Decadence: An Architectural Genealogy of Material, Lateness, and Style

Abstract

As the antithesis of Western rationality, mastery, and progress, the concept of decadence has a long yet obscure relationship within the modern discipline of architecture. Its use in the field often carries a negative connotation as it tracks across historical, aesthetic, social, economic, and ecological territories of meaning. This dissertation constructs a genealogy of decadence within architecture by tracing its appearance within architectural discourse at the time of disciplinary formation in the late-eighteenth century, its role in shaping nineteenth-century buildings and architectural theories, and its later extension into postmodernism. In addition to revealing the conceptual contours of decadence within a modern discipline that often sought to rout it out, this study argues for the possibility of an operative engagement with the term. Unique within the history of decadence is the fin-de-siècle decadent literary movement. Many of the authors shaping this genre use the built environment to highlight the physical, historical, and subjective connotations of decadence as they explore the concept. I take their work as a productive example of constructing a non-oppositional engagement with decadence, and I extend their thematic framing as a means to track the concept transhistorically to the analysis of architectural projects. Through the themes of material, lateness, and style, this dissertation traces three built works: the Sacré-Coeur basilica (1871-1914), Charles Moore’s Centerbrook house (1969), and the Crystal Cathedral (1980). Together, these structures link questions of material networks, historical narrative, and identity to design strategies that oscillate between the formal and the representational. Ultimately, the study of decadence in architecture is as much about unearthing examples of critical practice that fall outside of the aegis of autonomy as it is about revealing the suppressed underlayers of a modern discipline.