David Theodore Van Zanten

Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History. Occupies a unique place in modern architectural and urban history. His prolific body of publications ranging from nineteenth-century polychromy and French and American Beaux-Arts classicism to Parisian urbanism and early twentieth-century modernism has challenged and changed understanding of architecture and its relationship to the modern city and urban political, cultural, and bureaucratic structures. Two major books on nineteenth-century Paris, Designing Paris: The Work of Duban, Labrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer (1987) and Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital (1994), are seminal texts in the field. Equally important is his work on turn-of-twentieth-century America, which has shown how the connections between French theory and pedagogy and American practice provided special conditions for the development of modernism in the architecture of Louis Sullivan and his followers. Numerous essays and book Sullivan's City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan (2000), articulate a complex argument for understanding design at a variety of scales, from ornament to the building to the city itself. Decorated Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture for his efforts relating French to American cultural history.