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Patte, who complained of the capital’s
ill-assorted buildings, poor circulation, and lack
of public works, had offered a striking solution.
His project is a dialogue between mass and form,
like flesh or muscle or organs that are given shape
by skin or clothes. The old jumble, the "amas de
maisons entassés pêle mêle,"
remains, but the intervention of existing and
proposed squares girds and contains it behind a
discontinuous formal exterior, extending the logic
of a particular square and its zone to most of the
city. Moll’s plans may be said to rationalize
this complexly involuted organism.
Moll further regularizes Patte’s idealized map
of Paris, even to the extent of formalizing the
enceinte of boulevards visible at the
corners of Patte’s plan. They become the inner
lining of the rectangular city wall, and both a
park-like carriageway and a linear public garden.
Within the city, as in Patte, streets are kept
subordinated. Patte’s projects include many
new streets, straight but narrow, resembling spokes
to the wheel of one of his circuses; Moll’s
are of three precise widths, carefully planned, but
always either accesses to places or borders
to the district organized around that square. There
is no passing through his city without passing
through his squares, unless one were, irrationally
and inconveniently, to follow only the smallest,
service streets.
A plethora of sources and analogues will suggest themselves to anyone
who examines French and other European designs of the middle and
late eighteenth century. How pertinent are the projects of, for
example, Peyre, Dubut, Vaudoyer, or even Boullée and Ledoux,
may be debated. But it may be unjust to restrict Moll wholly to
the context of France. In his presentation to the Tribunat, Moll’s
spokesman Challan described him as much traveled. As Emil Kaufmann
notes, "a passion for traveling" was virtually a generic characteristic
of the revolutionary temperament (Kaufmann 179-80). The Cahier
often refers to London; perhaps he knew other British cities as
well. His arrangements might be called as "mechanical and symmetrical"
as James Craig’s Edinburgh New Town, yet, as in Britain, they
are free with crescents, even resembling the additions to Edinburgh
New Town that in fact appeared ten years after the Cahier.
Antolini’s Bonaparte Forum for Milan of 1801, 600 meters in
diameter, rivals the scale of the center of the sixth partie.
A suggestion from Ellen Weiss is especially interesting: "the use
of semi-circles and the hard juxtapositions of arbitrary geometric
forms" recall Piranesi’s reconstruction of the Campus Martius.
(Fig.
22)
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Fig. 22 Giovanni Battista Piranesi
(1762), detail of the reconstructed Campus Martius, Rome
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