"The Architecture of Industry in Diderot's Encyclopedia"

John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford University)

The plates of the Encyclopedia, the legends that accompany them, and the

articles they illustrate point to an important expansion of the concept of

"architecture" during the course of the eighteenth century.

Architectural drawings and engravings, in the Renaissance tradition

following Vitruvius, described self-sufficient structures that builders

familiar with the visual syntax of plans and elevations could use to

fabricate three-dimensional constructs. Buildings were assumed to be

supra-natural spaces for living, for work, for association, for government

proceedings, or for religious ceremonies. Architectural drawings

systematized the rational aspects of architecture by adopting a hermetic

language and syntax to present depopulated idealizations of space-defining

structures. Floor plans, like x-ray views from an all-seeing intellect,

were understood to represent the most rational aspect of a building's

structure. Renderings and engravings that showed completed buildings in the

form of pictorial tableaux served as souvenirs or catalysts to mental travel

that connected viewers in far-flung locales to famous structures, or

fostered projected reconstructions of ruins from the past. The

Encyclopedia contains many plates reflecting these traditional architectural

practices. The legends to such plates refer to the use of buildings, the

iconography of their decoration, their patronage, and their place in the

life of the cities for which they were designed. Typically, legends of this

kind do not refer the user to articles within the body of the Encyclopedia.

The plates of the Encyclopedia also attempt to visualize a new kind of

architectural space: not a void shaped by material, but a component of

machines that produce things or make value. Such spaces no longer incarnate

or symbolize value, but are tools of production. The preferred mode of

representing this functional or productive space is a diagram--notably cross

sections, cutaways, and exploded drawings. Two rich examples from the

Encyclopedia are the plates on mines and those devoted to smelters and

forges. These spaces of production are shaped by natural resources or the

demands of technology: the mine follows a vein of ore rather than a

pre-ordained design, thereby defining a space within in the earth far

removed from the traditional analogy between architecture and the dome of

heaven; the blast furnace is shaped like a cone to serve the geometric

disspation of high-temperatures, not because a geometry for building can be

extrapolated--as Vitruvius claimed--from the study of human proportions.

Comprehension of such plates is not self-evident: indeed, even the legends

fail to explicate them. Instead, readers are referred to lengthy articles

in the main volumes of the Encyclopedia where processes receive extensive

linguistic narration, even in those cases where multiple plates set forth

varied views of diagrammatic representations.

Our thesis is that this expanded field of architecture dovetails with the

"culture of diagram," a way of describing the world crystallized in the

Encyclopedia. Diderot's recourse to "rapport" and cross-referencing are

symptomatic of his belief that knowledge emerges from the correlation of

parts in a process of discovery. Architectural renderings from a single

vantage point (epitomized by tableaux in one-point perspective) or of

buildings in plan can adequately describe the empty shells of ideal spaces,

but they are no match for the temporal and material complexity of spaces

where things are made and work is done. Describing these functional spaces

demands a new relationship between word and image: the correlative dynamics