Review: Remarks on Architecture: The Vitruvian Tradition in Enlightenment Poland, by Ignacy Potocki

Abstract

Ignacy Potocki Remarks on Architecture: The Vitruvian Tradition in Enlightenment Poland Translated from the Polish and edited by Carolyn C. Guile University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015, 155 pp., 2 maps, 11 b/w illus. $74.95, ISBN 9780271066288 Remarks on Architecture: The Vitruvian Tradition in Enlightenment Poland is a short book of herculean proportions. It consists of an extensive introductory essay by Caroline C. Guile (fifty-six pages) followed by an English translation of Ignacy Potocki's unpublished eighteenth-century manuscript Remarks on Architecture ( Uwagi o architekturze ), along with a transcription of his original Polish text. This book represents an important contribution to early modern architectural history, offering many new insights into the fascinating but little-known architectural culture of early modern Poland. Especially valuable is the full translation of the treatise, which offers English-language scholars a rare opportunity to study a Polish primary source. Ignacy Potocki (1750–1809), a Polish nobleman, was a political activist and education reformer. His Remarks on Architecture , written before 1786, was a product of his elite class, education, and travels, and it reflects the climate of a critical time in Polish history. During the second half of the eighteenth century, one of the largest states in Europe disappeared from the map when Russia, Prussia, and Austria partitioned the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth among themselves. Guile's introduction provides detailed context for this “political crisis and period of national eradication” (4), and it is within this historical moment that Potocki's treatise on architecture must be understood. One of the most interesting aspects of Remarks on Architecture is Potocki's view of architecture as a branch of Enlightenment philosophy. Like other architectural thinkers of his time, Potocki wanted to instruct his readers on how architecture, placed into the service of the state, could help to alleviate society's ills. For example, if the rich invested in public buildings, “idleness, poverty, and vice everywhere would turn into industry, financial self-sufficiency, effort, and work” (75). Potocki dedicated his treatise to the szlachta , the Polish …