administration shaped buildings as a response to the spaces created by streets; facilitating circulation came to dictate formal solutions for the built environment.

The project that best demonstrates the central thesis of Mead’s book—that Baltard’s major innovation was to shift from a classical notion of building typology based on functional considerations, to a design technique that used urban history to generate built form—is the Halles Centrales. In this reading, based on Aldo Rossi’s theorization of typology in The Architecture of the City (1966; trans. Joan Ockman and Diane Ghirardo, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), it is neither the functions housed within a building nor the properties of materials employed in its realization that is the primary generator of Baltard’s architecture. Though design considerations related to use and construction evidently contribute to the final composition, the overall plan and massing of the Halles Centrales results from a close analysis of the building’s urban context. According to Mead, Baltard “formulated an urban typology at the markets that synthesized the historical development of the Halles quarter” (148).

Although the Halles Centrales is closely associated with the Second Empire (1852–70), the construction of Baltard’s first pavilion began in 1851 during the Second Republic, and the final pavilion completed to his revised designs only opened in 1874 at the beginning of the Third Republic. On a political level, the reconstruction of the Halles Centrales served to demonstrate Louis Napoleon’s commitment to improving the French capital. The project linked the prince-president’s administration with that of his uncle Napoleon I, who in 1811 declared that the central markets of Paris should be rebuilt. Under the July Monarchy (1830–48), extensive studies of the site were undertaken and legal authority consolidated to permit the expropriations and demolitions necessary for the vast urban operation. Mead charts the complex backstory of the Halles Centrales, positioning the protracted development of Baltard’s project in relation to an emergent theory of urbanism that redefined the city in terms of its circulatory systems. He shows that Baltard’s overall scheme for the Halles Centrales was shaped by planning considerations that closely integrated the design of the market structures into a comprehensive plan for rebuilding the surrounding neighborhood. Unlike a traditional, classical monument that would sit discretely in relation to its context, Baltard’s Halles Centrales was intimately linked to the surrounding urban fabric and to the new circulatory network that would become the hallmark of Second Empire Paris as realized during Haussmann’s administration.

The crucial moment often highlighted in studies of the nineteenth-century history of the Halles Centrales is the decision taken by Napoleon III on June 3, 1853, to halt the project. By that time, the stone-and-iron pavilion that was the product of the first phase of construction had become a lightning rod for criticism. A flurry of counter-projects were produced and a campaign mounted in the pages of the Revue Générale de l’Architecture et des Travaux Publics, which championed the progressive ideals of the Romantic generation of architects and advocated for more radical solutions. Despite Baltard’s learned design that referenced both the fenestration of the adjacent church of Saint-Eustache and the hybrid system of construction employed by Labrouste at the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the closed, inert forms of his pavilion evoked the forbidding aspect of a fortress.

At the moment the project was suspended, Haussmann had not yet been appointed prefect. As Mead shows, Baltard and his collaborator Félix-Emmanuel Callet (1791–1854) quickly produced three new schemes, two of which stripped the buildings down to their exposed iron frames, and these were presented to the emperor less than a month after the cessation of work and before Haussmann’s arrival in Paris. In a (successful) bid to consolidate his authority over the emperor’s public works program for Paris and to reconfigure the new Halles Centrales as the product of his administration, one of Haussmann’s early acts as prefect was to fire Baltard and Callet and to re-present their projects to Napoleon III once they were out of the picture. This proved to be but one of many acts of political theater, a genre in which the prefect excelled. Haussmann soon put Baltard and Callet back on the job, and they finalized their designs for the new market pavilions by the end of 1853. As Mead points out, a project as expansive and complex as the Halles Centrales could not possibly have been redesigned in so short a time and could only have been the result of a long process of development well underway before Haussmann arrived on the scene.

Rather than being an isolated experiment with iron construction that was anathema to Baltard’s academic ideas, the Halles Centrales was one of several major buildings in which he integrated exposed structural metal. The dome and nave of the church of Saint-Augustin is another signal instance, as was the central courtyard of the Hôtel de Ville, where Baltard designed a controversial iron-and-glass roof sheltering the elegant ceremonial staircase built for Queen Victoria’s visit to Paris in 1855. The Halles Centrales, however, was exceptional for the modernity of its conception. Like Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace built in London’s Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, Baltard’s market pavilions were modular in design and composed of standardized, prefabricated metal components. Yet unlike the Crystal Palace, the Halles Centrales was conceived as a permanent monument within a dense urban environment, resulting in a daring juxtaposition of modern, commercial infrastructure with the historic fabric of the city. Zola, who reveled in the audacity of Baltard’s design, described the Halles Centrales as nothing less than “an entire manifesto in itself! . . . Since the beginning of this century, only one original building has been built that has not been copied from somewhere else and has sprung naturally from the spirit of the times, and that is Les Halles” (Le Ventre de Paris, 1873; The Belly of Paris, trans. Brian Nelson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 186). Mead’s Making Modern Paris effectively situates Baltard’s achievement fully within the currents of his period and demonstrates how the intellectual environment and administrative structures within which he worked contributed to shaping his approach to design. The coherence of the final project for the Halles Centrales emerges as the unlikely outcome of a daunting challenge and protracted process, one that highlights Baltard’s commitment to formulating a new architecture for the capital of the nineteenth century.