Longchamp Palace

The Palais Longchamp is a building erected in the style of historicism in Marseille between 1862 and 1869 . It is located in the 4th arrondissement in the Quartier des Cinq-Avenues at the northern end of Boulevard Longchamp.

The Palais Longchamp at night

Building history

In 1838, under the supervision of the engineer Franz Mayor de Montricher , construction began on the Canal de Marseille in order to carry fresh water from the Durance to Marseille. The canal and with it the water first reached the Marseille region (near Saint-Antoine) in 1847 and finally the actual urban area of Marseille in 1849, on what was then the Longchamp plateau. To celebrate the arrival of water, the architect Pascal Coste was commissioned in 1847 to create a representative water distributor and a natural history museum. Because of the revolution of 1848, this project remained just a sketch.

In 1850 the city made a new attempt. She commissioned the architect Jean Danjoy, who already planned a water distributor in the form of a triumphal arch and underneath an allegory of the Durance river with female symbolic figures of fertility (wine and grain). Nothing came of this project either. It was not until 1859 that the mayor of Marseille, Jean-François Honnorat, commissioned the sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi , who would later be the creator of the Statue of Liberty , to work out new plans. This initially only provided for a monumental fountain - then, at the urging of the city administration, a central water distributor, flanked by symmetrically arranged museum buildings. In a third project, he connected these museum wings with a monumental gallery of columns.

The hesitant city administration then appointed a special commission of local architects Henri Labrouste and Léon Vaudoyer as well as Victor Baltard , city architect of Paris. This commission spoke out against Bartholdi's project. Bartholdi received his fee, and in 1861 the young architect Henri-Jacques Espérandieu , who came from Nimes, was commissioned to build the existing complex. (At that time Espérandieu was working as a construction manager at the Basilica Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde ). From 1863 onwards, Bartholdi protested by pointing out that the idea of the semicircular colonnade came from him and was supported primarily by the Paris press. Until 1901 he upheld his claimed authorship in court, but to no avail.

At the end of September 1861 Espèrandieu presented his first plans, on April 7, 1862 the definitive project was accepted by the local council, and on August 15, 1869 the grand opening of this "largest monumental building of the Second Empire outside Paris" took place. Since then, two highly regarded museums in Marseilles are located in the two side wings: the Museum of Fine Arts ( Musée des Beaux-Arts ) on the left and the Natural History Museum (Muséum d'histoire naturelle) on the right. The building is surrounded by the Parc Longchamp ; towards the front, the garden is dominated by a generous arrangement of gargoyles and waterfalls, towards the rear there was a zoo until 1987, which is now used as a green area and is very popular.

Individual evidence

↑ See: European art history in data VEB Verlag der Kunst Dresden, 1984, p. 496

literature

Henri Espérandieu: Palais de Longchamp. Documents relatifs aux réclamations de M. Bartholdi. Marseille: Impr. De Barlatier-Feissat, September 2, 1869.
Bertrand Lemoine , Alexandra Bonfante-Warren: Architecture in France, 1800-1900 , Harry N. Abrams, (1998), especially p. 71