Utopian models: The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and Lequeu’s Architecture Civile

• In Event: The Architectural Imaginary

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the role played by the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili within eighteenth-century French culture, especially in the work of architect Jean Jacques Lequeu, who treated the incunabula like an architectural model for the utopian city in his most important work, Architecture Civile. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili/Dream of Poliphilus, the incunabula anonymously published in Venice by Aldus Manutius in December 1499, and translated in 1546 by French humanist Jean Martin, was rediscovered in the Revolutionary years, especially among secret circles of intellectuals and Parisian literati. My paper, part of my PhD thesis, shows how the Hypnerotomachia’s woodcuts became a cultural and architectural model, a resource and a point of departure for the creation of Lequeu’s innovative architecture, which drew extensively from Italian Renaissance works of literature and architecture.

Author

• Elisa Boeri, Politecnico di Milano