French Architects And Engineers In The Age Of Enlightenment

This book offers a unique insight to the teaching and practice of architects and engineers.

Building Theories speaks to the value of words in architecture. It addresses the author’s fascination with the voices of architects, engineers, builders, and craftspeople whose ideas about building have been captured in text. It discusses the content of treatises, essays, articles, and letters by those who have been, throughout history, committed to the art of building. In this, Building Theories argues for the return of a practice of architectural theory that is set amongst building, buildings, and builders. This journey of close reading reinterprets the words of Vitruvius, Alberti, de L’Orme, Le Camus de Mézières, Boullée, Laugier, Rondelet, Semper, Viollet-le-Duc, Hübsch, Bötticher, Berlage, Muthesius, Wagner, Behrendt, Gropius, and Arup. With chapters dedicated to texts from antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century, and with a critical eye on architectural theory popularized in the Anglo-Saxon world post-1968, readers are introduced to a wider, more inclusive definition of architectural ideas. Building Theories considers how contemporary scholarship has steered away from the topic of building in its reluctance to admit that both design and construction are central to its concerns. In response, it argues for a realignment of architecture with the concept of techné, with a dual commitment to fabrica e ratio, with a productive return to l’art de bien bastir, with the accurate translation of the term Baukunst, and with an appeal to the architect’s ‘composite mind.’ Students, practitioners, and educators will identify in Building Theories ways of thinking that strive for the integration of design with construction; reject the supposed primacy of the former over the latter; recognize how aesthetics are an insufficient scaffold for subtending the subject of architectural ethics; and accept, without reservation, that material transformations have always been at the origins of built form.

Architectural form reconsidered in light of a unitary conception of architecture and the city. In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of “pure,” but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit of the possibility of an absolute architecture, the other is the space of the city, its extensive organization, and its government. Politics is agonism through separation and confrontation; the very condition of architectural form is to separate and be separated. Through its act of separation and being separated, architecture reveals at once the essence of the city and the essence of itself as political form: the city as the composition of (separate) parts. Aureli revisits the work of four architects whose projects were advanced through the making of architectural form but whose concern was the city at large: Andrea Palladio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Étienne Louis-Boullée, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. The work of these architects, Aureli argues, addressed the transformations of the modern city and its urban implications through the elaboration of specific and strategic architectural forms. Their projects for the city do not take the form of an overall plan but are expressed as an “archipelago” of site-specific interventions.

A landmark study of abstraction in architectural history, theory, and practice that challenges our assumptions about the meaning of abstract forms. In this theoretical study of abstraction in architecture—the first of its kind—Pier Vittorio Aureli argues for a reconsideration of abstraction, its meanings, and its sources. Although architects have typically interpreted abstraction in formal terms—the purposeful reduction of the complexities of design to its essentials—Aureli shows that abstraction instead arises from the material conditions of building production. In a lively study informed by Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and other social theorists, this book presents abstraction in architecture not as an aesthetic tendency but as a movement that arises from modern divisions of labor and consequent social asymmetries. These divisions were anticipated by the architecture of antiquity, which established a distinction between manual and intellectual labor, and placed the former in service to the latter. Further abstractions arose as geometry, used for measuring territories, became the intermediary between land and money and eventually produced the logic of the grid. In our own time, architectural abstraction serves the logic of capitalism and embraces the premise that all things can be exchanged—even experience itself is a commodity. To resist this turn, Aureli seeks a critique of architecture that begins not by scaling philosophical heights, but by standing at the ground level of material practice.

This book focuses on the development of towns in France, taking into account military technology, physical geography, shifting regional networks tying urban communities together, and the emergence of new forms of public authority and civic life.

Landscape and Agency explores how landscape, as an idea, a visual medium and a design practice, is organized, appropriated and framed in the transformation of places, from the local to the global. It highlights how the development of the idea of agency in landscape theory and practice can fundamentally change our engagement with future landscapes. Including a wide range of international contributions, each illustrated chapter investigates the many ways in which the relationship between the ideas and practices of landscape, and social and subjective formations and material processes, are invested with agency. They critically examine the role of landscape in processes of contemporary urban development, environmental debate and political agendas and explore how these relations can be analysed and rethought through a dialogue between theory and practice.

The first global history of architecture to give equal attention to Western and non-Western structures and built landscapes, Architecture since 1400 is unprecedented in its range, approach, and insight. From Tenochtitlan’s Great Pyramid in Mexico City and the Duomo in Florence to Levittown’s suburban tract housing and the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing, its coverage includes the world’s most celebrated structures and spaces along with many examples of more humble vernacular buildings. Lavishly illustrated with more than 300 photographs, plans, and interiors, this book presents key moments and innovations in architectural modernity around the globe. Deftly integrating architectural and social history, Kathleen James-Chakraborty pays particular attention to the motivations of client and architect in the design and construction of environments both sacred and secular: palaces and places of worship as well as such characteristically modern structures as the skyscraper, the department store, and the cinema. She also focuses on the role of patrons and addresses to an unparalleled degree the impact of women in commissioning, creating, and inhabiting the built environment, with Gertrude Jekyll, Lina Bo Bardi, and Zaha Hadid taking their place beside Brunelleschi, Sinan, and Le Corbusier. Making clear that visionary architecture has never been the exclusive domain of the West and recognizing the diversity of those responsible for commissioning, designing, and constructing buildings, Architecture since 1400 provides a sweeping, cross-cultural history of the built environment over six centuries.

Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760–1834) regarded the Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (1802–5) and its companion volume, the Graphic Portion (1821), as both a basic course for future civil engineers and a treatise. Focusing the practice of architecture on utilitarian and economic values, he assailed the rationale behind classical architectural training: beauty, proportionality, and symbolism. His formal systematization of plans, elevations, and sections transformed architectural design into a selective modular typology in which symmetry and simple geometrical forms prevailed. His emphasis on pragmatic values, to the exclusion of metaphysical concerns, represented architecture as a closed system that subjected its own formal language to logical processes. Now published in English for the first time, the Précis and the Graphic Portion are classics of architectural education.