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...