The goals of the project were to research, identify, and make available the relevant readings and images to help students comprehend and learn about the gradual expansion of architectural theory and achievement in France during the 17th and 18th centuries. The PITF developed a course iSite that housed a rich collection of scholarly articles and images for the course for yearly re-purpose.

Teaching Challenge:

This was a course on architectural theory and achievement in France in the 17th and 18th centuries. While it proceeded chronologically from the reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolution of 1789, the course provided a selective, as opposed to comprehensive approach, to designs, edifices and treatises. The course began by addressing architecture as an emblematization of power. This ideological context set the stage for the gradual expansion of architectural theory and its resulting discursive field, which moved beyond debate over the orders to include phenomenology (architecture's relation to the senses), historicism (or the origins of architectural form), and the environment (the cult of nature).