Jean-Jacques Lequeu: The architectural imagination in the Age of Reason

Barry Bergdoll
Photo credit: Robin Holland
November 14, 2019
7:00 p.m.

Menil Drawing Institute, 1412 W. Main Street, Houston

 

This lecture is available for one AIA/CES Learning Unit. Watch the lecture, download the pdf, and submit for credit.

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Professor Barry Bergdoll will present a lecture on the occasion of the exhibition, Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect, Drawings from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, on view at the Menil Drawing Institute October 4, 2019 – January 5, 2020. Draftsman and architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757–1826) left a corpus of drawings to the Bibliothèque nationale de France that had been largely forgotten until the publication, in 1953, of Emil Kaufmann’s influential essay "Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu.” Since then, Lequeu’s work has been associated with the radical geometric abstraction of the more famous architects Claude Nicolas Ledoux and Etienne Louis Boullée, as well as with a genealogy of modernism. This trio was further consolidated in an important exhibition in Houston in 1967-68 supported by the Menil Foundation titled Visionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu. While these publications and exhibition made famous an unknown figure's spectacular and fantastic drawings, they created a set of associations that have obscured the difficult task of relating this work both to the world of the late 18th and early 19th century France and to the puzzling private universe of the draftsman. In this lecture, Bergdoll will suggest trajectories for reading and understanding Lequeu's place in the history of Enlightenment and Romantic architecture. 

Barry Bergdoll is a specialist in late 18th and 19th century French and German architecture, and the author of numerous works on the period, including the textbook European Architecture 1750-1890 in the Oxford History of Art series.  He is Professor of Art History at Columbia University and former Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.  

The Fall 2019 Lecture Series is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund, and by grants from the City of Houston through the Texas Commission for the Arts.

This lecture is organized by the Menil Collection in partnership with Rice University's Humanities Research Center, Rice Architecture, and Rice Design Alliance.

Rice Design Alliance is an AIA/CES Registered Provider of quality educational programs. For each lecture, attendees will earn one Learning Unit.

For information regarding visitor parking at the Menil Collection, please visit  menil.org/visit.

Video courtesy of Menil Drawing Institute.