During the second half of the eighteenth century British architecture moved away from the dominant school of classicism in favour of a more creative freedom of expression. At the forefront of this change were architect brothers Robert and James Adam. Kondo’s work places them within the context of eighteenth-century intellectual thought.

The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.

If there is a linchpin to understanding modern European history, it lies in the period of religious strife & scientific progress between the 1550s & 1650s. In The Age of Reason Begins, Will & Ariel Durant bring together a fascinating network of stories in their discussion of the bumpy road toward the Enlightenment. This is the age of great monarchs & greater artists: on the one hand, Elizabeth the First of England, Philip II of Spain & Henry IV of France; on the other, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne & Rembrandt. It also encompasses the heyday of Bacon, Galileo, Giordano Bruno & Descartes--the fathers of modern science & philosophy. But it is equally an age of extreme violence, a moment in which all Europe was embroiled in the horrible Thirty Years' War--in some respects, the real First World War. Whatever the case, this is a chapter in cultural history one can't set aside. "Mr & Mrs Durant are admirably lucid...This is a book that can be commended very warmly."--The New York Times.

Containing essays by leading scholars representing a wide range of disciplines, this Companion offers new perspectives on the French Enlightenment. Clearly organized and easy to use, the volume provides a comprehensive overview of a period that marks the beginning of modern intellectual culture and political life.

Architecture, and its pedagogy in the academy, is dominated by the technology of image production that veils the ‘naked power’ behind its operation. It conforms to the principles of cultural logic of the society of the spectacle, consistent with neoliberal capitalism. The problem with this dominant pedagogy is that it violates the fundamental ethical imperative, putting architecture in direct contradiction with the ‘common good’. In addition, it has let architecture enter the brothel of pornographic capitalism which turns every object into an object of obscene gratification of the senses. In this book, Nadir Lahiji adopts Alain Badiou’s thesis from The Pornographic Age to demonstrate that contemporary architecture is in absolute complicity with the pornographic present. The traits that Badiou identifies in this age are manifestly visible in architectural surfaces which are subordinated to the same ‘regime of images’. Similarly to Badiou’s political indictments of the society which has given rise to the pornographic present, the book condemns the architecture that has lent its service to the same society with a license to consummate its transgression to better cater to the imperative of the ‘regime of images’. Transposing the conceptual categories in Badiou’s analysis to the critique of architecture’s pornographic turn in contemporary society, the book constructs a conceptual framework by which to demonstrate the specific manifestations of pornography in building. The book is aimed at architecture students at higher graduate and post-graduate levels.

In his landmark volume Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion paired images of two iconic spirals: Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Borromini’s dome for Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza. The values shared between the baroque age and the modern were thus encapsulated on a single page spread. As Giedion put it, writing of Sant’Ivo, Borromini accomplished 'the movement of the whole pattern [...] from the ground to the lantern, without entirely ending even there.' And yet he merely 'groped' towards that which could 'be completely effected' in modern architecture-achieving 'the transition between inner and outer space.' The intellectual debt of modern architecture to modernist historians who were ostensibly preoccupied with the art and architecture of earlier epochs is now widely acknowledged. This volume extends this work by contributing to the dual projects of the intellectual history of modern architecture and the history of architectural historiography. It considers the varied ways that historians of art and architecture have historicized modern architecture through its interaction with the baroque: a term of contested historical and conceptual significance that has often seemed to shadow a greater contest over the historicity of modernism. Presenting research by an international community of scholars, this book explores through a series of cross sections the traffic of ideas between practice and history that has shaped modern architecture and the academic discipline of architectural history across the long twentieth century. The editors use the historiography of the baroque as a lens through which to follow the path of modern ideas that draw authority from history. In doing so, the volume defines a role for the baroque in the history of architectural historiography and in the history of modern architectural culture.