Queering the Essai sur l’Architecture: Laugier’s Politics of Exclusion
Christiane Matt will explore the politics of exclusion in this canonical text in a forthcoming SAHGB seminar. Here, she explains how she approached the application of queer theory to Laugier’s treatise.
Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture, 1753, engraving by Charles Eisen, primitive hut with allegorical figure of Architecture. Copyright: Artstor.
How can we read canonical texts of architectural history and theory in ways that acknowledge their multi-layered narratives of exclusion and elision? In this piece, I will attempt to cast light onto some of the rhetorics and politics of exclusion in Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l’Architecture (1753). The theoretical groundwork for this endeavour has been laid by architectural historians such as Mark Wigley, who has provided an incisive and nuanced re-reading of architectural texts including Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1443–1452), which focuses on the way in which architecture produces the gendered body.
At first glance, it might seem peculiar that Laugier (1713–1769), a Jesuit priest who delivered numerous sermons before the French king and his court, also wrote a treatise on architecture. Laugier addresses his own amateur status in the introduction to his treatise, arguing that it is his innate ability of judgment rather than a professional affiliation with the architectural metier that allows him to speak of a subject that he claims to love dearly. When he published his Essai sur l’Architecture in 1753, he lamented that while many treatises had already been written about the measurements and proportions of architecture, a thorough discussion of architecture’s principles was still a desideratum. His self-proclaimed goal is therefore to shed light on the ‘true and fixed principles of architecture’ to inform future architectural practice. By positing the primitive hut as the fundamental principle of architecture and the basis of his theory, Laugier aims to exorcise from architecture everything that does not correspond to this principle. This brings me to my next point: Laugier is highly critical, even dismissive, of any kind of difference.
Applying queer theory to an 18th-century French architectural treatise perhaps seems an idiosyncratic undertaking, however I believe that the approach has value. Bringing queer theory into dialogue with Laugier’s work allows me to productively tease apart Laugier’s words in order to reveal the hidden rhetoric of exclusion in his text. Considering my own, personal position as a white lesbian woman who considers herself an architectural historian allows me a different vantage point on Laugier’s Essai. In the words of black feminist and cultural critic bell hooks, marginality allows for a radical and counter-hegemonic position that stems from lived experience. In the following, I utilise my positioning in discourse as a critical tool for the analysis of Laugier’s text. I also draw on the work of Stacy Alaimo, who has argued that the notion of nature has a long history of being invoked to exclude marginalised communities such as women, indigenous peoples, black people, people of colour and LGBTQIA+ people. Nature is often equated with the norm or the normal, meaning that notions of otherness are constructed on the basis of what is perceived as natural.
Nature is also of importance for Laugier’s theory of architecture. Indeed, he utilises nature as a category that is both normative and exclusive. Laugier is quick to identify any supposed infraction against the rules of what he perceives as good architecture as ‘unnatural’ or ‘against nature’. The pilaster is one of these supposed infractions against nature, as Laugier declares that it is not founded upon any natural principles or need. Another example of this exclusionary rhetoric is the spiral column, which Laugier – quite offensively – associates with the disabled body. Conversely, he often refers to la simple nature as the source of architectural principles. Any architectural form which does not correspond to Laugier’s architectural principles is declared defective and bizarre. The second edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (1695) defines the term bizarre as closely related to fantasy, extravagance and caprice. While 15th-century architectural theorists such as Sebastiano Serlio regarded the bizarre positively and associated it chiefly with artistic creativity and innovation, the term became increasingly pejorative from the late 17th century onwards. I argue that the bizarre is a potentially subversive category that calls into question rigid norms and moral systems. By taking seriously the notions of the bizarre and its related category, disorder, I attempt to provide a queer re-reading of Laugier’s treatise. Rather than disregarding the productive potential of the fantastical, fanciful and ornamental in architecture, I hope to reclaim these terms for a queer analysis of 18th-century architectural theory. I will explore these ideas in greater depth in a paper for the series of seminars hosted by Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain in collaboration with the Institute for Historical Research and the Oxford Architectural History Seminar on Monday, 26 October.
Christiane Matt is a current PhD student at the University of York, where she is researching the relationship between the body, gender and architecture with regard to the supposed origins or founding myths of architecture from circa 1450 up to the 20th century. She is also a member of the SAHGB’s LGBTQIA+ network.
Further reading:
Stacy Alaimo. ‘Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of “Queer” Animals’. In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 51–72. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
bell hooks. ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’. In Gender Space Architecture: An interdisciplinary introduction, edited by Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden, 203-209. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Mark Wigley. ‘Untitled: The Housing of Gender’. In Sexuality & Space, edited by Beatriz Colomina, 327–389. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.
This part of my research has been made possible by Rodney Palmer who has extensively worked on the history of bizarria and bizarrerie in art and has very kindly shared his expertise on the topic with me. I am deeply grateful for his patience with my questions and for our many stimulating conversations.