 France is an interesting country during the Baroque period, as interesting as Italy is interesting, but for slightly different reasons. You might say Italy is interesting because of the efforts on the part of the papacy to consolidate power, to enact reform legislation, and to find an architecture that was expressive of those ambitions. And in France, the same objectives are true, but aimed at glorifying the state rather than the church. And particularly in the person of Louis XIV, you have somebody who pretty much single-handedly tries to remake France into a modern country. And by modern, I mean he's trying to get rid of any traces of feudalism. He's trying to get rid of the scattering of power among local lords throughout the country and to consolidate the power. Architecture becomes a tool for doing that. Louis had a long run. Louis was able to accomplish so much because Louis became king when he was like five years old. By the time he was five years old, his father had died and he became the ruler. And look what a sweet little guy he is. He's just adorable. For the beginning of his reign, they dressed him like a girl, which wasn't nice. But he had a group of regents to oversee the policy. His mother was involved in this, which was quite unusual at the time. In fact, when Louis XIII died, leaving only one heir, the young Louis, he made the comment that his wife had caused him no distress, which was astonishing. Anyhow, you have this group of people, Mazarin, a cardinal Richelieu, Fouquet and Colbert, who are organizing the day-to-day running of government, but also organizing the finances of the state. And particularly Mr. Fouquet is the minister of finances and amasses for himself huge personal wealth. Once Mazarin dies, Louis takes over and single-handedly begins to rule France. Certainly, he still has counselors, but as someone who's now more aware of the state of his finances, he begins to clean house. I will talk about that in a moment. Notice we call Louis here the Sun King. That was his own idea. He thought he was the Sun King, the Roi Soleil. He radiated light and reason and luminosity and clarity wherever he went. He was a great patron of the arts. Under Louis XIV, certain institutions were established. He didn't simply act as a patron for arts to embellish his own palaces or architecture to construct his own palaces, but he also established academies in France. And the idea of the academy is quite a radical idea. When we were talking about Italy, we were discussing how the arts tended to be familial enterprises, that if you were an architect, or if you were a stone cutter, or if you were a painter, you probably taught that technique to people in your family, but kept those secrets closely guarded. At the time that Louis is in power, people in France are looking at Italy and wondering why has Italy become this center of culture, and how could France advance? The establishment of academies became one way to do that. And academies are essentially schools, or academies are boards of overseers who begin to theorize, to set rules, to figure out ways to communicate and to proliferate knowledge in the arts. I just want to show you how great looking these people are. This is Marie Teresa of Spain, Louis XIV's wife, with their only surviving child who went on to become Louis XV. I just want to point out one more thing about Louis, because this is not something you see every day when looking at a picture of a potentate. Louis felt he had great legs, and on every occasion, he would show off his legs. And please notice here, he has little pink high heels with bows. This is just one of the many ways that Louis' legs could dazzle you. Here's another great example of Louis' fabulous legs. When Louis was in power, there were a number of major conflicts that were fought, and he succeeded not only in consolidating power among the local rulers within France proper, but also extending the terrain of France. And you can see here in the orange zone, territories added to France that had been elsewhere beforehand. We mentioned Nicolas Fouquet, his minister of finances. And Fouquet was also a patron of the arts, specifically he was a patron of architecture. And he had for himself built a palace, and the palace is Volovicon to the south of Paris. It's kind of a spectacular palace. I mean, look at this ground. So also notice the date. The palace of Volovicon is earlier than some of these axial palaces that we were looking at in Germany and Austria, like Schönbrunn and Nymphenburg. In fact, palace design, or let's say chateau design, country palace design in France really sets the model that gets copied by all of the rulers in Europe who want to be like Louis because Louis is such an influential character. Here's Volovicon. And what are we looking at here? Well, here we see the chateau, the actual house. And the house is somehow involved in this elaborate expansion of gardens. One thing you see immediately is the notion of the axis, and how the axis does not simply extend out into the garden, but it also extends out into the courtyards. If we look at the house proper over here, you can begin to see that there's something going on in Volovicon that's a little bit familiar to us from Italian palaces like the Barbarini Palace or any Baroque palace. And that is the idea of an unstable center. Instead of thinking about architecture as organized around a fixed point, the architectural organization seems to be on the move. Here when we look at the plan of the chateau proper, we see a kind of punching and an echelonning of space at the entry level, creating a figural space on one side and creating a figural object on the other side. Even beyond this displacement and expulsion of object toward the garden side, there's a pavilionization of edge. Instead of seeing this thing as a taut wrapper, we see a pavilion, really individuating itself, a pavilion, a pavilion, a pavilion, and so forth. At the scale of the entire complex, it's even more specific in the way the center moves and the envelope of the building adjusts to accommodate this moving center. For example, look down here. This is the entry court and you pop in and you find a series of courtyards that become contracted as you move toward the chateau. This is a big courtyard and flanking it at either side are outbuildings, equiries, places to keep animals or your favorite horses or whatever. Almost as though they have cracked open, they've slid apart. These are the egg shells. This is the center of the egg leaving a voided space. If you look at the voided space here, there's a strong correspondence between that space and this space that the chateau proper occupies and that's a kind of ambiguous terrain also. Because the chateau is surrounded by a moat, there is really absence of land here surrounding the building and presence of land here as though the building that properly belonged here scooted away but didn't have enough land to go with it. This propulsion through space, through the grand court, toward the building, out the oval chapel, begins to sponsor an entire series of notions of center that move through the garden. There's a Doug Graff diagram that I found in the garbage once so I kept it thinking anything Doug Graff does is great and you will be having Doug Graff for theory next year so memorize this diagram because it's a good one. What he's simply showing on this diagram is that there is a discussion between what's happening in the realm of architecture and what's happening in the realm of the garden. For example, this is essentially what's happening with the architecture. There's a center point established here, it displaces to here, it displaces to here and out pops the building leaving the shell behind. There's a kind of center line also and this center line is a long water canal and on either side of the water canal there's a kind of reflection of the condition on one time made of architecture and the other time made of landscape architecture, landscape architecture in the form of terraces or reflecting ponds or retaining walls. Even beyond this kind of reflection of landscape against architecture you find an extension of the axis up the hill. In fact it's instructive I think to look at the section down below. I don't know why they did this but this section is exaggerated in the vertical. I think they did this so that you could see that there is a lot of development going on in the vertical. For example if you look at this little pointy stuff down here it's supposed to represent the building and it's way exaggerated in the vertical. But what it's showing you is that the ground falls away as you move through the garden and the effect of that, the effect of that is that you are constantly getting a new terrace as you're moving down through the garden that becomes the new datum against which you see the building. The building is reframed by the landscape in really kind of surprising and interesting ways. It's a familiar thing but you see it again and again in different contexts. It says though this whole idea of the axis is augmented by the notion of vision. You have Descartes studying both vision and space and in the design of Volovicon both of these things are coming together. Notice this red line cutting through here which represents the fact that by the time you finally climb the hill which seems arduous and steep to come to the statue at the top of the hill you're now on level with the chateau. This thing that had been alluding you and slipping away as you moved from one terrace to another terrace to another terrace now represents itself in its full glory. This is a diagram that simply pulls apart the different features in the garden. We have water on the lower diagram showing you in dark all of these different water features and we have the terraces on the upper level showing you the different ground planes that you investigate and all of these features are familiar to us from the Italian gardens we looked at. But the difference is that the Italian gardens we looked at happened more or less a century beforehand and there was a really different idea about space and particularly a different idea about axis. In the Italian gardens the axis tended to be bounded. The axis tended to be finite. In the French gardens the axes have the implication that they go on forever. I mean even the way in which this water course is developed here seems to pick up the street that you take to approach Vos-le-Vicombe. There is this kind of lock of Cartesian space and then these radiating lines going forth in all directions. Here's another little diagram of the kind of push and pull and translation of center through edge to give you something that becomes highly concatenated like the Vos-le-Vicombe but may have had quite simple origins. Here we're talking about a kind of French translation of the Baroque. The French Baroque is not quite so gutsy, not quite so muscular as the Italian Baroque and a lot of that could do with the fact that in France they do not have the detritus of ancient Rome lying around all the time. If you have these Roman temples staring you down across the forum you get a really strong sense of what it is for something to behave like a big gutsy plastic column and if you don't have that local vernaculars get folded in with this classical language. These are some views, I'm going to try to show you views that give you some of these moments of repositioning of Vos-le-Vicombe as you move through the gardens. From one terrace you see the whole thing spreading out like this, this is the moat in the local ground and as you move further and further back you keep getting these different retaining walls that reframe the garden for you. It's too bad that Fouquet was such a great entertainer because he would have these lavish parties there and on one occasion he invited Louis XIV and Louis XIV was a little bit shocked to see that his minister of finance was living in a style that he himself would not permit and so his technique was immediately to imprison Fouquet for life and to hire his architects and the architects of this are two, we have Le Vos and the landscape architect Le Notre. Louis employs Le Vos and Le Notre to take the old palace of Versailles which was already existing and to expand it, to modernize it and to develop a system of gardens. This is kind of what you get and what you kind of get is pretty spectacular. The old palace was this little central nubbin in through here and the amplification of the palace involves extending an edge, folding the edge in an echelonning fashion and really creating a seam between two different conditions, the condition of the gardens which expand out in this direction and the condition of the city. Here too there's that kind of mirroring that we observed in Vole Viquant that the things in nature and the things in the city are unfolding in similar manners particularly this notion of the radial. We have these three streets kicking off from this court of honor in front of Versailles and we have these radial things kicking off from the garden. The trident in this is the fifth plan of Rome would have inspired a taste for this radial organization but also if you think that Louis calls himself the Sun King there's a particularly strong impulse for the building of these radial schemes because this becomes a kind of diagrammatic representation of Louis himself in the architecture. And wow look at this plan or look at the space that the plan entails. This is a contemporary drawing or painting of the palace of Versailles showing how probably Louis liked to think about it since Louis commissioned this guy to do the paintings. Really telescoping of spaces and bang the axis where does the axis terminate? The axis never terminates. The axis goes on forever. It extends forever like Descartes coordinates and like Louis' power. When this drawing was done the dense part of the city had not quite yet been built up yet. We just have an edge of trees holding down that figure. Here we have another view a bit later showing us that echelonning space of the four court. This is a really enlarged version of that diagram that we saw at Vaux-le-Vicombe and that we also saw at other palaces and that is the sidedness of the scheme. And by sidedness I mean the building organization decorously behaves one way toward the urban fabric and another way toward the garden. Toward the urban fabric, toward the urban edge it becomes figural space which is what you expect to find in a city during the Baroque period. Toward the garden it becomes object. It's a giant hulking big object but the infolding of the edge pops out something that becomes distinctly pavilionate and this object becomes that which organizes the axis. Just want to show you how this thing fits in a larger sense. Here we have the separatrix, the line that separates the condition of the city from the condition of the gardens. And here is a little diagram beginning to show you how this thing not simply mirrors but also expands. That there is this double task. One task is expanding that the space of the axis and the other task is playing with vision. Descartes diagram for sight has to do with rays of light extending from the eye. Just like here we have rays of space extending from the scheme. If you look at the diagram from Versailles you could say that on one level there is this flipping between the condition of the city and the condition of the garden. And at another level there's this constant slippy slidey center motif. Displacement of center. One moment of the center might be at the springing of the trident that displaces to the center of the bar where interestingly enough Louis XIV has his bedroom. Louis' vitality sponsors the energetic expansion of architecture in all directions. Notice also the tight scale of the gardens close to the building. And the tight scale of the gardens has to do with different ways that the gardens are used. Some of the gardens are used for walking, taking a little stroll. Other gardens are used for riding your horse or going by carriage. So the scale increases as you get farther away. Also visually when you're inside the palace the things that are far away collapse perspectively and appear legible because the spacing between things is farther away. Here I have a little emblem of Louis' Sun King and the final motif in the expansion of the gardens is this grand poin which is a kind of sunburst, architectural sunburst. These are just some diagrams showing you what Louis' space is doing. It's folding in, folding in, folding in and you get this increased sense of what the perspective space is in things like the Court of Honor to Versailles. You also have this very deliberate scaling of the space where these clear geometrical figures contract and contract and contract and contract finally coming down to Louis' bedroom. And the same development goes on in terms of the relationship between the building proper and the garden. One of the amazing things at Versailles is not simply the architecture but also the hydraulics that are deployed. And by hydraulics I mean boy there are a lot of fountains and how do you get all these fountains to work? How do you get all these kind of amazing fountains to work? And over here you get one clue and what this thing is is a retaining pond that stores up water to build up enough water pressure to activate the fountains. But even that wasn't quite enough so when Louis was visiting the gardens you had members of his staff spread all over the gardens like waving flags and the wave of the flag meant turn on fountain number four. He's just passed fountain number two. And so after he passes fountain number two they turn that one off and they turn on fountain number five. There wasn't enough water pressure to make all of them go at the same time. I just want to show you here and the Piazzadelle Polpolo. I mean it's really almost as though Louis is rebuilding Sixth is the Fifth's plan of Rome in this little evacuated circumstance of small town in the outskirts of Paris. Even the fold in the Aurelian wall where the gate comes in is kind of like the little fold in the palace of Versailles that begins to open up to the trident there and pop out like an object in the countryside. Louis's scale is vast compared to the scale of Rome which is amazing because Rome is also vast. These things are big courtyards whereas these things are quite modest churches. There's another I think really interesting thing going on in Louis's scheme and that has to do with this whole line of reflection that we're talking about between two different conditions. Like how does the architecture make this notion of reflection or similarity within difference visible? How does that get expressed? And the answer is there is a hall of mirrors along the axis so that in one direction you look out and you see nature expanding off toward infinity and you look in the other direction and you see yourself in the mirror with nature reflected behind you which is a kind of nice way that the Baroque positions itself. This is just the garden façade and you can begin to see how this really is a big pavilion. The pavilion itself gets pavilionized but compared to the figural space that you get on the court of honor side there really is a kind of figure ground reversal as you move from the front of the building to the back of the building. Fabulous and notice the axis. I think this is pretty great that instead of having an object at the end of the axis two trees slip in from the edge of the of the wood and become almost like obelisks but not obelisks in sixth sense becoming a destination toward which the axis moves but obelisks in the Egyptian sense two things that frame a path that continues. There is an elaborate development of these axes and we spoke before about Edmund Bacon and the notion of the the second man the notion that if you put a strong enough plan into operation subsequent generations will find a way to act on that plan. Here we have a kind of development of the space of Versailles over here the trident of Versailles skipping off in these directions and one of these paths eventually moving through the Bois de Bologna and getting you to Paris. There is this development of an axis that that in a sense with some wobbling with some bending begins to cut through into Paris and and give a structure this kind of great axial structure to that town and this is also from Edmund Bacon's book the design of cities and he's making a comparison between the way that the axes are used in six is the fifth plan and the way the axes are used in in the French Baroque period with a specific attention to the fact that the axes are really extensible here. Before we move into Paris I just want to show you one more palace commissioned for Louis XIV by another architect Jules-Haudroix-Mainsard and this is the château of Marley. It's an interesting château for a number of reasons. One when Thomas Jefferson was doing various ambassadorial tasks in Paris on behalf of the newly founded American government he became very interested in in Marley as an example and when we later on will look at the University of Virginia there are many things that are going on in the organization of Marley that he takes and uses. Specifically what's different about Marley from anything that we've seen yet is that this impulse toward pavilionization toward the individuation of objects from edge that was already implied in a lot of other buildings becomes fully realized here. The edge that flanks the central space of the garden becomes a series of pavilions. It's not a continuous edge it's a series of pavilions that imply the edge. There's a big palace at one end and a series of waterfalls at the other but in many ways this is more like the space of say the oval at Ohio State University than any other space that we've looked at. Way more orderly, way more axial but still the idea that the individual building becomes realized is of importance. Now let's look at Paris. Paris is great. Paris is on the River Seine. There are a couple of islands in the middle. On the Ile de la Cité you have Notre Dame the big Gothic church. When Louis takes the reins it's kind of a mess so we can even go back before Louis and look at Henry IV who also did some major urban interventions. The map over here begins to show you some of these interventions. One, the big axis coming down the Champs-Élysées and beginning to activate the space of the Louvre Palace over here is one big move. There are a number of squares that you can begin to see here. This one is Place des Vosges, Palais Royales, Place Vendômes, a number of them in there. These are figural spaces that are being designed and plopped down in the city kind of like let's say Bernini making the space in front of San Pietro, making a space, designing a space, designing the edges of the space, thinking about the city as ground on which an architect can operate not simply to shape objects but to shape spaces as well. Let's look at a few of these interventions on the part of Louis and his architects. This is by Le Vos, one of the architects of Versailles and I think this is a pretty interesting building. It's the palace of the four nations and it is located across the river right over here from the Louvre Palace. One side of it faces the river. The other aspects of it crank back into the into the fabric. So it has this funny compromise site. Here we see the river and here we see the fact the fabric of streets. We're seeing here something that is really typical of French planning during the Baroque period and also during the 18th century and that is this flexible almost hinge-like realignment of parts, the local symmetry, the idea of the figural space or even the poché beginning to do work and to enforce a kind of shift. Do you guys remember what poché means? Who knows what poché means? Ryan. Good, it's the space in between a wall. It's stuff that you can carve. So when we look at this drawing by Le Vos, we see some really kind of gutsy heavy poché and the poché for example over here carving out this nice square figure with these little lobes at the end succeeds in making an adjustment from one axis of symmetry, nailing the river to another axis of symmetry, aligning with the streets and nailing the courtyards. Poché as well as the space becomes material that enforces and permits this kind of arrangement. Here we see a view from the riverside facing the Louvre of the Palace of Four Nations, very decorous, very appropriate and as it cranks away it becomes more ordinary and more contingent in its alignments. Louis was a great patron of the arts and had decided to move the arts in France forward by giving a lot of attention to the establishment of academies and within the academies there were a number of strong voices, so much so that a great debate ensued in the academy between the people who called themselves the ancients and the moderns. Let's call them the ancients and the moderns. The basic debate between the ancients and the moderns of course goes back before the French academy, goes back to certain philosophical principles which were already under discussion in the time of Saint-René Descartes. For example Descartes says something in his rules for the direction of the mind that adds a certain amount of doubt or skepticism to the whole relationship that people living in this age should have toward antiquity. He states, concerning objects proposed for study we ought to investigate what we can clearly and evidently intuit or deduce with certainty and not what other people have thought or what we ourselves conjecture. Descartes is calling for evidence. Descartes is urging people to think for themselves and not simply to try to recover the thoughts already conceptualized, already codified by people in previous centuries. In a similar direction an early architectural writer Roland Freire de Chambret in his book on parallel of ancient and modern architecture says we have as good a right to invent and follow our genius as the ancients without rendering ourselves their slaves. When France starts to establish academies it goes wild and the idea of the academies traced back to the notion of the Potanac academy in Athens philosophers hunkering down under the shade of Stoas in the Athenian Agora but also to the Potanac academy in Florence or academies in the circle of Tresino in Veneto where the young Palladia was cultivated. The first French academy was already founded in 1635 when Louis was just a little toddler. It was founded by Cardinal Richelieu who went on to become one of Louis's counselors and its purpose was to standardize the French language to purify the French language and to provide a dictionary. But shortly thereafter academies began to proliferate dealing with every aspect of human knowledge. The academy for painting and sculpture, the academy of dance, the academy of inscriptions and bellettres called Little Academy, the French academy in Rome where people might go and cultivate their taste by learning from great examples. The academy of sciences, the academy of music and finally and for our purposes the most important one the Royal Academy of Architecture in 1671. Here the purpose was similar to the purpose of the literary academies and that was to codify in this case to codify the principles of classical design and moreover to promote national taste by espousing these principles with public lectures. The ancients are exemplified by a guy called François Blondel and Blondel really believed that the ancients the architects of antiquity had solved all the problems that their architecture represented this condition of mastery that one had to strive to to attain. What architecture could do and that in fact what was the task of architecture was to pay attention to study work of antiquity and to try to reproduce it as faithfully as possible. This director of the Royal Academy of Architecture was François Blondel who was trained as a mathematician and engineer but was something of a polymath and quickly became fluent in all aspects of architecture and wrote a treatise well two-volume treatise called called architecture course on architecture. Blondel's positions were fairly conservative and by that I mean he wanted to conserve that which was best about antiquity. He believed beauty derives primarily from proportions and that these proportions derive from a cosmological order harmony of the spheres and that our ability to appreciate this kind of beauty is divinely inspired. Blondel doesn't write this but one of his associates does. A building cannot be perfect if it does not follow the same rules as composition or the harmonizing of musical chords. Blondel would insist on sketching the orders and measuring things doing measured drawings studying typology working almost in a kind of piece me away learning what the kind of parts were that made antiquity so great and then reproducing them. Opposing him was the great protagonist of Les moderns which was Claude Perrot and Claude Perrot was a modern in every sense of the word. If modern meant you embrace this baroque impulse toward systematization this is something that Perrot was doing. He also wrote a treatise called the ordering of the five species of columns according to the method of the ancients and here he comes up with some fairly radical thinking. For one thing he begins to talk about beauty not simply as something that is received and studied and found in antiquity but he becomes much more abstract about what beauty might be and identifies two kinds. Positive beauty for Perrot is beauty based on convincing reasons. Convincing reason is not something that somebody tells you is beautiful but that you can prove is beautiful according to the kind of criteria that Descartes set forward when he suggests that we ought to investigate what we can clearly see and evidently intuit or deduce with certainty. For Perrot positive beauties have to do with the quality of materials, the excellence of the craft, symmetry and the size and magnificence of buildings. Arbitrary beauties on the other hand are simply based on convention it's what people are used to and into this category of arbitrary Perrot casts pretty much what every other architectural treatise focused on. Issues of the orders, issues of proportions, issues of typology. These are Perrot's orders and if you'll notice Perrot in describing the orders gives you this graph of similar measures that allows a relationship between Tuscan, Doric, Iona, Corinthian and composite to be really clear. It's none of this catches, catch can stuff that had obtained before. It's a system of precise rules and just compare that to the orders by Sebastiano Serlio. For my money Serlio's orders are better and that's because Serlio does things that Perrot thinks are stupid. Perrot thinks optical corrections are stupid. There's nothing logical about optical corrections. Optical corrections are things like antises. So if you look at Serlio's orders there's this bulge one-third down which begins to communicate the muscular task of holding a building up that architecture performs. Perrot just gets rid of things that seem crazy and in fact in Perrot's treatise he talks about theory in incredibly abstract terms and even go so far as to suggest that the orders are not really necessary, that the orders are a convention and not something that really matters. Perrot suggests that now at this advanced moment in history in the 17th century we stand on the shoulders of the ancients so it is not surprising that we can see much farther than they can. He's happy to jettison it all. Meanwhile you have François Blondel and the academy spitting out this very different idea about what what architecture should do. These are some drawings from Blondel and they're so sweet. I've got to say I like this more just because it's it's more of a narrative. It's a story. It's the story of the Corinthian column. You had a guy with a lute wandering in this silvan landscape and suddenly he sees a basket on top of a column, a basket of a canvas leaves and he thinks by looking at nature he gets an example of how to make a column. This is not a rational guy going to work. This is a rational guy going to work measuring things, figuring things out, coming up with a system, saying there is a relationship between the diameter of a column and a height of a column and it's mathematical and by the way there's also a relationship between the different orders and it's mathematical. It can be learned, it can be taught. This poetic vision of architecture that Blondel gives you is really something that is uncovered archaeologically within a culture. Like I think this is really beautiful also. This is from Vignola but this represents something that is also taught by Blondel and that is that there is this kind of anthropomorphic projection of everything in the orders. So here there's a cornus and the cornus represents a human face. It's funny because there's this element within the cornus called a dental course where you have these little things that look like little blocks marching along and this is carefully drawn so that the dental course goes exactly where the teeth go. Fabulous. This is the frontispiece to his treatise. He's talking to an allegorical figure of architecture revealing the truth of his treatise and showing you some of his projects behind particularly this one which is his most famous project and that's the east face of a move which you probably know. Just before we move on to the move I want to show you somebody who comes along in the next generation but really pushes forward this modern spirit. The spirit of rationalizing and systematizing and trying to throw away the detritus of architecture that has been kind of heaped up through history and cut to essences and that is Abbe Loge. Frontispiece for his treatise, a drawing of the Primitive Hot. The suggestion that Loge is making here is similar to the suggestion that Perot is making and that is the received tradition of architecture is not as important as the origins of architecture. The origins of architecture show you the original act before history made the playing field uneven and contaminated. This allegorical figure of architecture is leaning on the detritus the broken remnants of a classical architecture that has been discarded and pointing toward this this hut, Adam's hut in paradise where branches are twined together, trunks become columns, branches are twined together and you get nature offering you a model for architecture and not architecture. Implications in Loge's Primitive Hot are that the essence of architecture is structure, the essence of architecture is not ornament. A model for architecture is nature, a model for architecture is not culture so things are moving in quite different directions and moving pretty fast. Let me just say one more thing about the academy because at the same time that the battle between the ancients and the moderns was waging in architecture you had a guy called Charles Le Bon who was the head of the academy in painting and these are exercises that the students of painting did or these are some exercises. These exercises were actually preceded by a series of drawing studies where for example you would do noses, you just draw noses for a while and you'd have to do a happy nose and a sad nose and a tranquil nose then you would do ears, a happy ear, a sad ear. Eventually you get into plates like this where they're studying how faces tell stories, they're making the representation of the human physiognomy almost literary, each of these things has a word written next to it and the task of the academy according to Le Bon is how to fix meaning in the visual arts, how to make meaning recoverable in the visual arts by codifying this kind of thing. In a sense, Le Bon is trying to find a system that means something like an encyclopedia for visual imagery but at the same time this notion of really not observing real people and real reaction and real emotion but simply developing a code for it I think makes this stuff look hilarious. Let's look at the Louvre. Here's the old palace, this little part right in through here and throughout history and this thing takes you all the way to the 19th century but let's say during the time of Louis there becomes this expansion. Another telescoping space, telescoping space similar to the telescoping space we see in Versailles, receiving the axis coming in through the Tuileries gardens through the Champs Elysees and nailing it. So the problem Louis has now is that he needs a new façade for the frontispiece of the building, something worthy of this new spirit and he decides to get some good architects to come down and do it. If you're a potentate in the 17th century and you want a good architect let me recommend Mr. Bernini. Louis gets Bernini to come and do a couple of schemes for the façade of Le Louvre and these are two schemes that Bernini did. One, this is a familiar one, we've seen this one before, where Bernini carves out a concave space and sticks an object in the middle. Another is a kind of reversal of that scheme, carves out a concave space and sticks a concave space in the middle which is pretty interesting. Seeing these two Bernini projects for the Louvre reminds me of something that Louis Kahn was said to say, that whenever you're trying to design a project you should design it so that you think it's almost perfect and then you should design the opposite and the opposite will be better than the one you started with because you will have already understood the implications of one scheme and in doing the opposite you will incorporate those and find more things. Louis was not so enthusiastic about this stuff and in fact eventually he got his homie, his local architect Mr. Claude Perot, to design the façade and this is what you get, this is the built thing, this is the drawing of the thing and let me just go back to the Bernini to show you what a chakaroo this is. I mean if we wanted to talk about what counts as Baroque, Bernini does it better than anybody. The idea of plasticity, the idea of the inner penetration of concave and convex spatial cells, the idea of pavilionization of edge and object pulling out of wrapper. Look at this, wow, this thing is so hyper-rational, this is Claude Perot putting on his little mathematician thinking cap and dare I say sucking the life out of the building. He's doing some things that for Perot exemplify this modern spirit, like yes we want to have a temple but we don't need to have a temple like they had in the olden days, we can find a different system of columniation. So Perot has these paired columns and the paired columns also march into the space of the temple. They spread apart, there's a different intercolumniation but they're still paired so that's totally new. Dublin that you rarely see in works of antiquity or works in the Renaissance for that matter. Perot explains this in his writings and says the taste of our century or at least if our nation is different from that of the ancients and perhaps it has a little of the Gothic in it because we love the air, the daylight and the openness. Thus we have invented a sixth manner of disposing the columns which is to group them in pairs and separate each pair with two intercolumniations. Perot is suggesting that there's something profoundly different about French taste versus Italian taste and he's taking full license to invent and amplify and discard aspects of tradition that no longer suit his purposes. Not a Perot fan I have to say his theory is awfully interesting but his architecture is so dry. Just an aside on Perot, he had a brother Charles Perot whom you might know about because Charles Perot was also a modern and he was a kind of ethnographer collecting folk tales so it's because of Charles Perot collecting folk stories that you know the story of puss in boots and beauty and the beast. These are stories that were collected from like old grandmas that he wrote down and and made public. Charles Perot was to French fairy tales what the Grimm brothers were to Germanic fairy tales