European Architecture 1750-1890 (Oxford History of Art)

Rating:
Summary: 'epistemology'
Review: Bergdoll's book is by far the best book available in bookstores. (I mean among recent theoretical books in architecture section.) He guides us epistemologically to the roots of Enlightenment Architecture. It's not a chronological ordering of historical events. Rather, Bergdoll rigorously endeavors to seek the underlying influences and principles that have formalized such enterprise. As Mark Wigley once mentioned in his article 'The Translation of Architecture.', Bergdoll is a great translator of interpreting the presence (original works) in representational form. In so doing (=translating), Bergdoll perfects and enlivens the presence, which otherwise would have been fossilized.