Progress in the age of navigation: The voyage-philosophique of Julien-David Leroy (France).

摘要

This thesis is an analysis of the career and publications of the influential French architectural theorist Julien-David Leroy (1724–1803). It is proposed that Leroy's work takes its significance from the concept of the voyage-philosophique, a category of research linked to the ideology of progress that motivated the Paris-based Académie des Sciences and Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Leroy's most significant contribution to architectural theory built on his voyage to Greece (1754–55) and consisted of transposing the voyage-philosophique into the realm of architecture. Focusing only on phenomena that could be apprehended either through measurement or by the mobile eye of a scientific traveler, Leroy rejected Renaissance notions that beauty derived from the impact of specific proportional relationships on the eye of an immobile observer. Leroy not only liberated the eye, his work also redefined the classical canon. Rejecting Providence, he explained the transformation of architecture through time as a response to environmental and social factors. Though he admired Greek architecture, the notion of an absolute or ideal past state had no place in his thought. Progress thus understood in both its literal and figurative senses, Leroy displaced the orders from the preeminence they had enjoyed since the Renaissance and conceptualized the experience of architecture as the sensation of forms in space relative to a mobile observer.