 Crisis of style is an issue that we've already begun talking about really for the last few lectures. The kind of architecture we talked about at the beginning of this class seemed to proceed directly and inevitably from conditions of the culture and from the conventions of architecture that had immediately preceded it. When we move into the 18th century, there's a kind of rupture. It could be the kind of paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn talks about or it could be the change in epistem that Michel Foucault talks about, issues that we discussed in earlier lectures. But suddenly there's a whole range of choice that architects have to make and they make that choice with the aim of finding some way to make their architectural decisions mean something. Why choose one thing instead of another thing? How do you decide? How can you make your architectural choice not completely whimsical or arbitrary but significant and important? That's what the big problem in the 18th century is. And we see here this painting by Thomas Kuhn, the architect's dream that we looked at briefly last time, of the sublime representation of the vastness of scale of architecture and the vast sweep of history as tiny little midget architect sits on top of a gigantic column capital with his flimsy little pieces of paper holding his plans, looking at the choices in front of him. The choices aren't just historical, classical, gothic, Egyptian, but they're also locked into mood and atmosphere. They're also locked into landscape. How does an architect react? We've talked previously about certain things that came into prominence during this period. Already in the 17th century, there was an establishment of academies, schools to teach architecture, and part of the ambition of the academies was really to make it easier for people to make these kinds of choices, to set some rules, to give people governing principles. So things like proportion, things like the orders were taught, at least in the French Academy, at least at the beginning in the École des Beaux-Arts. Ideas like symmetry were firmed up, and debates even within that context rose up. Debates between people who wanted to hold on to these architectural practices that had gone on before and that had been recovered from antiquity, or people like the moderns, people like Claude Perrault, who believed that architecture, like science, could be progressive, it could advance, it could move forward, just because the Greeks had to use stone in a way that respected the brittleness of stone, using it for spanning in a fairly conservative way. By the 18th century, you could stick a little bit of iron there and hang stone from iron, and stone could behave differently. Why can't you take advantage of these new technologies? Shouldn't architecture change to embrace the new possibilities of the age? Aesthetics comes into play also, and aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that has to do with making judgments about beauty. And aesthetics becomes important when the historic value of art slips away. And what's the historic value of art? Well, even somebody as self-involved and idiosyncratic as Michelangelo might say making works of art had to do with representing something that had a meaning to the society. And you know what the society believed, there was a consensus. Everybody basically had the same underlying values. By the time you get into the 18th century, it's all over the map. Instead of having these transcendental reference out there, it's about God, it's about the state, it's about our history, it's about mythology. Instead of having those transcendental reference out there, it becomes about art itself. It's about beauty. It's about stirring up feelings in the beholder. It's about representing strong contrasts so that you will feel a sense of the sublime and so forth. We also notice that instead of a purity in an attempt to have the kind of agreements of parts to whole, that was one of the great desiderata in the Renaissance, historical eclecticism becomes increasingly popular. And what does that mean? Who can define historical eclecticism? I don't know which one of you to call on. It's hard, Ryan. Drawing from many, many, many sources, already here in the Thomas Colf, it's not clear what his choice will be. Will it be Gothic? Will it be classical? Will it be Egyptian? Or will he put all these things together and get something completely new? And that's a possibility. One thing that powers historical eclecticism is the desire to draw meaning from the pre-embedded connections that certain architectures have. If you look at Gothic, for example, you might say, scary, there might be a little hunchback wandering around that cathedral. I'd better be careful. Or you might say, religious, deeply moving religious experience. Depending on the kind of building you're trying to make, you pick and choose for the power of association. In fact, there's a word called associationism, which is making choices about which historical style to pick based on the kind of feelings and associations that it provokes. And then there's also the idea of character, which is closely related to associationism. Certain kinds of styles activate certain kinds of feelings. These are all tied up in ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. And ideas of the picturesque, where the subjective emotional experience that one gets is beginning to be valorized a little bit above the objective truth of the thing because the referent of truth is slippery. I have no idea what the real truth is, but I know that when I look at this landscape, I feel a sense of amazement because this classical building is so large and that the light is so strong or whatever. Or in the case of Piranesi, you see you really do get those feelings. Piranesi is playing up the sublime as radically as he can by giving you these vanishing points. This looks like a coliseum that could hold five million people. It's so big. Or even here in his drawing of the Piazza del Popolo, it's the trident, the famous trident that we know in the Piazza del Popolo, but it looks like space is rushing out in three directions. He gives you this exaggerated perspective there too. And he plays with scale and he plays with contrasts of light and dark and he plays with the idea of the ruin. That nature is so powerful that the works of man can barely hang together. And that even becomes clearer when you see something like Piranesi's series on the prisons where the very subject matter that Piranesi chooses to engage has to do with the fact that coherent society can no longer hang together. Architecturally, we get that by these broken bridges and dead-end pathways. Luministically, we get it by the strong silhouetteed figures. Even the subject matter, to choose to represent a prison, means that you're no longer aiming at these grand monuments of culture to enshrine in your architecture. But that society itself is unraveling and there are these aberrant conditions also that deserve somehow to be represented. So against this wave of the sublime, of course, we have the dialectic going on. At least we have it going on in this class. There is this desperate attempt to fix meaning, to get back to something rational, to have some way to operate. You guys probably experience this every day when you look at, well, you don't look at paper anymore, but let's say a blank computer screen. What do you do? What's the first line that you make? How do you know? How do you operate? These are hard choices. You get some critics who will say, don't like it. I can tell you that because I'm me and I have excellent taste. Make something I like. That's really a frustrating kind of critic. It will happen from time to time. There'll be other critics who will try to give you criteria and tell you these are rules that you should try to figure out. You should try to have ideas. You should try to have ideas. You should try to have a party, a grand point of departure. You should try to have a strategy. Look at the site. Look at the program. Look at the social conditions that emerge from one organization versus another. And in the case of the people operating in the 18th century, at least in France, there was a large group of people trying to get these kinds of rules going on. It stems from the group of the moderns. It stems from Perot trying to codify the orders. And you get Abbe Marc-Antoine Loge writing in the middle of the 18th century his essay on architecture. And he gives us this famous diagram, the famous diagram of the primitive hut. And it is a important diagram. In the essay, Loge expands on these themes but you don't even need to read the essay because you get everything in this frontispiece. The ambition here is to cut to the chase, to get at what architecture is before history and convention have cluttered up the playing field. How can you operate? What can you do? And Loge would say, look to the primitive hut. Look to the first dwelling. Look to the way that shelter was made at the original moment. And so we have the allegorical figure of architecture showing the naked baby. Cupid, I don't know. I don't know why Cupid's there. Lover of architecture maybe. Showing the naked baby a primitive hut that really has to do with twining together branches. So lessons in this are nature rather than culture is the thing to look toward. Very consistent with enlightenment ideas like Jean-Jacques Rousseau talking about the primacy of nature over culture. Ornament, conventional ornament is pointless. It's just something people have become used to but it has no profound value. So the allegorical figure has discarded classical architecture. These are broken fragments of something that is no longer worth considering. And instead she's pointing toward this hut. And what is the embellishment of the primitive hut? And the embellishment of the primitive hut is joinery. It's the method whereby structural elements are twined together. This gives you the opportunity not to be arbitrary in picking your structural program. You're not looking at history books and seeing what thing is the prettiest. You're trying to figure out the rational connection between different elements. That gives you a kind of ornament because of the conditions necessary to make the joint. Original architecture, authentic architecture. The architecture of the primitive hut is skeletal. It's like the Gothic. It's closer to the Gothic than the classical. And that it connects to this forest imagery, this natural imagery. It's light. And ornament derives directly from constructional necessities. So you have a couple of people in the 18th century in France trying to operate in this modern game plan set forward by Loge and really set forward by Perrault a century before. Often one looks to Jacques Gabriel Soufflot. Oh la la. Friend of the brother of Madame Pompadour went on a grand tour and studied all of these works of antiquity and came back and actually did a series of measured drawings of Herculaneum but gave an important paper on Gothic architecture beginning to make this kind of claim that there's something in Gothic architecture that gives you this immediate connection to the authentic. Here's this most famous building and you look at this and you would say, oh, I couldn't hate it more. It's just this big lump of classical stuff. And that's true. It's a big lump of classical stuff. It's got all the lumpy classical stuff that you could imagine or let's say all the typologically driven classical stuff that we've seen in buildings that don't claim to be Modern or avant-garde. Big temple, giant tempietto sitting on the roof, cruciform plan, but ways in which Soufflot pushes the envelope or begins to transform the project is by making it as light as possible. He's trying to reduce the structure and make it seem as though the dome just floats. And in fact, the structure that we see here has to do with a intervention made a couple of decades after he finished because in fact it was not quite enough structure. But in Soufflot's original conception, this would have been a field of columns with a giant dome supported above it. And in that, he's trying to bring the kind of lightness of the Gothic to the language of classicism, the rational, clear, codifiable language of classicism, but the lightness, the delicacy, and the dematerialization of the Gothic. And this is a little drawing of a detail from Soufflot. And what the drawing shows are iron bars that he's using these newly... Well, iron's been around since, let's say, the Iron Age. But he's now applying these materials to architecture to begin to increase the tensile properties and to begin to create structures that wouldn't have been possible with more conventional language. It's a fine building. And when I say it's a fine building, it means it doesn't stir my soul the way some things do. It's full of dead poets, though. So if you ever go to Paris, you absolutely should go inside. You will see the tombs of people like Voltaire and Victor Hugo, Montesquieu, great. And in terms of dome architecture, he's clearly learning from the masters. He's got himself a triple dome here, a technique he could have picked up in London, let's say, looking at the dome of Saint Paul's by Christopher Wren, where there are two domes working in tandem and hanging a third dome beneath them. And the third dome, this dome that you've visually experienced from the inside of the church, is the clear half-spherical geometry that platonic thinking would give you. But the actual internal geometry becomes much more capable of organizing the forces in a paraboloidic manner and thereby to be as efficient as possible. So Souffleau seems like the French irrational. If you look at Souffleau, you'll think these are normal people, but this is not exactly true because there was another current going on in France, let's say in the latter half, or the third quarter of the 18th century. And these were people who were trying desperately to figure out how architecture could mean things by making architecture more and more and more literary. And what I mean by that is, if you read a book, you at least have a clue what the author's after. If the author says, the dog is lazy, you come away from that text thinking, the dog is lazy. And if you know what those words mean, and if you believe that language holds meaning, then you think the dog is lazy. Could architecture do that? Could forms in architecture have similar clarity? And already in the academy, in the French academy, back in the 17th century, we had the painting academy under the tutelage of Charles Lebrun beginning to try to fix literary meaning in the visual arts by codifying facial expressions, codifying hand gestures. So if you want to represent sorrow, anybody seeing this would know this painting is about a sorrowful woman. Anybody seeing this would say this painting is about a mirthful woman. If the ambition in the 17th century in the academy was to almost make a dictionary of the visual arts or at least of human physiognomy, could a similar thing be done for architecture? During this period, close to the period, surrounding the period of the French Revolution, you get a group of architects called the Revolutionary Architects. And most of these architects had absolutely nothing to do with the French Revolution. They are either building projects for the bourgeoisie, or making imaginary projects, or working for corporations to create new factories, or they are disgruntled postal workers, just scrivening away like crazy people. I was going to tell you about the French Revolution, but instead I want to get onto these guys because they're awfully interesting. I mentioned crazy, scrivening postal workers, the kind of people that you never want to sit next to on the bus because they just creep you out. Here's one of them, Jean-Jacques Le Cueux. He wrote a treatise on architecture called Architecture Civile, Civil Architecture. And it never got published, but the plates of it are in the Bibliothèque National in France. And he also has this whole kind of collateral series of crazy pictures, pornographic pictures. I won't go further than that. I might show a few of them, but not the worst ones. So he's really picking up on Le Brun's project of the physiognomy of the idea that there can be a representation of expression. And he uses himself as a model. So you look through his work and it's full of these things where he is trying to personify all the different expressions. Murth, sorrow, surprise, pissed off. Who knows what? He's a very strange-looking man, but he's also trying very desperately to make architecture have meaning. And he's thinking, how can the form of architecture communicate the function of architecture? How can architecture speak, like language speaks? And so this whole method that we have here is called architecture parlance. It's trying to make architecture speak. Parlance means speaking, speaking architecture. So we come to a project like this one. This is a project for what? He's trying to tell you through the form of this building what its function is. Is anybody good enough at reading the architectural signs to know? Andrew, do you have an idea? Yes, because yeah. Why do you think it would be a hunting ground? What kind of crazy person are you? Come up with an idea just by looking at a building. These are all animals you could eat, like dogs. Is that what you're saying? No, no, no. But dogs are used in hunting too. That's absolutely true. These are animals associated with hunting. Here we have wild boar. Here we have a deer. And I think these are all dogs. I'm pretty sure they are, but they're hunting dogs, favorite hunting dogs. What about the general shape of the building? What does that look like? That's not what I'm looking for. He said Egyptian. Yes? Like antlers. Yeah, I think that's what he's going for, that if these are the antlers on the deer, then the entire building becomes like antlers. So the building is telling you, in a very explicit way, what its program is. I promised you that I would show you a little bit of the pornography. You ready for it? Close your eyes if you don't want to see it. This is not the bad pornography. This is a woman peeing, and this is a nun showing her breasts. More of that in his treatise. Go to the Bibliotech Nacional. The major plates are stored in the regular part, but there's a special section of the Bibliotech Nacional because it's France, and they need special storage capacity for pornography, and it's called l'enferre, which means the inferno. So get permission to go to the inferno. Here's another project. Oh, I told you what it is. I'm a stooge. Can you guess what it is without reading my caption? Or let's say this. Why is it a dairy? Why is it not a meatpacking plant? What is it about the form of this building that tells you it's a dairy? Yes, Danielle? The jug on the top, right? This is a cow with a milk jug on the top. It's got to be a dairy. There's no possible way for this building to hold any function other than dairy. Just like this place in Texas is clearly a cattle farm, right? With Albert the Bull. Got to be that. Not quite sure what the function of this one is, but it's a good idea, definitely a good idea. What could the function be? Elephant milking or something. Even a building like this, which is Le Cue's meeting place at Bellevue. It's a speculative project because Le Cue is so crazy. Nobody's going to give him a real commission. But look at how eclectic this is. He's really picking and choosing, pulling the kinds of pieces of a different history that we've seen put together before. For example, when we looked at Fonthill Abbey, we saw a cruciform plan organization or let's even say Cartesian coordinates being used to skewer together different chunks of buildings. And here he's looking at a kind of castle. He's looking at a kind of temple. He's looking at a kind of triumphal arch. He's looking at a vernacular farmhouse. And he's putting them together in a picturesque way. We have Claude Nicolas Le Duc who is another one of these guys. And Le Duc is actually a legitimate architect. But he's still playing with the idea of architecture parlant. How can architecture communicate meanings in a clear way? By legitimate architect, I mean he has real clients. He does real commissions. But he also plays around with this idea of how can architecture communicate meaning. So he's done a number of these imaginary houses for imaginary clients. What do you think this one is? The shape, the form, the sighting of this house represents its program. Who is it that would like to live in a spherical house? Any ideas? Sorry, your architecture students would definitely like to live there. They'd like to have any bed to sleep on ever. Anybody else having any, Ryan? It would be a good house for a Renaissance humanist who loves spheres. That's not what he's going for. Any other ideas? Could be a good house for a bowler or a pool player or a soccer player. Also not what he's going for. For him this is a house for an agricultural worker. Because a seed is a round thing. And notice how it's situated in the ground, sunk in the ground. So the house like a seed is planted in the ground. Therefore the agricultural worker will think this is a good house. I don't know though. I think the agricultural worker might want a more ordinary house. But look at the plan. I mean this is hyper-rational, right? There is such an interesting thing about these architecture-pollin schemes. Because on one hand they are surrealistically nutty and disconnected from any possible tether on the world in a normal sense. And on the other hand they're kind of hyper-geometrical, hyper-rational, hyper-polished. Here's another one. Whose house is this? Yes. Yeah, this is a house for the river master, or the guy. I don't know why you need somebody to be in charge of the river. But back in 18th century France they did. The house becomes a tunnel through which the river runs. And the poor little river master lives in this tunnel. Good luck with that, river master. Or what about this? Whose house is this? Yes? Archer would be a good guess. The archer would have a nice good target to get the arrow through. So that would help the self-esteem of the archer. But that's not what the answer is. Any other ideas? Well, you probably can't tell because we don't really have this profession anymore of barrel maker. We don't have those guys. But this is supposed to be the house for the barrel maker. And I guess this represents the kind of tool that you would use in making the barrel. Any ideas what this is? This is the barrel maker house again. Any ideas? What could look like that? It's house for the woodsman. So it represents simultaneously wood chopped and stacked, but also a pyre that could be set on fire of wood. Great ideas. You guys are not good at Architec du Parlon. For example, if you went to Niagara Falls, if you saw this, would you have a clue? Would you know how to get ice cream? I don't think you could do it. But clearly, we have this tradition alive and well. Has anybody ever been to the Longerburger Basket Factory? What does it look like? A giant basket. It is exactly from the playbook of Architec du Parlon. How are you going to make a basket factory? Like a giant basket. This is not really Architec du Parlon. This is putt-putt golf in Panama City. But it just looks so good. But these are serious questions that are being asked. These are serious questions. And that is, how can architecture mean anything? And part of this has to do with the general crisis of meaning in the 18th century. But part of this also has to do with a devalued state of architecture in the 18th century. 19th century author Victor Hugo writes a book called Notre Dame de Parrier. Translated by Walt Disney into the wonderful movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame. And we know what that's about. It's about Esmeralda dancing and The Hunchback and the gargoyles running around. But there's another plot line or let's say there's another line of argument going through that in which the protagonist is the cathedral itself, Notre Dame. Hugo suggests that buildings historically, especially cathedrals, carried meaning in a very specific way. For example, at Notre Dame, it's very likely that generations of people who lived in Paris worshiped in the same church. Their parents were married there. Their grandparents were married there. Their great grandparents were married there. Perhaps they have relatives that were buried there. Perhaps they have relatives generations back who carved gargoyles for this. The stones hold memory. Stones hold meaning. There's a kind of automatic aura of authenticity about the object itself. In addition to that, in addition to this personal connection to the stones, there's also the legibility of the architecture. We spoke about Panofsky Gothic architecture and scholasticism when we were back talking about Gothic architecture about how the facade of a cathedral is like a model or the city of God in heaven with the rose window and the grid all having specific meanings that can be recovered. If you want to remind yourself about the history of Christianity or your particular position in Christianity, you can come and admire the facade and read the facade, see the sculptures telling you about the last judgment or about the temptation or you could go inside and have this emotional experience where you're just elevated because of the qualities of the architecture. Architecture held meaning in a way that nothing else could especially when you have illiterate people. How else do you know anything except through architecture? However, when Gutenberg makes the printing press, and starts making multiple copies of the Bible, suddenly architecture's value to be the thing that holds those meanings is a little bit compromised. And as you move forward in time, books get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and more and more and more plentiful. And so what's the task of architecture? Victor Hugo comes up with this statement, this will kill that. In French he says, ceci tour à cela which means this will kill that. And this in Hugo's construction is the printing press. And that is architecture or the traditional role of architecture to be the conservatrix of society's meanings. Not happening anymore. So having lost that role, having ceded that value to books, architecture begins to flounder and architecture thinks maybe it can be like a book. At least in the context of architecture parlant, architecture tries to behave like a book to have the kind of recoverable meanings that books have. And fails. Here's another project. For those of you who speak Greek fluently, you know exactly what this is. But for those of you who don't know what this is, any ideas? Yes, sir. Poffy mouth. He says, bravle. Yes, it's a bravle. I'm not even going to ask you why you think that. But it's a funny idea. And this is the site plan which I think is really funny. But if you look at what it looks like, if it is this little temple, what you put at the opening of this thing is a little temple front. Of course you do. And that's what it looks like. The attempt at architecture parlant is a doomed enterprise, really. You get this idea of the geometrical construct and the idea of locking meaning at loggerheads with each other. For example, these are two projects by Lidu. On the left, it's a project for a canon foundry. On the right, it's a project for a prison. In what way are these different? In what way does this thing say canon foundry and does this thing say prison? It's not a bit clear. In this desperate attempt to fix meaning to form, he's beginning to reveal the fact that you can't do it because form can appropriate many different functions. So canon foundry, he has these little flaming things over here to melt the iron. And prison, he has tiny little windows to keep prisoners from jumping out the windows and escaping. But the diagram is essentially the same. And you might want to ask, well, is this just a flaw in the method? Or is he revealing something about the 18th century? Something about prisons and factories and that they might be more similar than we think. And certainly in Foucault's book Discipline and Punish, which we mentioned very briefly on an earlier occasion, he's beginning to suggest that these institutions that rise up in the 18th and 19th century at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution both have a common purpose and that is really tranquilizing the population or surveilling the population to enforce obedience and calm behavior. Each of these diagrams has a center point. And the center point would be the place for the warden in the case of the prison or the supervisor or the boss or whatever overseer in the case of the factory. Superintendent, who knows. This point is a point of surveillance and there's this word panopticon, which is used by an English philosopher called Jeremy Bentham. And the idea of the panopticon if you pull the word apart pan means all and optic means eye. So the panopticon is a diagram for the all C and I. You get your person who surveils in the center looking down making sure that everybody is obeying and behaving properly. In the case of the prison you might get your person who is the prison warden in a tower looking through rows and rows and rows of prison cells on all sides. And this is a sneaky technique. The warden or the superintendent can see the workers or the prisoners but the workers and the prisoners can't see the warden. And the ambition of this is to internalize discipline. You don't know when you're being watched and if you do something wrong and they see you doing it you get punished. You don't know when you're being watched. They could be watching you at any moment and they will punish you and they will punish you harshly. So you rein it in. You behave very well. One of the premises here is that there is something for society during the Industrial Revolution and afterwards that requires these kinds of mechanisms to tranquilize the population and the Panopticon performs equally well for prison or for factory. Another protagonist among these revolutionary architects is Etienne Louis Boulet. And Boulet is another serious architect. This is a project that he did for a library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, unbuilt. But it's a great idea. It's a great 18th century idea of what a library could look like in that it seems to be about this infinite space that goes on and on forever with tier upon tier upon tier of book suggesting this vastness of knowledge that's out there to be acquired. This is another project by Boulet which I think is really really nice. It's the temple to nature Nature, of course, is viewed in the Enlightenment period as this pure original condition that culture contaminates. And so he builds this wonderful sphere over this rough ragged grotto. And it becomes a way to bring these two conditions into radical juxtaposition. But using the same spherical motif he does an even more famous project. And that is his Sennetath to Newton. Sennetath means a kind of funerary monument with no dead person in it. So it's sort of a memorial. And this is a Sennetath to Newton. This is not a Sennetath to Newton but it's in Ohio. It's the Neil Armstrong Museum. Don't go there. If you're looking for an experience like the experience at the Boulet project of this vast spherical space you will not get it. The architects in Wapa Caneta were not as good as Boulet. But here's what he's suggesting. And in this sense it is a really strongly conceived architect to a parlant project. He's trying to think about Newton, this great scientist, this guy who gave us gravity and calculus and all kinds of other things. How can you represent that? And you can represent that not simply with the Earth but with the cosmos. So there are a number of elements that you see here. One is the notion of geometry and the reflection of man and geometry in the Vitruvian man or things like Kepler's model of the universe where perfect geometrical form and perfect geometrical form are nested together or even something like this which is an armillary sphere a mechanism to study the rotation of the planets back in the days when you had no clue how the planets rotated. This is what Boulet gives us. Boulet gives us this amazing space that during the daytime is illuminated through these little slits in the roof that looks like a starry sky. Newton's power is so great that he can turn nighting today and day into night. So you come inside and the sky illuminates with these little pinpricks. Meanwhile at night you go inside and you have this great glowing armillary sphere so that you feel like you're somehow in the middle of the solar system. Playing with the sublime this thing is vast. This thing is represented by Boulet with strong contrasts of light and dark with chiaroscuro. You look on the top here these are trees. This thing is so big that trees are that small. These are a few more images from the French Revolutionary Architects. Architects who were very concerned with making meaning recoverable from their architectural designs because it's one thing to load up a design with meaning. It's another thing to have people look at that design and understand what you're after. They're trying to fix meaning to make meaning in architectural form as understandable as meaning in language and in literature. So we have this idea of architecture parlant speaking architecture. The idea that the form of the architecture could somehow be capable of creating associations and creating feelings that will carry you to an understanding. Here this is a cenotaph a different cenotaph than the Newton cenotaph that we looked at by Boulet Etienne Louis Boulet in terms of associations. What kind of associations is he trying to crank up here? This is a monument to a dead person. Why does it look like this? You know how is he mining history to find an appropriate form? Any takers? It's a pretty easy one. Tom, what do you think? Probably a pyramid, right? Nobody does death as well as the Egyptians. The Egyptians are experts at death. So here we have a sublime pyramid sublime for a number of reasons. Can anybody identify any qualities of this thing that make it sublime? Yes, sir. Yeah, the clouds are stormy. The clouds are creating an atmosphere. The clouds are creating a mood. The weather is a protagonist in this nature is active and terrifying. What else? Yeah, the play of light, the reflection of light. This is all about chiaroscuro, the strong play of light and dark. So that light, rather than revealing things in a simple way so that you can see all of the intricate qualities of the object, light is used to dazzle you and astonish you. What else makes this sublime? Corey, you accidentally moved your hand so I assumed that that meant you wanted to speak. I would say big and beyond big gigantic. The scale of this thing dwarfs human scale. So there are all of these different aspects of the sublime coming into play here. And Boulet did a number of these imaginary cenotaphs. Here's another one. What do you think he's after here? What's he after here in terms of associationism? How's he trying to communicate the mood of cemetery entrance in this project? Yes, sir. It's like a pyramid here. It's like a pyramid, exactly. So just as we saw pyramid here, we see something like a pyramid here. Is it only a pyramid or is it something in addition to a pyramid? Yeah. Good. There are obelisks here. So we also get this kind of large Egyptian idea of the landscape being engaged in setting the mood. I'm not exactly sure what you said, but I heard the word obelisk. So I'm going with that. What else? Yes? Okay. That's probably true. I can't see that on my slide. It's too small. What I'm going to go for instead is it kind of looks like a pediment that's been buried. It kind of looks like some kind of architectural construct. The pitch of this is not the pitch of a pyramid, which is a lot steeper. This is the roofline that you would associate with a classical temple. But instead of being out in the light, drenched in sun, this one has been submerged in the ground, buried, like dead people, buried. But there's a kind of double reading here. And again, he's using light. The general reading of this cemetery entry is contra luce. It's silhouetted. You're seeing this scary big thing against a stormy sky. But the entry proper is light-filled. It's luminous. And it's kind of surrealistically light-filled, given how dark the rest of the sky is. So this juxtaposition between light and dark is being used to help create the mood. And here's just another cenotaph. And the idea is why this is a useful form if you happen to be an architect or a prolonged guide for a cenotaph. What does it look like? Perhaps you don't know. It looks like a Roman sarcophagus. It looks like one of these stone coffins that you would put a dead person in, a noble person in Roman times. But now, instead of being scaled to the human body, it's gigantic. Here's a door, and these tiny little bumps down here are people. The idea of death being contained in architecture is overwhelming. And again, contra luce, overwhelming scale, and so forth. One more architecture-parlain project. Probably the most significant one. This one was, in fact, built, which gives it lots of significance. And that is the saline du show, the saltwork of a show in Arc-Escena, as the contemporary name of the city. This is the scheme. Only half of it got built. But the scheme locates itself near the Swiss border in a heavily forested region. It's a nice engagement with nature because you want to be in this forest. And why do you want to be in this forest? So that you can cut down the trees. Popular idea about nature as a resource that can be burnt and destroyed. Great idea. And it worked very well at show. They needed to burn the trees to create boiling water. They would get salt water. They would get the salt out and to purify the salt from the minerals in the earth from the salt caves that they went into. They would boil it and from the brine crystals would form. And that's how they got the salt. This is an amazing scheme. It's one of those geometrical devices that we saw Lidoux admiring in other schemes of his. Big circle, big cross implanted in the middle of the circle. But maybe because this thing operates at the scale of the city, instead of the scale of an individual building, it can operate in a more efficient way. Or at least the meanings are not quite so forced and contrived as in other Lidoux projects. For one thing, this notion of the round city has a literary precursor in Sir Thomas Moore's description of Utopia. It also sets up hierarchy in a fairly elegant way. Given a circular scheme with crossing lines in the middle, where is the most important point in that scheme? Can anybody guess a circle with crossing lines in the middle? Could it be the center? I think it would be. It would have to be, right? So what do you put in the center? What do you put in the center of this scheme? And the answer for Lidoux is it's a double thing. There's a chapel, and on top of the chapel, you have the overseer's house, manager's house. God kind of organizes it, but the overseer in a panopticon sense also keeps an eye on God. Hierarchy is established with wings of the factory here, and depending on who you are in the whole scheme, you are either in the inner ring or the outer ring. And nature itself gets controlled in that fashion with clearly delimited lawns in the center and kitchen gardens moving beyond that, and finally the forest surrounding it on the outside. So this is the geometry of the plan. The idea of Architech du Apollon comes out when we look carefully at the language that Lidoux is using. Here's the entry pavilion. Your first glimpse at looking at this is that this is a severe classical language of architecture. We have a Doric, but it's a really stripped down classicism. It's as if it wants to connect to the logic and the clarity of the classical language, but strip it away from any kind of ornament or any kind of real connection to human scale to pump it up to make it monumental. If you look at the windows that we have here along the edge of the building, they're fairly strange and they look like this. What kind of window is that? What does that look like? I'm presuming that none of you are salt miners, so you really don't know what this looks like, but what it's meant to represent is the brine, the boiling brine being introduced to air so that the salt crystals conform. The windows of the building represent the process of making salt. Also, when you walk through this severe gateway, what you find is this. You find that you're walking into something like a grotto or maybe like a salt mine. Maybe the experience of entering the salt works at show is meant to be somehow commensurate with the experience of mining salt going into the ground. And you pop out of that and you find yourself back in this kind of ideal landscape looking at the building. And if this thing strips away all the ornament to make it as severe as possible, other elements in the scheme ratchet up the rustication. If we look over here and we can already get a clue that the rustication is exaggerated or over here the rustication is exaggerated. The strange articulation of the columns on the director's house have two qualities. One, the play of the cylindrical shaft and the rectilinear blocks underscore the interest in primitive geometries and a stripped down classicism that characterizes all of Lidu's work. And two, the blockiness begins to represent the shape of salt licks or blocks of salt that were produced by the salt mine. Another example of the building demonstrating its function through its articulation. Lidu did a number of gatehouses for Paris. These were places where taxes would be collected as people came in and out of the inner precinct of Paris. And again you see the playbook by which Lidu organizes his buildings. A strong, simple play of stripped down volumes and simplified classical orders. These Doric peers that are here at the temple fronts are completely devoid of any ornament whatsoever. And the volume of the building is really a simple cylinder ringed with a running Palladian motif. The windows are simple punches. This is a building that can be organized based on this simple diagram that we see again and again from Lidu, a circle and a square and cross axes. Here as a freestanding volume. Here's another one of Lidu's barrières and he did quite a number of them. Here's a house by Lidu, by the way, just to show you that he wasn't simply making these speculative projects or these these grand industrial projects. This is a house for Madame Guimarre, a rich courtesan, an entertainer, a singer, a dancer who had enough suitors to provide for herself this townhouse in Paris. And this is the typology of the plan. And the plan involves a gateway piece, a courtyard, a house, and a garden. And this is the typology that you see again and again in Paris. In the case of Madame Guimarre, the upper story of the gateway piece is a theater where she can entertain her guests. But it's worth looking at this house because it's a good example of transformation of the type of the French hotel, the French urban house into the 18th century. One thing that marks it as an 18th century building is that it seems to be not so much reliant as a piece of fabric but more of a freestanding object. And look at the way it takes this geometry, a notion of an ideal geometry, a notion of a center, let's say a notion of a tartan grid, a Palladian plan and begins to warp it based on contingency of the site. There's a very interesting game of taking the ideal organization of a house that would be symmetrical and organized around ovalized spaces and fitting it onto this tight site through a series of shifts, bumps and grinds. You come in on axis and you're greeted by this beautiful portico. You come into this curved space and already when you're in a curved space all points on the curve are more or less equal. Of course center is more equal than others but it's different than say a rectilinear porch which would authorize only one direction. So you come in here to this little exedra kind of looking like the Ohio State football stadium. You pop in here and you find yourself with three different doors. One way of entering gets you into a kind of ante chamber but another way of entering gets you into a grand ante chamber, the ovalized room that sets you up on a sequence of major spaces. Large dining room, large sitting rooms but the space is unraveling. The space is not axially disposed but Leduc is taking advantage of the carving of the pochette and the figureality of these spaces to create a series of hinged movements. By the way he's got a very interesting skylight over the dining room. It's as though you've come to a centric piece or at least you're being oriented and re-aligned on a different axis and you move forward here and this becomes a kind of greenhouse room. We see it here in plan and then you come forward again. So it's like all the pieces of a conventional villa that have been dismantled and twisted around an axis using the pochette and using these figural spaces to enforce those kinds of moves. This is a drawing by Leduc showing you a theater that he designed in Bezosan, France. It's an interesting and strange way of representing the theater. There is this play of the gaze. The space of the theater is reflected in the mirror of the eye of the viewer creating this tense web of relationships that reminds us of the structure of relationships sketched out by Velázquez in Las Meninas. Even the very project of theater puts into the foreground the act of looking and surveilling and the idea of being out of the experience and looking at it from a vantage point that will never allow you to fully participate. In Leduc's work and in the work of all the revolutionary architects Boulais, Le Cue we see an extreme moment of an attempt to use reason of an attempt to use a linguistic analogy to structure the meaning of architecture. It's a tempting thing to do but it was an enterprise ultimately doomed to fail. Instead when we see Leduc's work or the works of Boulais or Le Cue I think most people are not struck by how rational it is and how clear and how scientific the method is but rather how strange how uncanny how slightly next to the normal the images are and that provokes for us a strong emotional response rather than an than a intellectual response. I think it's the friction between the tightly geometric plans and the clear use of Platonic geometry and the surreal implication of odd images or odd scales that makes these works so powerful.