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

Book excerpt: 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.