French architect. He studied architecture with Giovanni Niccolò Servandoni (1695-1766), Étienne Louis Boullée and Pierre Louis Moreau-Desproux (1727 or 1736-1793). He took the Academy of Architecture's Grand Prix de RomeGLOSSARYA scholarship, founded concurrently with the French Academy in Rome (1666), that enabled prize-winning students at the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris to spend a period (usually 4 years) in Rome at the state's expense. Prizes for architecture began to be awarded regularly in 1723, and prizes for engravers and musicians were added in the 19th century. The prizes were meant to perpetuate the academic tradition and during the 18th and 19th centuries winning the award was the traditional stepping stone to the highest honours for painters and sculptors. Many distinguished artists (as well as many nonentities) were Prix de Rome winners, notably David, Fragonard, and Ingres among painters and Clodion, Girardon, and Houdon among sculptors. The prizes are still awarded and the system has been adopted by other countries. in 1758 at age 19, traveled to Rome the following year, and returned to France in 1763. His patrons included the Count de Saint-Florentin, for whose mistress Chalgrin built a house on the Champs-Élysées that was subsequently leased by Thomas Jefferson during the years that he served as U.S. minister to the French government.
Chalgrin participated in the reintroduction of the basilican style of church architecture. His Saint-Philippe-du-Roule (designed 1768) was the main church of this type in Paris. Prominent features of the interior are twin rows of columns, extending down the sides of the naveGLOSSARYthe main interior space of a church building. It may have parallel aisles on each side, often separated from it by pillars, and is intersected by the transept, which cuts across it at the point where the choir begins. and around the periphery of the apseGLOSSARYA semicircular projection, roofed with a half-dome, at the east end of a church behind the altar. Smaller subsidiary apses may be found around the choir or transepts. Also known as an exedra. The adjective is apsidal., that support a coffered barrel-vaultGLOSSARYA roof or ceiling whose structure is based on the arch. There are a wide range of forms, including the barrel (or tunnel) vault, formed by a continuous semi-circular arch; the groin vault, formed when two barrel vaults intersect; and the rib vault, consistong of a framework of diagonal ribs supporting interlocking arches. The development of the various forms was of great structural and aesthetic importance in the development of church architecture during the Middle Ages. ceiling. The structure is characterized by an essential simplicity of design that was in stark contrast to the complex interiors of existing GothicGLOSSARYGothic, which may well have originated with Alberti as a derogatory term and which certainly corresponds to Vasari's 'maniera tedesca' ('German style'), is properly the descriptive term for an artistic style which achieved its first full flowering in the Ile de France and the surrounding areas in the period between c. 1200 and c. 1270, and which then spread throughout northern Europe. It is characterized by the hitherto unprecedented integration of the arts of sculpture, painting, stained glass and architecture which is epitomized in the great cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and Reims or in the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. In all the arts the predominantly planar forms of the Romanesque are replaced by an emphasis on line. There is a transcendental quality, whether in the soaring forms of the pointed arches or in the new stress on the humanity of Christ, which similarly distinguishes it from the preceding Romanesque style. In thinking of Nicola (d. c. 1284) or Giovanni Pisano (d. after 1314) there is same danger of forgetting what had happened in French sculpture half a century or more earlier, and likewise it is hard to remember that the spectacular achievements of early Renaissance art are a singularly localized eddy in the continuing stream of late gothic European art. By northern European standards few Italian works of art can be called gothic without qualification, and the story of 13th and 14th century Italian architecture is as much one of resistance to the new style as of its reception, whether directly from France or through German or central European intermediaries. In sculpture and in painting, the Italian reluctance to distort the human figure, conditioned by a never wholly submerged awareness of the omnipresent antique heritage, gives a special quality to the work of even those artists such as Giovanni Pisano or Simone Martini who most closely approached a pure gothic style. Nevertheless, the vitalizing role of Northern gothic art throughout the early Renaissance and the period leading up to it should never be underestimated. The artistic, like the cultural and commercial, interaction was continuous and much of the Italian achievement is incomprehensible if seen in isolation. It is not merely at the level of direct exchanges between one artist and another, or the influence of one building; painting, manuscript or piece of sculpture upon another, that the effects are to be felt. The streaming quality of line which is so characteristic of Brunelleschi's early Renaissance architecture surely reflects a sensitivity to the gothic contribution which is entirely independent of, and lies much deeper than, the superficial particularities of form. The counterflow of influence and inspiration from South to North must likewise not be underrated. In particular, the contribution of Italian painters from Duccio and Simone Martini onwards is central to the evolution of the so-called International Gothic style developing in Burgundy, Bohemia and north Italy in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. and Renaissance churches.
Following the marriage of the count de Provence (later Louis XVIII), Chalgrin became first architect to his household (1775) and designed for the countess the Pavillon de Musique at Versailles, which still survives. At this time he also helped to complete the Church of Saint-Sulpice. Under the Directory Chalgrin was commissioned to transform the Luxembourg Palace into a government building. The salle des séances that he built now serves as the hall of the French Senate. Chalgrin's final project, which he did not live to see completed, was the famous Arc de Triomphe in Paris, begun in 1806 to commemorate Napoléon's victorious battles.
Chalgrin was elected to the Académie royale d'architecture (France) in 1770. He succeeded Charles de Wailly in the Institut de France in 1798.
