Sydney Event | Jennifer Ferng on Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s Maison gothique (1777-1814)

 Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Section perpendiculaire d'un souterrain de la maison gothique

Jean-Jacques Lequeu, Section perpendiculaire d’un souterrain de la maison gothique

Sensuality and the Subterranean: Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s Maison gothique (1777-1814) during the late Enlightenment

Dr Jennifer Ferng, Lecturer Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning 

As one of the French utopian designers of the late Enlightenment, Lequeu is regarded by many architectural historians as having an enigmatic inventory of unbuilt work. He envisioned Grecian-Egyptian temples, Masonic grottoes, and neoclassical tombs and civic monuments. Enhanced by his training as a draughtsman, his studies of human anatomy verged on the edge of explicit prurience. This lecture surveys some of his fanciful imagery in relation to the intellectual discourses surrounding the subterranean, focusing on how myth and occult knowledge came to define his ideas of architecture and the body.

Dr Jennifer Ferng is Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves as co-editor of Architectural Theory Review. Her research examines eighteenth-century European architecture and art in the context of the geological sciences. 

Date: Monday 13th October, 6.00pm – 7.30pm

Venue: Law School Lounge, Sydney Law School, Eastern Avenue, The University of Sydney (Click here for venue directions).

Free and open to all with online registration requested. Register online via this website.

This lecture is part of the Key Texts series, presented Sydney Ideas and the Sydney Intellectual History Network (SIHN).