Review: Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe by Konrad Ottenheym, Krista De Jonge, and Monique Chatenet, editors

Abstract

Konrad Ottenheym, Krista De Jonge, and Monique Chatenet, editors Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe Architectura Moderna 9. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010, xiv + 408 pp., 300 b/w illus. €110 (paper), ISBN 9782503533544 Most buildings in this book will be unfamiliar even to scholars of early modern architecture: these public buildings, such as city halls or market arcades, often count among the happy discoveries of sightseeing in European cities after visiting better-known churches and palaces. A good guidebook might give the names of the architects and dates of the construction campaigns, but if curious to learn more, information about such buildings is often found only in national or regional inventories of historic monuments based on painstaking research by local scholars. Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe furnishes a broad international panorama of such noteworthy early modern urban structures, presenting thirty essays uniting otherwise scattered material on these hard-working building types of late pre-industrial society. The Architectura Moderna series, initiated in 2002, aims to explore architectural exchanges and influences within northern and central Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essays collected in the series’ ninth volume were originally presented at two related conferences held in Utrecht in 2006 and 2008 under the general title “Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe.”1 Their chronology spans 1400 to 1800, with the major geographical emphasis on the Low Countries, France, and the German lands; Italy, England, Scotland, Denmark, Poland, Dalmatia, Spain, Portugal, and Dutch overseas colonies are also represented. Most articles are in English, but eight are in French, and one each in German and Spanish. The term public buildings is problematic, as book and series coeditor Krista De Jonge admits in her foreword (vii). While many buildings treated here are public in the sense that they were commissioned by and for various civic or governmental bodies, others were commissioned by private or institutional patrons, served a limited group of users, or had restricted access, and thus were arguably “private.” Coeditor Konrad Ottenheym’s introduction opens …