Appel à communication : « Color in Eighteenth-Century Architecture » session de l’American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference (Minneapolis, 30 mars-2 avril 2017)

2017 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference
Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, MN, 30 March — 2 April 2017

Proposals due by 15 September 2016 to be addressed at basile.baudez@gmail.com

Session:
Color in Eighteenth-Century Architecture
Basile Baudez, Université Paris-Sorbonne, basile.baudez@gmail.com

Although associated with baroque exuberance born after the Counter Reformation movement or the nineteenth-century rediscovery of polychromy in Greek architecture, color was far from absent from eighteenth-century architecture—even if critics like Quatremère de Quincy, or draftsmen like Boullée, favored monochromy on built structures and their representation. At a moment when color was invading every aspect of daily life, when artists and printers were developing new ways to diffuse color reproductions, when authors from Roger de Piles to Goethe were revalorizing the evocative and sensualist effectiveness of color, how did architects respond to this pressure, both in their drawings and buildings?

The geographic breath of this session is left deliberately open, but proposals should be unified by their close attention to the complex and paradoxical relationship between theory and practical use of color in architecture in the eighteenth-century. Key issues will include comparisons of attitudes towards color in different national traditions, the decision to hide or reveal colored materials, the place of color in architectural definitions of beauty or connotations of color within typologies, spaces or specific periods.