What’s so relative about beauty? Reading Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes (1683) / EDAR

This lecture is part of the course Bad Books by Marson Korbi, within The Doctoral Program of EDAR, EPFL

What’s so relative about beauty? Reading Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes (1683)
Perrault’s Ordonnance is righlty famous for its discussion of architectural beauty as depending in what Perrault calls ‘relative’ reasons or causes: arguments depending on taste and custom. This claim has had an extraordinary afterlife, but it is still worth looking at it critically, as it engages with matters of learning, historicity, and ultimately the questions of authority and power that stood at the core of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. In this respect it is particularly instructive to read the Ordonnance against Claude’s brother Charles Perrault’s Parallele des anciens et des modernes, where the architectural ideas of the Ordonnance become building blocks for a theory of culture.

Maarten Delbeke holds the Chair of the History and Theory of Architecture at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. He researches and teaches the history and theory of art and architecture in Europe from the 17th century up to the present, and is active as an architecture critic.