The Edenic device, paradise architectures.

Paradise unites what is "irreproachable" in the quest for endless happiness. To dare to invite it into architectural discourse is to invent architecture by questioning its initial absence. Alain Guiheux thus confronts a paradox: if paradise is characterized by the lack of architecture, if there is no architecture in Eden, how can we borrow this concept to write the history (if not the counter-history) of architecture? For the myth of paradise, which engenders attitudes and desires, has continuously transformed architecture.

Architectures Paradis confronts the reader with the return of the Edenic system and offers a captivating journey into this other stage of architecture. Paradise is the figure of the unthinkable, the invisible, and the indeterminate, against the tyranny of order and "space." With a particularly rich icono-semantic network, juxtaposing medieval illumination, the radical projects of the avant-gardes of the 1960s, contemporary architectural achievements, as well as novels and cinema, this book creates a narrative that profoundly rethinks architecture and its consequences—both in presence and absence—on humans.