The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment

Vidler, Anthony

Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987. Hardcover. Black cloth boards with lime green lettering on spine, green and color illustrated dust jacket with off-white lettering, vii, 230 pp., bw illustrations. VG/VG- (book shows minimal signs of shelf wear, all pages clear and intact - dust jacket shows minimal wear at corners and spine). Item #182708
ISBN: 9780910413077

"In The Writing of the Walls, Anthony Vidler presents an unconventional view of architecture toward the end of the French Enlightenment. Drawing on cultural and intellectural history, he redefines the relations between architecture and society during this revolutionary period. In detailed case studies of new building types - the factory, the hospital, the prison, and the Masonic lodge - he traces the interaction of theory and practice at a time when architects sought to attune the beauties of proportion to the dictates of social needs. Vidler sees Ledoux's industrial utopias, Poyet's scientific hospitals, and Lequeu and de Sade's alienated, pornographic visions as experiments in forging a new architecture that would at once teach and reform society. He alsdo analyzes academic theories - from Durand's method of teaching design to Quatremere de Quincy's idea of type - for their radical effect on the traditions of classicism. Questioning the historical commplaces of 'visionary' and 'revolutionary' architecture, Vidler sees these various tendencies as the first stages in the generation of a specifically modern architecture, one still marked by these debates and haunted by their language of forms." - dust jacket description.