Lauren O'Connell, Current Research Interests
Architecture as Cultural Encounter :France Pictures Russia in the Nineteenth Century
This project builds upon my earlier studies of a history of Russian architecture written in 1877 by French architect and theorist Viollet-le-Duc. In previous investigations I have looked at Viollet's L'Art russe as a contribution to architectural theory that proposed a means of reconciling the will to express a "national" identity in historically-based form with the rational dictates of modern structural methods; as early evidence of the tension between drawing and photography in nineteenth-century architectural education and historical research; and as the linchpin of an ideologically motivated program to market Russian art abroad.
My present work frames Viollet-le-Duc's Russian project against the backdrop of other French accounts of Russian architecture and situates it within the broader genre of nineteenth-century cross-cultural travel literature. I am particularly interested in the larger theoretical questions raised by architecture's status as a medium through which alien cultures encounter one another.
Monuments and Meanings
This project builds upon my earlier research on the architectural impacts of the French Revolution. In addition to destroying much of the built legacy of the old regime, the Revolution of 1789 provoked the conversion of many historical structures to new uses. Many of these conversions were themselves devastating, both physically and symbolically incompatible with a building’s original form and purpose.
The fate of one such structure, the Tour Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie in Paris, is emblematic. This splendid Gothic tower is the remnant of a 13th century church that was sold off by the Revolutionary government for profit, and destroyed by its buyer to make way for modern construction. The tower itself was spared, because of its value "to the arts". Since that time, the tower has been threatened and rescued numerous times, and now stands as an inviolate icon of the city, a crucial "contact zone" linking contemporary Parisians to their collective past.
Applying the framework of a "perceptual history," a history of the ways in which a building has been perceived over time, I focus on the shifting meanings of this stranded relic. I am interested in particular in the ways that it managed to stay aloft by redefining itself and its value to each new generation of city dwellers. This speculation on the fate of an individual structure is rooted in a larger reflection on relationships between past and present in the modern city.