This seminar studies the works of architects and artists from Nicolas Poussin and Claude Perrault to Jacques-Louis David and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux through the lenses of successive reinterpretations of the Enlightenment in the modern period. Conventional ascriptions of the “Age of Reason” (Ernst Cassirer, Emil Kaufmann) were thrown into question by post-World War II philosophers (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer) and later by poststructuralist critics (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida); these critiques were countered by a new interest in typological form (Aldo Rossi, Bruno Fortier) that founded Neo-Rationalism on a reading of Enlightenment visions of city structure. The engaged historical interest in the reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its cultural effects (Maurice Agulhon, Mona Ozouf, Robert Darnton) together with a revived utopianism of the later 1960s opened the texts of Enlightenment architects, hitherto seen as “di∞cult,” to scrutiny with respect to the literary accomplishments of the late eighteenth century. More recently, the return to a study of the idea of “nature” in the work of Bruno Latour and Félix Guattari has stimulated a sense of the “modernity” of the Enlightenment’s views of the environment, for better or for worse.