specialization Cultural history of European architecture and town planning, 17th—19th centuries; theory; historiography of architecture. email
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B.A. Yale University M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University
Richard Wittman specializes in the cultural history of architecture and town planning, especially of the modern and early modern periods, with secondary research emphases in theory and the historiography of architecture. His primary interest lies in the emergence of modern conceptions and experiences of space, whether architectural, political, personal, scientific, or virtual. His talks and publications explore these themes mainly in connection to seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century France, and, more recently, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Rome. He welcomes the opportunity to work with graduate students interested in theoretically informed, culturally oriented approaches to virtually any aspect of architectural history.
Professor Wittman's first book was entitled Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2007). He has also published a variety of articles on related topics, including: "Architecture, Space, and Abstraction in the Eighteenth-Century French Public Sphere," which appeared in Representations 102 (May 2008); "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 criticism in translation, tentatively entitled, Architectural Writing in France from the Eighteenth Century to Haussmann: A Reader (under contract to Routledge).
During the Fall Quarter 2007, Professor Wittman was Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. Professor Wittman spent the 2005-06 academic year in Rome on an NEH Fellowship, where he pursued research on a new book project on the century-long reconstruction of the Early Christian basilica of S. Paolo fuori le mura in Rome (1825-1929). He will return to Rome for the 2009-10 academic year to complete research on this project, this time as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. His project on S. Paolo will consider official representations of the reconstruction and their public reception, both as reflections of a fluctuating political situation, and in terms of the changing possibilities for architectural experience and representation in the increasingly mediatized public culture of modernity.
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) 2008 Theories and Methods in Architectural History
Richard Wittman specializes in the cultural history of architecture and town planning, especially of the modern and early modern periods, with secondary research emphases in theory and the historiography of architecture. His primary interest lies in the emergence of modern conceptions and experiences of space, whether architectural, political, personal, scientific, or virtual. His talks and publications explore these themes mainly in connection to seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century France, and, more recently, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Rome. He welcomes the opportunity to work with graduate students interested in theoretically informed, culturally oriented approaches to virtually any aspect of architectural history.
Professor Wittman's first book was entitled Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2007). He has also published a variety of articles on related topics, including: "Architecture, Space, and Abstraction in the Eighteenth-Century French Public Sphere," which appeared in Representations 102 (May 2008); "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 criticism in translation, tentatively entitled, Architectural Writing in France from the Eighteenth Century to Haussmann: A Reader (under contract to Routledge).
During the Fall Quarter 2007, Professor Wittman was Visiting Professor in the Department of Architecture at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. Professor Wittman spent the 2005-06 academic year in Rome on an NEH Fellowship, where he pursued research on a new book project on the century-long reconstruction of the Early Christian basilica of S. Paolo fuori le mura in Rome (1825-1929). He will return to Rome for the 2009-10 academic year to complete research on this project, this time as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. His project on S. Paolo will consider official representations of the reconstruction and their public reception, both as reflections of a fluctuating political situation, and in terms of the changing possibilities for architectural experience and representation in the increasingly mediatized public culture of modernity.