A4348 History of Architecture I: 1660-1860
History/Theory LectureMary McLeod
SUMMARY
Theories of Beauty: Claude Perrault and Christopher Wren
The relation between seventeenth-century science and culture. Perrault and Wren as scientists turning to architecture. The battle of the ancients versus the modern. Perrault's Vitruvius and Ordonnance . Perrault's theory of two kinds of beauty: positive and arbitrary beauty. The east facade of Louvre. Wren s Tracts on Architecture . Wren's theory of two causes of beauty: natural and customary . St. Paul's cathedral.
Rococo: Le Gout Moderne
Lepautre. Origins of style nouveau. Forme rocaille. Genre picturesque. Pineau. Meissonier's Livre d' ornemens (1734). Bellum vs. Pulcurm. Differentiation between the interior and exterior. The decorative arts and ornament. Intimacy. Convenance. Artifice. Exoticism--chinoiserie. Meta-style. International diffusion.
Origins: The Greco-Gothic Ideal
Cordemoy's Nouveau traite . Laugier's Essay sur l' architecture . Free-standing columns with lintels. The primitive hut as the architectural Soufflot's paradigm. Sainte-Genieve. The beginnings of archeology. Winckelmann and Le Roy as advocates of Pan-Grecian theory. Superiority of Greek vs. Roman architecture. Piranesi's Parere su l' architettura .
The English Garden and the Picturesque
Landscape through painting: Claude, Poussin, Rosa. Alexander Pope. William Kent. Capability Brown. Sharawaggi. Landscape as emblem. The natural landscape as an expression of political freedom. Uvedale Price's An Essay on the Picturesque. Humphrey Repton's Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (1795).
The City of the Enlightenment
Abbe Morelly's Code de la Nature. Voltaire and Laugier's ideas of urban embellishment. Patte's royal squares. Place de la Concorde. De Wailly and the planning of the Odeon. Ledoux's Architecture consideree sous la rapport de l' art, des moeurs et de la legislation . The tollgates of Paris. The saltworks and the ideal town of Chaux. Boullee s monuments.
Character vs. Type: Boullee, Ledoux, Quatremere de Quincy, Durand
Boullee's Essai sur l' art. L' architecture parlante. Quatremere de Quincy's theory of type. Durand's Precis des lecons. Ecole des Beaux Arts. Ecole Polytechnique.
Disintegration of Classicism as a Universal Language
Georgian England. The Grand Tour. Archeological influences. The Adam style. Total design. George Dance II. Architecture unshackled. Newgate Prison. John Soane. Pastiche and architecture of assemblage. The Bank of England. The house museum. Picturesque/ classicism. Stylistic choice.
Ideological Expression: An Architecture of Natioinal Identity
Thomas Jefferson. Classicism as an expression of democracy. Architecture as pedagogical tool. The agrarian ideal. French vs. English sources. The establishment of the pro fessional architect. H. Benjamin Latrobe. Monuments and national identity. The planning of Washington, DC
Historicism: Goethe, Schinkel
Herder's philosophy of history. Goethe and Schlegel's appreciation of the Gothic. The Romantic-Classic sensibility. The dissemination of the doctrine of Durand. The rise of Berlin as a capital city. The Prussian Reform Movement. The architecture of the Prussian Enlightenment. Friedrich Gilly. Karl Friedrich von Schinkel.
Utopian Socialism and the Architecture of Social Control
Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentha's Panopticon and the principle of inspection. Fourier and Considerant's Phalanstere. St. Simon's city of industrial progress. Godin's Familistere. Menier's Chocolaterie. Marx and Engel's critique of utopian socialism.
The Gothic Revival: Pugin and Ruskin
The Gothic as romantic escape or folly. Carlyle's critique of laissez-faire and the Mechanical Age. Signs of the Times. Past and Present. The Catholic Revival. A.W. Pugin's Contrasts . Ecclesiology and the Cambridge Camden Society. Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street. Ruskin's moral culture.
The Academy Reassessed: Romanticism, Rationalism, and the Neo-Grec Movement
The neo-grec movement. Henri Labrouste's Bibliotheque Sainte-Genieve and Bibliotheque Nationale. Viollet le Duc's critique of the Ecole des Beaux Arts; The gothic revival and the search for a19th century style; Dictionnaire Raisonnee and Entretiens .