Public Debate on Architecture in France

Abstract

AbstractWestern European society experienced a profound historical transformation during the eighteenth century, with the emergence of modern understandings of the public and the nature of publicness itself. For the first time, information networks, constituted mostly by an unprecedented multiplication of printed texts, became the most potent sector of the public sphere, in a sense that we now take for granted in our awareness that media coverage is how events attain “publicity.” Those in touch with this print culture became aware that there were many other readers like them who were reading the same texts, around the same time, and likely thinking similar things about them. With this shift, a modern sense of the claims of public opinion on common affairs began to take shape. As the most prestigious public art of representation, standing squarely at the intersection of space, publicity, politics, and culture, architecture occupied a unique place within these transformations. Architects, patrons, and governments found themselves compelled to translate the public meanings of their buildings into the new networks of information exchange by which the civic public sphere was now increasingly constituted. Inevitably, printing became the medium of this shift, with myriad consequences for architectural practice, reception, theory, and patronage, as well as for the understanding of architectural history. This chapter traces the most important of those consequences in French architecture between the foundation of the Royal Academy of Architecture in 1671 and the coming of the French Revolution in 1789.