Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and Its Legacy - Softcover

Etlin, Richard A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226220850 ISBN 13: 9780226220857

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1996

Synopsis

Richard A. Etlin explores the social and cultural hierarchies established in eighteenth-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 eighteenth-century. Examining a broad range of topics from architecture and urbanism to gardening and funerary monuments, he shows how the work of these architects was informed by considerations of symbolic space.

For Etlin, the eighteenth-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 Boullée 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 eighteenth-century hôtel, revolutionary space, and the transformation of the image of the cemetery, Etlin examines the space of absence as embodied in commemorative architecture from Boullée 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

From the Back Cover

Using architecture, urbanism and gardens, Richard A. Etlin identifies different types of symbolic space whose generic features have far-reaching implications not only for architectural history but also for anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, and cultural studies. In the process Etlin makes crucial distinctions between narrative, expressive, and numinous space. Topics discussed include the Beaux-Arts principles of design, the neoclassical aesthetic in relationship to the sublime, the social and architectural codes of the Rococo hotel, the landscape garden cemetery, revolutionary space, and the space of absence as it relates to commemorative architecture.

About the Author

Richard A. Etlin is professor of architectural history at the University of Maryland.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0226220850
• ISBN 13: 9780226220857
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 262