Professor Rodolphe el-Khoury will present Episodes in the History of Architecture and the Senses: Paris circa 1750 at MIT on Wednesday, November 10 (Room 3-133, 6:30pm).

In Paris circa 1750, in the context of radical changes in the conception and implementation of modern architecture and urbanism, science, philosophy and technology were reinvested in the sensing body as a model and instrument of spatial organization. The talk traces the processes set in motion in the early stages of the scientific revolution that gradually secured the hegemony of sight in the control and production of space. An "occularcentric" cast in the practices of observation and analysis flourished under the new visual regime, benefiting from the proliferation and mechanical reproduction of the visual document. The sensory field in eighteenth-century Paris was still a contested territory where multiple sensory practices vied for influence, at the side of a commanding sight, in the construction of a sane and controllable environment. The study of this field is an opportunity to capture the swan songs, so to speak, of the senses before they were effectively muted under the "empire of the eye."

Click here for the lecture poster.

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