Architecture, Print Culture and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France The Classical Tradition in Architecture Series

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 all the major monuments of eighteenth-century Parisian architecture, with detailed analyses of the public debates that erupted around such Parisian monuments as the east facade of the Louvre, the Place Louis XV [the Place de la Concorde], and the church of Sainte-Genevieve [the Pantheon].

Depicting the passage of architecture into a mediatized public culture as a turning point, and interrogating it as a symptom of the distinctly modern configuration of individual, society, and space that emerged during this period, this study will interest readers well beyond the discipline of architectural history.

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 Unravelling 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

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.