Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers a different take on addressing the critical from both an epistemological and a theoretical point of view. The backdrop to Le Corbusier's short and retrospective observations on totality and crisis is Emil Kaufmann's historiography of the eighteenth-century French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Kaufmann's text also unfolds a project that is critical, but only to a limited degree; his case still allows to make a historical corollary between two notions of abstraction and autonomy. Kaufmann's advocacy for modernity follows a totalized notion of time which can be associated with the present esteem for contemporaneity.