In 1985 at the suggestion of thesis advisor and professor  Michael Djordjevitch (and now longtime collaborator and friend), Richard Cameron decided to undertake a ‘counter-project’ to the Grand Louvre project of the French President Francois Mitterand and the American architect I.M. Pei. The starting point for this undergraduate thesis project was the proposal to rebuild the Tuileries Palace in Paris, destroyed by fire in 1871 during the French Commune, and to design a harmonious classical addition to the Louvre in a style compatible with its existing architectural vocabulary and history.

The Tuileries Palcae was designed by Philibert Del’Orme for queen Catherine de Medicis on the model of the Pitti Palace in Florence, the queen’s ancestral home. In similar fashion to the Pitti Palace, which has an indoor passageway to the Uffizi, a series of long galleries were constructed to the garden palace from the original Cour Carrée of the Louvre, leading to its current plan. The Pei project of uniting the various remaining galleries with a modern underground mall space provides neither neither formal nor practical coherence to one of the world’s greatest museums that is so central to the history of French architecture. 

The design drawings shown here, which began with a reconstruction of the famous lost de l’Orme staircase at the center of the Tuileries, depict a series of galleries and architectural features including a grand rotunda space capped by a dome that visually terminates the long axis of the Champs-Elysee from the Arc de Triomphe

 

INSTAGRAM

'EIRENE' (Peace) Capriccio after Bernini's sketch for the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in St. Peter's and a cupola from Madison Square Garden by Stanford White. RWC Atelier 2023 "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called childre
Sometimes sketching random things-imaginary designs, buildings in Rome from Cipriani's illustrated et al keeps my hand in practice and the miles going g by on the train and after leads to design ideas for real projects-really doodling with a purpose.
One of the lesser known courtyards of Rome just down the street from the Trevi Fountain-the side loggia of the home of the Accademia di S. Luca in Rome. Imagine entering this every day with Borromini as your professor...
The Villa Medici in Rome, home to the French Academy since 1803. All the great Rome prize winners worked in this building sending their rigorous and painterly surveys of the Roman and Greek monuments back to Paris (see previous post). I remember seei
Santi Luca e Martina in Rome. Cortona's great church in the Roman Forum next to the arch of Septimus Severus and church of the Academia di S. Luca, the world's first academy of fine art. It has been a focus of study for many years since it was first
The sublime student work(!) Of Emmanuel Brune, 1er Grand Prix 1863 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The first image sits beside my drawing table to remind me of the standard to aim for in design and delineation...