Architecture and Language: Constructing Identity in European Architecture, c.1000–c.1650

Architecture and Language examines one of the central themes in the history and theory of Western architecture. Seeking to understand how language provides a model for understanding architecture, the essays in this volume both celebrate the diversity of the language-architecture analogy and assess its theoretical implications in the light of the diverse historical circumstances that produced it. The chapters examine the connections between style and nationality, vernacular and ‘official’ languages, the importance of Latin in giving the architectural profession a literate and cultured status, and the influence of architectural description on perception and design. By untangling the roots of the analogy in classical and Renaissance writings on architecture, this study calls into question the extremist conclusions of semiotics and linguistic analysis about the overriding importance of language in artistic experience.

• No comparable book for this period in architectural history exists • Attempts to link medieval and Renaissance thinking about language and the sister arts of architecture and art • Uncovers the particular historical circumstances in which architecture found itself bound up with questions of text, language, description, and literary theory

1. English with a French accent: architectural Franglais in late twelfth-century England? Peter Draper; 2. Il gran rifiuto: French Gothic in central and southern Italy in the last quarter of the thirteenth century Caroline Bruzelius; 3. Naming of parts: describing architecture in the high Middle Ages Lindy Grant; 4. Architectural vision in Albrecht von Scharfenberg’s Jüngerer Titurel - a Vision of Architecture? Achim Timmerman; 5. Architecture, language and rhetoric in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria Caroline van Eck; 6. Architecture, texts, and imitation in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Rome Cammy Brothers; 7. Sanmicheli’s architecture and literary theory Paul Davies and David Hemsoll; 8. Architects and academies: architectural theories of Imitatio and the literary debates on language and style Alina Payne; 9. The rhetorical model in the formation of French architectural language in the sixteenth century: the triumphal arch as commonplace Yves Pauwles; 10. Monstrous babels: language and architectural style in the English Renaissance Christy Anderson; 11. Languages and architecture in Scotland 1500–1660 Deborah Howard.