Pierre Pharoux
Étienne-Pierre Pharoux (1759? – Sept. 21, 1795)[1] was a French architect, a trained-engineer, and a shareholder and agent of La Compagnie de New York (the New York Company), a Paris-based land enterprise that in the 1790s launched a speculative endeavor to settle more than two hundred thousand acres of land in a northwestern region of New York State, named Castorland. His experience in America is known through a few executed works, a journal and a series of visionary architectural and town planning designs that document Pharoux’s response to the urban landscape and the natural environment he encountered.
History
In summer 1794, Étienne-Pierre Pharoux started a survey to acquire proper knowledge of Castorland, today Lewis and Jefferson Counties. [Fig. 1] His journal of the voyage, written in French and compiled for the most part with his compatriot, Simon Desjardins, became an important testimony of post-revolution American history and culture. Often mentioned as the mentor of notorious engineer Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849),[2] Pharoux left his own significant mark on American architecture by responding to the urban landscape and to natural environment he encountered with a series of visionary designs and ambitious plans. His architectural vocabulary featuring a neoclassical style ingrained in French Enlightenment, secured him prominent clients such as U.S. Senator from New York Philip Schuyler—father-in-law of Alexander Hamilton—and the Livingston family.[3]
Little is known about Pharoux’s life before boarding for New York in 1793. In the years immediately after the French Revolution (1789), he was a member of the Bataillon de Volontaires Bonne-Nouvelle (1791) and one of the sixteen “électeurs” of the Bonne-Nouvelle section of the Electoral Assemblies in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris (1790-1792).Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no name must have content Both Pharoux and Desjardins, the other commissioner of La Compagnie in charge of Castorland, were marked as “expert bourgeois” –trained surveyors– in an architect listing of the time. The record further documents their address, respectively Rue de Cléry n.15 and Rue du Porte-Foin n.15. It appears as Pharoux had begun to work as surveyor in 1789, while Desjardins is listed as practicing since 1782. However, Pharoux is noted as “architecte à Paris” in notary records starting in April 1785.
- ↑ The date of birth of Pierre Pharoux is unknown. However, archival records from 1790 reports “Pharoux, Etienne-Pierre, architect,” as 31 years old. Source: Assemblée électorale de Paris, 18 novembre 1790 - 12 août, 1792 : publiées d'après les originaux des archives nationales, avec des notes historiques et biographiques, https://archive.org/stream/assemblelect01charuoft/assemblelect01charuoft_djvu.txt
- ↑ When he joined Pharoux and Desjardins, Brunel was a young engineer. Later, he “was celebrated for his tunnels and dockyards” and the construction of the Thames Tunnel. Roger G. Kennedy, Orders from France: the Americans and the French in a revolutionary world, 1780-1820, (New York: Knopf, Distributed by Random House, 1989): 47-48, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Douglas G. Bucher, W. Richard Wheeler, Mary Raddant Tomlan, A Neat plain modern stile: Philip Hooker and his contemporaries, 1796-1836, Fred L. Emerson Gallery-Albany Institute of History of Art, (Clinton, N.Y.: Trustees of Hamilton College; Amherst, Mass.: Distributed by University of Massachusetts Press, 1993): 15, view on Zotero.
