Richard A. Etlin demonstrates how the conceptual basis of the modern house and the physical layout of the modern city emerged from debates among theoretically innovative French architects of the eighteenth century. Examining a broad range of topics from architecture and urbanism to gardening and funerary monuments, he reconsiders eighteenth-century French architecture with regard to the ways in which it was informed by symbolic space.

This book provides an accessible introduction to a century of architecture that transformed the classical forms of the Renaissance and Baroque periods into building types still familiar today.