Chinooiseries
This spring, if you are dreaming of building a summer house in the country, here is the perfect book to inspire you to get out the tape measure and drafting paper. Chinoiseries is a dreamy collection of fifty watercolors of small outdoor buildings, primarily pagodas, rendered by the authors in a meti-culous and realistic manner. Authors Bernd H. Dams and Andrew Zega were trained as both architects and historians, and this book benefits from their discerning eyes and enthusiasm for historical detail. Zega was previously an editor, but moved into the visual arts as an architectural renderer and designer for Robert A.M. Stern Architects in Manhattan, where he worked for eight years doing elevational and perspective drawings for client presentations, while Dams joined Stern as an architectural designer, after working at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum and Christie’s.

Their two backgrounds have com-bined beautifully to produce a series of illustrated books. The first was Pleasure Pavilions & Follies: In the Gardens of the Ancient Régime. Then came Garden Vases/Vases de Jardin, Palaces of the Sun King: Versailles, Trianon, Marly, next, a previous edition of Chinoiseries (Connaissance et Mémoires, Paris 2005), an expensive limited–edition artist's book, which Rizzoli has now thought-fully reproduced at a mass-market price.

Chinoiseries took ten years to compose, reconstructing buildings, mainly French, that were designed in the period between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, which have mostly disappeared, as this type of building was usually built for decor-ation, not longevity. But how beaut-iful they must have been!

The book is divided into four chapters, “The Architecture of Joy,” “A Graceful Disorder,” “Sir William Cha-mbers,” and “George le Rouge.” The first chapter explains how the arrival of exotic and rare Chinese objects fired the seventeenth-century imagination. The European interpretation of this distant culture became known as “Chinoiserie,” and its influence spread throughout the arts. The first example was the late seventeenth–century Porcelain Trianon pavilion at Versailles, which was the earliest building of this style erected in Europe.

The second chapter explains the spread of the Chinoiserie style from France throughout Europe, to England, Bavaria, Sweden and Germany. The authors’ rendition shows that the Chinese House in the Desert de Retz was the size of a small house, which must have look-ed like an apparition in this famous French garden.

Chapter Three describes the mission of the English architect Sir William Chambers to spread the style further. He published a hugely influential series of books on the subject and actually visited China, which wasn’t easy to do in the mid-eighteenth century. He returned, inspired, to create the garden and exotic follies at Kew, just outside London. Naturally, competition between England and France soon grew fierce as to who could build the best pavilions. An observer remarked, “The Englishman in the country looks for rural pleasures. The Frenchman takes the town into the country with him. The Englishman is himself a gardener and cultivator of his garden. The Frenchman is seldom more than a decorator.” Fighting words indeed.

The Chinese house at Armainvilliers in France, perfectly illustrates the influence of Sir William’s publications, being a virtual copy of one of his drawings. Two-storied, and hung with bells, it was destroyed, like most of the buildings pictured here; however it lives on in their beautiful illustration.

Dams and Zega’s final chapter describes the influence of Frenchman George le Rouge. After a chance meeting with Chambers in Paris, he was inspired to publish over 21 albums of his own collection of Chinoiserie building design and garden engravings. The last illustration in this beautiful book deserves to be recreated. It is the Musician’s Pagoda at the Mall, in New York’s Central Park. While a touch more Moorish than Chinese in influence, it was destroyed in 1922, and would be a wonderful addition to the park if it were ever rebuilt.

If you don’t have a space in the garden to recreate one of these confections, you can always (carefully) take the book apart and frame these exquisite designs – a whole wall of them would look fabulous!

You can buy their books and a beautiful range of notecards via their website.

And if you want to read more about this style, Phaidon Press published a book called Chinoiserie by Dawn Jacobson in 1999, which is still in print.