The Theory and Practice of Eclecticism in Eighteenth-Century European Architecture

Abstract

In The Theory and Practice of Eclecticism in Eighteenth-Century European Architecture, Kristoffer Neville links an early modern method of eclectic thought to contemporary architectural theory and practice. The eclectic mode promoted the selection and combination of elements from different traditions to create new work, work ostensibly more perfect than the individual sources on which it was based. A related approach has long been acknowledged in major projects by the architects Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, and Balthasar Neumann, all active in the first half of the eighteenth century, but a conceptual basis for this commonality has not been recognized. Neville excavates the intellectual foundations of seventeenthand eighteenth-century eclecticism and shows how these were absorbed into architectural theory, articulating a concept that was widely valued in the German lands during the eighteenth century.