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- Laugier and Viel de Saint-Maux: The Sacred and the Profane in Two Architectural Origin Myths
- Abstract
- While the origin of architecture has been the subject of numerous writings, two important figures came to the forefront in the eighteenth century: Marc-Antoine Laugier and Jean-Louis Viel de Saint-Maux. Richard Wittman compares the two. Attempting a new discursive framework for architectural thinking, both Laugier and Viel de Saint-Maux departed from Vitruvius’s account of architecture as mankind’s observation of nature. But as Wittman underlines, Viel de Saint-Maux inverted Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture. For Viel de Saint- Maux, the origins of architecture lay no longer in a utilitarian mode of imitation, but in mankind’s quest to relate his life to that of the cosmos.
- Citation
- Wittman, R. (2016). Laugier and Viel de Saint-Maux: The Sacred and the Profane in Two Architectural Origin Myths . Action and Reaction in Architecture , OASE, (97), 35–42. Retrieved from https://www.oasejournal.nl/en/Issues/97/LaugierandVieldeSaintMaux
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- October 2016
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