Reunions Lecture: Architecture as Art or Science at the End of the 18th Century: the Case of Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s Graphic Work

In the long history of the definition of architecture, late 18th-century France seems to represent a moment of victory for those advocating the discipline’s inherently artistic character. At first glance, no one better exemplifies this tendency than the architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu. But beyond their exceptional aesthetic appeal, Lequeu’s drawings reflect the conflicting character of a profession situated between the artistic and the technical worlds.

This lecture will highlight the way Lequeu established a specific and original dialogue between text and image, an idiosyncratic use of water and body colors, and showed an obsession for technical details that allowed him to question and distort the graphic language established by his colleagues. Studying his drawings allows us to understand the extraordinary and creative tension at work in the definition of architecture between art and science at the dawn of the modern era.