1st Edition

Architecture, Print Culture and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France

By Richard Wittman Copyright 2019
304 Pages
by Routledge

304 Pages
by Routledge

This book focuses on the complex ways in which architectural practice, theory, patronage, and experience became modern with the rise of a mass public and a reconfigured public sphere between the end of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution. Presenting a fresh theoretical orientation and a large body of new primary research, this book offers a new cultural history of virtually... Read more

Introduction  Part I: The Academy and the Public  1. A Network for Debate  2. The Aestheticizing Discourse of Print  3. Architecture and Civic Ideals  Part II: Architecture, Politics, and Public Life  4. The City as Critical Allegory  5. The Debate on the Place Louis XV and the Louvre  Part III: The Impact of Public Debate  6. Marigny's Program  7. A Public for Architecture  8. A New Paradigm for Publicity: 1759-1763  Part IV: The Crisis of Architectural Representation  9. Sainte-Geneviève and the Unraveling of a Tradition  10. Politics and Monuments under Louis XVI  11. Private Interest and the Rhetoric of Public Good  12. The Disrepute of Architecture  Conclusion: The Image of Unity

Biography

Richard Wittman is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is a cultural historian of early modern and modern European architecture and town planning, with secondary interests in theory and the historiography of architecture.

'This book suceeds admirably in clarifying an architectural culture with plenty of original points of view and exciting ideas that place eighteenth-century French architecture in a new perspective, and open new ways to assess and appreciate architectural writing and historiography.' -- Freek Scmidt, CAA Reviews