The First Moderns

Review

"The range of Rykwert's learning is enormous. History of gardens, Chinese influences, festival architecture, all contribute to the overflowing wealth. Great figures in the history of thought and science - Bacon, Newton, Vico - are seen from new angles.... This is no superficial history of styles, no conventional history of ideas. It invigorates both through the attempt a...

Review

"The range of Rykwert's learning is enormous. History of gardens, Chinese influences, festival architecture, all contribute to the overflowing wealth. Great figures in the history of thought and science - Bacon, Newton, Vico - are seen from new angles.... This is no superficial history of styles, no conventional history of ideas. It invigorates both through the attempt at a new kind of history of architecture."

- Frances Yates, The Times Literary Supplement

"This is a product of rare scholarship. A cultural history of European architecture between 1660 and 1780 ... it is the boldest history of architecture to have appeared since Wittkower's Architectural Principles."

- Jules Lubbock, Art History

Product Description

The focus of this brilliant tour de force is the international intellectual discourse that began in the French academy between Blondel and Perrault and which Rykwert believes posed the first essential problems of modernism. His history covers the work and thought of Inigo Jones, Wren, Hawksmoor, Burlington, Kent, Hogarth, Piranesi, Lodoli, Winkelmann, and J. B. Fischer von Erlach.