The University Libraries, Mason Publishing and the University Bookstore present
Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris
Byย Sun-Young Park
Sun-Young Park
Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, & Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris
Thursday, March 7th
3:00-4:30 p.m.
Main Reading Room (2001)
Fenwick Library, Fairfax Campus
Modern hygienic urbanism originated in the airy boulevards, public parks, and sewer system that transformed the Parisian cityscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet these well-known developments in public health built on a previous moment of anxiety about the hygiene of modern city dwellers. Amid fears of national decline that accompanied the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire, efforts to modernize Paris between 1800 and 1850 focused not on grand and comprehensive structural reforms, but rather on improving the bodily and mental fitness of the individual citizen. These forgotten efforts to renew and reform the physical and moral health of the urban subject found expression in the built environment of the cityโin the gymnasiums, swimming pools, and green spaces of private and public institutions, from the pedagogical to the recreational.
In Ideals of the Body, Sun-Young Park, assistant professor of history and art history, reveals how these anxieties about health and social order, which manifested in emerging ideals of the body, created a uniquely spatial and urban experience of modernity in the postrevolutionary capital, one profoundly impacted by hygiene, mobility, productivity, leisure, spectacle, and technology.
Refreshments will be provided. The Mason Author Series is co-sponsored by the University Bookstore.