Le Camus de Mézières, N. (1780) Le génie de l’architecture, ou l’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations. Paris: Benoît Morin.


Le Camus de Mézières proposes that architecture should be judged not only by proportional correctness or visual pleasure but by its capacity to move the senses and organise affect. His title states the argument with unusual directness: architecture possesses an analogy with sensation. The treatise moves from architectural orders into “the art of pleasing,” exterior decoration, distribution, and a long sequence of specific rooms, making spatial progression itself part of architectural meaning. Its theoretical contribution is to shift attention from isolated formal elements toward the experiential succession through which rooms, thresholds, light, scale, decoration and use acquire differentiated character. Methodologically, the building becomes a sequence of perceptual states rather than a static composition apprehended at once. This gives the work a precise bridge to later theories of atmosphere, phenomenology and cinematic space: architecture can construct knowledge and emotion temporally, through the calibrated passage from one condition to another.