| This dissertation explores the desire of Enlightenment architects and theorists for an expressive language of form that would be addressed to the new subjects postulated in contemporary social theory, empiricist and sensationalist epistemology, and philosophical aesthetics. This desire animates late eighteenth-century treatises, drawings and built work that sought to analyse form and space in terms of their power to 'speak' to the observer at the level of affect and sensation. Such works shift the focus of architectural discourse from the formal objects of architecture, to the perceptual and psychological response of an observer before a building.;This period saw a wide range of statements in architectural theory and history, philosophical aesthetics, and empiricist epistemology registering a new concern with questions of experience. In this same period, architecture became charged with new capabilities and functions vis-a-vis subjectivity and the social. This dissertation argues that these developments are fundamentally linked: ideas about sense-experience and perception informed conceptions of architecture's power to shape subjective experience, and the turn to empirical experience and psychological response emerged out of broader social crises to which architecture was called to respond.;If the forms and spaces of architecture could be charged with a power over the subject, and even a vitalistic energy of their own, however, the means by which they operated on subjects stood in need of analytic determination and description. Employing theoretical models drawn from contemporary aesthetics and sensationalist epistemology, architects and theorists took up earlier paradigms of aesthetic expression and reception, transforming and transposing these onto the charged field of affective experience.;Over five thematic chapters, dealing with empiricist philosophy and the crises of experience, rhetoric and persuasive communication, sympathy and the transmission of affect, the role of the senses in architectural reception, and the experiential category of the sublime, this dissertation traces a genealogy of the subject-object relation in Enlightenment architecture, and points toward the loss and transformations of affect in modernism. Finally, by exploring this aspect of the development of modern architectural thought, I hope to provide a ground for understanding the various returns of affect in our own time. |
