The Quest for the Origins of Architecture

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores some of the Enlightenment ideas about the origins of architecture and primitivism. It examines how eighteenth‐century architects presented the beginnings of building to their public. In the second half of the eighteenth century primitivism turned out to be a persistent model of thought: with advocates of a return to origins searching for the first beginnings of architecture, it became a focal point of architectural theory. To uncover the quest for the origins of architecture in eighteenth‐century texts the chapter discerns three types of primitivism: as a cultural normative theory; as an etiology; and as an artistic choice. It aims to further elucidate the problem of imagining the origins of architecture, in case studies ranging from a primitive hut conceived in a mental thought experiment, to reactions to archaic buildings at Paestum, or in representations of monuments in models. These cases attest to the increasingly prominent role of history in the quest for origins: Soufflot, Laugier, Piranesi, Cassas, and Petit‐Radel found different ways of visualizing the origins of architecture to the eighteenth‐century public, while all inciting a historical experience.