The rhetoric of architecture and the language of pleasure : the maison de plaisance in eighteen-century France

This thesis investigates the history of the petite maison (otherwise known as a little house) in eighteenth-century France. In particular, I focus on a popular libertine novella written in 1758 by Jean-Francois de Bastide entitled appropriately enough La Petite maison. In the novella, Bastide conflates concepts of vice and virtue in his descriptions of the little house. By doing so, the author set into play a terminological confusion of meaning that rendered the house as a problem that required a resolution. This thesis tracks the resolution of the ambiguous meaning of the little house in the work of the late eighteenth-century architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. I look at three different projects by Ledoux in order to trace how he transformed the "little house" as a literary trope illustrated by the author Bastide into a country house architectural typology. The first project discussed is a built music pavilion designed for fetes, entertainments and pleasures at Louveciennes for the mistress of Louis XV named Madame du Barry. The second project is an imagined house for a Marchande de modes (woman milliner tailor) represented in Ledoux's treatise entitled Architecture considered in relation to art, mores, and legislation, published in 1804.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Liss, Alyson Jacqueline

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Erika Naginski.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35500

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35500