Chapitre III. Figures de l’Observatoire de Paris, préfiguration d’un « État » moderne ?

Illustration I. Frontispice par S. Ledere, représentant Louis XIV et Colbert rendant visite à l’Académie des sciences. L’Observatoire de Paris, alors en chantier, paraît au loin à travers la fenêtre. In Cl. Perrault, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (Paris, 1671). Cliché BnF. Dans ce chapitre nous analyserons deux façons très différentes de figurer la cité : celle du romain Vitruve et celle de son traducteur français au xviie siècle, Claude Perrault. Une première sectio..

Vitruvius : writing the body of architecture

Vitruvius dedicated his, the only work on architecture to have survived from classical antiquity, to Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, and claimed repeatedly that he was "writing the body of architecture (corpus architecturae)." A detailed examination of meaning of this claim, read in the specific imperial context that brought De architectura to light in ca. 25 B.C., is the principal focus of this study, which has been undertaken less as an effort to come to positive terms with the relevance (or irrelevance) of Vitruvius' normative prescriptions for Roman building practice than in the attempt to try to understand what he was trying to say about architecture and why.The exegesis is developed in four parts. The first deals with the corporeal identity of the book itself: a ten-scroll "angelic" messenger, whose written form proves to be as significant an index of its meaning as its content. The second part assesses Vitruvius' presentation of his treatise to Augustus in the preface to Book 2 of his treatise as the emperor's Herculean body: at once the agent and proof of Roman conquest and, like Hercules, the philanthropic purveyor of the benefits of civilisation to conquered peoples. The third unravels what Vitruvius meant when he said that buildings, temples especially, were to be put together in the same way that nature puts together the bodies of beautiful men. The fourth part concludes that the beautiful body, in question is the body of the king: that of the emperor himself, whose body---corpus imperii---was, at that historical juncture, imagined as congruent with the body of the Roman world. For Vitruvius, through architecture---as architecture---this kingly body was to be the chief agent of the empire's enduring coherence.That the project of Roman world dominion so consistently shaped this first self-conscious attempt to give a comprehensive account of architecture raises troubling questions about the discipline itself. It is in raising such questions that Vitruvius' De architectura acquires more than antiquarian interest

Virtù-vious : Roman Architecture, Renaissance Virtue

In the service initially of Julius Caesar during his meteoric rise to autocratic rule, Vitruvius wrote in the mid-first century a. C., at the fall of the Roman republic and the beginning the period of one-man rule known as the Empire. After Caesar’s assassination in 44 a. C., Vitruvius transferred his allegiance to Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian Augustus, the first Roman emperor to whom he addressed his treatise on architecture. My own view is that Vitruvius’s intentions are to be understood ..

Socrates' ancestor: an essay on architectural beginnings /

Architectuurfocu

Socrates' ancestor : architecture and emerging order in archaic Greece

Socrates claimed Daedalus, the mythical first architect, as his ancestor. Taking this as a point of departure, the thesis explores the relationship between architecture and speculative thought, and shows how the latter is grounded in the former. A detailed examination of the Anaximander fragment, the earliest surviving record in Western philosophy, is considered in relation to Anaximander's built work. This three-part cosmic model which included a celestial sphere, the first map of the world, and a sun clock (the gnomon), reveals the fragment to be a theory of the work in that the cosmic order Anaximander was the first to articulate was discovered through the building of the model. The model is seen as comparable to a daidalon, a creation of Daedalus, whose legend reflects the importance of craft in the self-consciousness of archaic Greece where the kosmos (order) of civilization were seen as having emerged with the kosmos allowed to appear through the making of the artifact. Archaic self-consciousness is further examined through the emergence of the Greek city-state (the polis) and in the building of the first peripteral temples, both of which are revealed as necessary antecedents to birth of theory, understood as the wondering admiration of the well-made thing