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faculty
richard wittman, assistant professor
curriculum vitae
specialization
Cultural history of European architecture
and town planning, 17th—19th centuries;
theory; historiography of architecture.
office hours
Arts 1139, by appointment
phone
805 893 7583
B.A. Yale University
M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University
Richard Wittman specializes in the cultural history of early modern and modern European architecture and town planning, with secondary interests in theory and the historiography of architecture. His research centers on the ways in which architecture and planning changed with the birth of the modern world, as the spatially specific, decentralized, particularistic frameworks of pre- and early modern European society were replaced by the spatially exploded, discursively integrated frameworks (nation, public) that we think of as modern. His work has focused on two distinct areas: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, and, more recently, nineteenth-century Rome. In both areas, his publications investigate how design, theory, and even the individual experience of architecture and urban environments changed with growing mass participation in the spatially expansive, temporally accelerated networks of representation made possible by print culture. He welcomes the opportunity to work with graduate students interested in theoretically informed, culturally oriented approaches to virtually any aspect of architectural history, but especially European architecture from the Renaissance through the first half of the 20th century.
Professor Wittman's first book is entitled Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (forthcoming from Routledge). He has also published a variety of articles on related topics, including: "Local Memory and National Aesthetics: Jean Pagès's Early Eighteenth-Century Description of the 'Incomparable' Cathedral of Amiens" in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003); "The Hut and the Altar: Architectural Origins and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France" Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 36; and "A Bourgeois Family Puts its Cathedral in Order: A Fictive Debate on Notre-Dame in the Journal de Paris in 1780" in Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished - Essays in Honor of Robin Middleton (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006). He is also currenly editing an annotated anthology of eighteenth-century criticism in translation, tentatively entitled, Architecture, the City, and the Public in Eighteenth-Century France: A Reader (under contract to Routledge).
Professor Wittman spent the 2005-06 academic year in Rome on an NEH Fellowship,
where he pursued research on a new book project that examines the Holy
See's most important architectural endeavor of the nineteenth century:
the century-long reconstruction of the Roman Early Christian basilica
of S. Paolo fuori le mura, starting in 1825. This study centers on official
representations of the reconstruction and their public reception at the
Roman, Italian, and international levels. It considers these both as reflections
of a fluctuating political situation, but also in terms of the changing
possibilities for architectural experience and representation in the increasingly
mediatized public culture of modernity.
During the Fall Quarter 2007, Professor Wittman will be Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design.
undergraduate courses
Architecture, Urbanism, and Public Culture in 18th-Century Paris
Architectural and Urban Change in Paris and Rome during the 19th Century
Introduction to Architecture and Planning
Landscape and Landscape Architecture from the Renaissance to the Early 20th Century
Wren, Vanbrugh, and Hawksmoor (seminar)
17th-Century Architecture in Italy, England, and France
French Gothic Architecture in the 12th and 13th Centuries
graduate courses
2006: Architecture and Print Culture (c.1530 - c.1930)
