Symbolic Space – French Enlightenment Architecture & It′s Legacey: French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy (Chicago Series in Law and Society (Hardcover)) - Hardcover

Etlin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226220842 ISBN 13: 9780226220840

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1994

Synopsis

This work explores the social and cultural hierarchies established in 18th-century France to illustrate how the conceptual basis of the modern house and the physical layout of the modern city emerged from debates among theoretically innovative French architects of the 18th-century. Examining a broad range of topics from architecture and urbanism to gardening and funerary monuments, the author shows how the work of these architects was informed by considerations of symbolic space. For Etlin, the 18th-century city was a place in which actual physical space was subjected to a complex mental layering of conceptual spaces. He focuses on the design theory of Boullee and Durand and charts their legacy through the architecture of Paul Philippe Cret, Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn. He defines the distinctive features of neoclassicism and outlines the new grammar for classical architecture articulated by theorists and architects such as Laugier, Leroy and Ledoux. After discussing the 18th-century hotel, revolutionary space and the transformation of the image of the cemetery, Etlin examines the space of absence as embodied in commemorative architecture from Boullee and Gilly to Cret, Wright and Terragni. His book provides an accessible introduction to a century of architecture that transformed the classical forms of the Renaissance and Baroque periods into building types still familiar today.

About this title

About the Author

Richard A. Etlin is a Distinguished University Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Maryland. He is the author of five books, most recently In Defense of Humanism: Value in the Arts and Letters and Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.

From the Back Cover

Richard A. Etlin demonstrates how the conceptual basis of the modern house and the physical layout of the modern city emerged from debates among theoretically innovative French architects of the eighteenth century. Examining a broad range of topics from architecture and urbanism to gardening and funerary monuments, he reconsiders eighteenth-century French architecture with regard to the ways in which it was informed by symbolic space. This book provides an accessible introduction to a century of architecture that transformed the classical forms of the Renaissance and Baroque periods into building types still familiar today.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0226220842
• ISBN 13: 9780226220840
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 262