ABSTRACT
In the mirror of this mesmerizing scene it seems that architecture can speak and act like human actors do. As a matter of fact, that’s what the French, historical expression architecture parlante suggests. It was the Austrian art and architecture historian Emil Kaufmann who was the first to point out the use of the expression architecture parlante in the text Etudes d’architecture en France that appeared without an author’s name in an 1852 edition of the French Magasin Pittoresque. Kaufmann ascertained that the anonymous author introduced the term architecture parlante in relation to the work of the French, eighteenth-century architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. He is known for being a pioneer of French neoclassical architecture. Ledoux’s aim was to make architecture concur with the new French ideas inspired by the modern rationalism of René Descartes whose most accentuated concepts were autonomy, purity and geometry. The notion of architecture parlante indicates the intention of the new generation of eighteenth-century French architects to design buildings which
express the autonomous language of architecture itself. Architecture must tell its own story instead of responding to practical necessities. From this point of view, Kaufmann draws a straight line between Ledoux and Le Corbusier. He calls it ‘the development of autonomous architecture’ (Kaufmann 1981).
