There was a time when architecture existed mainly in the physical reality of the built environment and in the imagination. That was before it became a standard ingredient of the contemporary media, and a subject attracting the interest of historians, travelers, writers, and the general population. Exactly how this happened is not easy to reconstruct, but it seems very likely that some major changes took place in the eighteenth century with the emergence of the modern public and its attendant configuration of public and private spheres.

In this important book, Richard Wittman suggests that many of the defining characteristics of modern architectural culture have their origins in the transformations of architectural publicity in eighteenth-century France. He does so at the end of Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France, a clever reworking of his doctoral dissertation of 2001, after having presented the reader with a chronological study in four parts, consisting of twelve chapters, over the course of which he painstakingly unfolds his story of the emergence of the public as an extremely influential party in the development of French architecture and architectural debate.

With reference to Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), Wittman defines the “civic public sphere” as a “network for the circulation of information, ideas, and opinion” (6) in which public discourse is formulated. “A printed book, a conversation with a stranger in a coffeehouse, a painting on exhibit, or a public building (whether open or closed to the public) all participate in it, through the media, which in the eighteenth century meant the world of print, is its most vital component” (6). Architecture, as a form of representation, increasingly became part of a culture in which its rules of decorum and propriety were negotiated by both the elites and non-elites.

The story begins with the various editions of Germain Brice’s half-guidebook/half-critique Description Nouvelle of Paris, which appealed to both visitors and Parisians. It implicitly demonstrated the Royal Academy of Architecture’s dilemma of promoting an original French architecture of classical origin as opposed to the “barbarous” and pervasive Gothic style. Soon, writers like Michel de Frémin and Jean-Louis de Cordemoy publicly criticized the illegibility of state-sponsored architecture that only satisfied architects, further undermining the academy’s arguments for unified standards of judgment, and, thereby, the crown’s authority. Brice’s 1713 edition openly discusses the neglect of Paris’s architecture and public spaces, noticing the empty Louvre with the king residing in Versailles.

During the administration of Louis XV’s prime minister Fleury, open political debate was still illegal. Writing about cultural production, and especially architecture and town planning, created new ways to criticize the government “in the open,” through its care for, as well as neglect of, the built environment of the nation’s capital. Printed descriptions of architecture, Wittman argues, became substitutes for architectural expression by making the buildings speak their meanings to a public of readers. Without the need to be physically present, the reader was part of an audience of beholders connected through the medium of print. Thus, discussions of architecture and its significance and meaning became regular topics in the public sphere, partly as a result of the academy’s disorientation and the lack of occasions to erect great monuments.

Under Louis XV’s reign, public opinion fundamentally began to influence architectural discourse. Historic and architecturally significant monuments came to be regarded as national treasures by influential critics; their neglect was considered a (public) disgrace. The “pioneer of politicized architectural criticism,” La Font de Saint-Yenne, even claimed that the visual aspect of the king’s palace was the birthright of all patriotic citizens, implicitly criticizing the king’s preference for Versailles and his absence from the capital and the abandoned palace, the Louvre. Architectural critique thus pressed the state to act, witnessed by an alerted public. Furthermore, in this “disembodied public sphere,” architecture in print invited a whole array of slightly disagreeing individual, reductive interpretations of buildings, contesting the authority of the specialist and his expert knowledge.

Wittman is able to demonstrate that around 1750 the crown was desperately trying to win back the affection of the Parisian populace, specifically by planning to provide the city with splendid new urban embellishments. However, the flood of publications that followed the decision to create a new royal square (Place Louis XV, now Concorde) shows that the authorities had to deal with “public opinion” as a platform for the discussion and criticism of architecture and its diversified representational possibilities. The marquis de Marigny, the Director General of the Royal Works, relied on the artist Cochin in his attempts to use the printing press to restore the status of the artist above the level of contemporary criticism, as well as to reposition the court as the center of architectural activity and a dominant formulator of taste. Jacques-Germain Soufflot’s Sainte Genevieve, the most important royal architectural commission of the eighteenth century, was the object of an official publicity campaign that backfired and put the building of the church and the competence of its architect and the office of works at the center of architectural criticism and debate. Histories were constructed to present the new classicist church as the culmination of everything that was genuinely French. But critics like Laurant Desboeufs and Pierre Patte published counter-attacks on the building’s lack of French Gothicism and the untrustworthy construction of its dome, receiving backing from the experienced engineer Amédée-François Frezier. In the end, the conflict over the completion of the church reached the highest levels of government, leaving the building unfinished when the Revolution came.

It is easy to share Wittman’s amazement regarding the number and variety of architectural publications (nearly three thousand) that were issued during the eighteenth century. Wittman’s control of his abundant material deserves respect; especially in his use of concepts that are not easy to translate, he shows the necessary subtlety. In his often elegant rephrasing and summarizing of crucial publications, he maintains the colorfulness of the many debates. The architectural public of the mid-eighteenth century was informed by articles that appeared in several of the more than one hundred periodicals that circulated. Wittman succeeds in contextualizing this rich variety of publications that accompanied new building activities. He shows that many periodicals offered their own variety of architectural discourse but shared a concern to find a general basis for architectural judgment and taste. Thus, the publication of articles, books, and courses for amateurs all contributed to the establishment of a public arena in which architecture and the achievements of architects were incessantly being monitored, assessed, explained, or promoted. From the 1750s onwards, the role of the public was a factor that architects, the Office of Royal Works, and the Académie had to reckon with, and which in turn demanded a more assertive policy.

Under Louis XVI’s government, architectural debate was strongly informed by recent shifts in politics and changes in the character of political speech and public opinion. Some of the greatest “monuments” that were suggested seem to have been invented as political statements in their own right, without it ever seriously being considered whether or not they could be built, and with the image of the proposed project serving mostly as an emblem. Meanwhile, architectural criticism became increasingly intricate and politicized, and judged on its potential value for the public good, thereby complicating the various uses of the press by different parties. Several building projects in Paris were presented in the language of public benefit, making rhetoric play with the common good, but were exposed in the press as the concoctions of corrupt businessmen who were sacrificing and misusing public urban space for their own private interests. Cynicism and a strong distrust of architects and the building trades also entered the civic public sphere.

As Wittman concludes from the architectural writing near the end of the Old Regime, architecture fell in disrepute as architects were confronted with a changing mentality toward luxury, urban embellishment, state-sponsored building activity, and the growing awareness of the need for social and institutional reform. Representational monuments once hailed as great contributions to the architecture of the kingdom were now being measured for their functional qualities, or even considered as instruments of oppression, with the architect as an accomplice. The architect could and did respond by appropriating a purified or simple architecture that could not be associated with the language of luxury and the elite, but rather with the new sensationalism. But critics complained about the primitivism and austerity that seemed inappropriate to public building as being inexpressive and meaningless. In this arena of opposing views, where consensus was absent, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux constructed his barrieres as part of the tax-collection and anti-smuggling wall encircling Paris. Another option was to build anti-monumental, short-lasting, and primarily utilitarian structures, and achieving “embelissement” through destruction, disengagement, and removal. Thus, the changing attitude toward the urban fabric can be read as “a longing for an escape from the social world embodied in the cityscape,” and understood as the desire of the public to simply erase the architecture of oppression, taken quite literally on 14 July 1789.

Wittman succeeds admirably in clarifying an architectural culture with plenty of original points of view and exciting ideas that place late eighteenth-century French architecture in a new perspective, and open new ways to assess and appreciate architectural writing and historiography. It would be worthwhile to see how much of these discussions were, in the later eighteenth century, already international. As a center of the book trade and “la capitale des arts,” Paris attracted large international attention. A substantial number of publications were published outside France, and many French journals and magazines were read in polite circles throughout Northern Europe that were looking for novel ideas, forms, and fashions.