From Aër Concretus to Aerism: Reading and Building Architectural Histories of Air and the Environment in Eighteenth-Century France
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Abstract
In eighteenth-century France, a group of texts revealed air as a literary artifact that came to life on the printed page and conditioned the design of buildings, towns, and landscapes. These texts were part of a culture of aerism that looked to air and other environmental conditions as a source of disease. Air was modified and rethought to suit the agendas of readers and other audiences invested in the relationship between human health and climate. This is to say that air was a modernizing substance and committing its history to words and books anticipated not only nineteenth-century ideas about hygiene but also created an architectural history of air that unmoors our understandings of architectural modernity and situates it within a larger, more diffuse field of textual and cultural practices.
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