Washington Winter Show 2018

52 The Architecture of Joy by Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams L et us begin with an example. The pagoda at Rosay (fig. 1) stands atop a large, finely made grotto, so large that a dozen people can—and once surely did—dine in the vaulted cave. Water from springs on the hillside above has been channeled in lead pipes underground to spout from crevasses, tumble over the tortured rock, and collect in rustic basins that feed the pond in which the grotto stands. The pagoda above is reached by a bridge of finely wrought iron that springs from a densely planted hillock and arches gently over water to the grotto. The pagoda at Rosay is a unique survivor, the last chinoiserie pagoda in France to stand on its grotto in a park retaining its original landscape and follies, facing its château—an ensemble complete and essentially unchanged from the time of the Revolution. Rosay is a time machine. To visit Rosay is to understand why its builders often bankrupted themselves creating gardens and inhabiting them with fantastic structures. Remove the highways, the television, the whole of modern life, and a folly in one’s backyard becomes an inexhaustible source of delight. When looking then at chinoiserie in 18th-century Europe, a time itself synonymous with grace, and attempting to describe these structures—fretwork pagodas and brightly painted summerhouses set atop rock-work grottos—such words as whimsy, charm, and delight immediately spring to mind. And no wonder, for chinoiserie is western architecture’s equivalent of plain, simple joy. Apparently it was always so. From their first meaningful awareness of its existence, Europeans were intrigued by China, and their fascination would only grow with the centuries, fueled on the one hand by a trickle of fantastic tales and superbly worked luxuries and on the other by the land’s seductive aloofness. From the outset, two Chinas developed in the European mind; knowledge of one, the actual country, came fitfully, with long periods of self-imposed isolation compounded by many misconceptions and outright deceptions, but the other, the imaginary world of Cathay, was a pure invention, a collective vision nurtured, embroidered, and beloved by the European spirit. As Hugh Honour explains, “chinoiserie is a European style and not, as is sometimes supposed by Sinologists, an incompetent attempt to imitate the arts of China…Cathay is, or rather was, a continent of immeasurable extent lying just beyond the eastern confines of the known world. Of this mysterious and charming land, poets are the only historians and porcelain painters the most reliable cartographers.” It was Marco Polo’s Travels , first disseminated in 1295, that brought China to the attention of medieval Europe Figure 1. The pagoda at Rosay. Built ca. 1800 and still extant. Watercolor on paper by the authors. ©Edward Andrew Zega and Bernd H. Dams, Architectural Watercolors.