Richard Wittman – författare

This book 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 a fresh theoretical orientation and a large body of new primary research, this book offers 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 east facade of the Louvre, the Place Louis XV [the Place de la Concorde], and the church of Sainte-Genevieve [the Pantheon]. Depicting the passage of architecture into a mediatized public culture as a turning point, and interrogating it as a symptom of the distinctly modern configuration of individual, society, and space that emerged during this period, this study will interest readers well beyond the discipline of architectural history.

This book 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 a fresh theoretical orientation and a large body of new primary research, this book offers 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 east facade of the Louvre, the Place Louis XV [the Place de la Concorde], and the church of Sainte-Genevieve [the Pantheon]. Depicting the passage of architecture into a mediatized public culture as a turning point, and interrogating it as a symptom of the distinctly modern configuration of individual, society, and space that emerged during this period, this study will interest readers well beyond the discipline of architectural history.

In 1823, the fourth-century basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls in Rome was destroyed by a catastrophic fire, prompting debate as to whether, and in what style, it should be reconstructed. Two years later, Pope Leo XII made the unprecedented decision to rebuild St. Paul's as an exact replica of its predecessor, which resulted in the most expensive construction project in Rome since the early modern rebuilding of St. Peter's. In this study, Richard Wittman traces this reconstruction within the context of the Church's struggle to adapt to a radically changed and changing world. He offers new perspectives on European architectural modernity and its negotiations with the past, and problematizes received ideas about the sources and significance of architectural historicism. Proposing a new prehistory of the great Catholic revival after 1850, Wittman's study demonstrates the key role that religions motivations played in the formation of modern mentalities, and particularly the historicist component.