“Une maison pour me loger”: The Luxembourg Palace and the Accidents of History / TPOD

This lecture is part of the course Harmony and Conflicts by Marson Korbi, within The Doctoral Program of EDAR, EPFL

“Une maison pour me loger”: The Luxembourg Palace and the Accidents of History, by Sara Galletti
The session will use the Luxembourg Palace (Paris, 1611–31), designed by Salomon de Brosse for Queen Regent Maria de’ Medici, as a case study to explore the notion of context and its relevance in the production of multidimensional architectural narratives. First imagined as a simple ‘home’, the Luxembourg became, during the two decades of its planning and construction, not only an extraordinarily lavish royal residence but also a project that materialized the tensions of its time—institutional and artistic—and actively engaged to steer their direction. Context, in this case, will be understood to range from the material setting of the palace—such as the needs it has to address or the urban and environmental situation in which it was situated—, to the immaterial circumstances of its coming into being, including the political and economic conditions in which it was conceived, as well as the desires and ambitions it was expected to realize. 

Sara Galletti is an Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History at Duke University. She received an M.Arch. from IUAV (Venice) and a joint PhD in the History of Architecture and Urbanism from the Université de Paris IV–Sorbonne and IUAV. Her field of research is early modern architectural theory and practice, with a focus on early modern Europe and the Mediterranean. Her first book, Le Palais du Luxembourg de Marie de Médicis, 1611-1631, was published by Éditions Picard (Paris, 2012). She is currently working on a book tentatively titled History of Stone Vaulting in the Premodern Mediterranean: Practices, Theories, and Patterns of Knowledge Transfer. 

Image: from Sara Galletti, Le Palais du Luxembourg de Marie de Médicis 1611-1631, 2012