Architecture, print culture, and the public sphere in eighteenth-century France / Richard Wittman.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Pt. I. The Academy and the public -- 1. A network for debate -- 2. The aestheticizing discourse of print -- 3. Architecture and civic ideals -- Pt. II. Architecture, politics, and public life -- 4. The city as critical allegory -- 5. The debate on the Place Louis XV and the Louvre -- Pt. III. The impact of public debate -- 6. Marigny's program -- 7. A public for architecture -- 8. A new paradigm for publicity -- Pt. IV. The crisis of architectural representation -- 9. Sainte-Genevieve and the unraveling of a tradition -- 10. Politics and monuments under Louis XVI -- 11. Private interest and the rhetoric of public good -- 12. The disrepute of architecture -- Conclusion: the image of unity.

"Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France focuses on the complex ways in which architectural practice, theory, patronage, and experience became modern with the rise of a mass public and a reconfigured public sphere between the end of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution." "Presenting both a fresh theoretical orientation and a large body of new primary research, this book otters a new cultural history of virtually all the major monuments of eighteenth-century Parisian architecture, with detailed analyses of the public debates that erupted around such Parisian monuments as the cast facade of the Louvre, the Place Louis XV [the Place de la Concorde], and the church of Sainte-Genevieve [the Pantheon]. With these investigations, Wittman also reflects upon how the transformation of the public sphere altered the human relation to architecture, and to space in general, by privileging a virtual rather than embodied experience of publicness."--BOOK JACKET.