Antoine Picon, "Urban Sensing: Toward a New Form of Collective Consciousness", in Humanizing Digital Reality: Design Modelling Symposium Paris 2017, Springer Nature, Singapore, 2017, pp. 63-72. (original) (raw)

Renaissance and baroque attempts to make the city more regular to the modernist project of entirely rational and geometrically rigorous new urban compositions. From the nineteenth century onwards, these endeavors were, however, balanced by a growing sense of the value of the urban historic heritage. Through novels like Victor Hugo's celebrated Hunchback of Notre-Dame published in 1831, Romanticism contributed to the reevaluation of the picturesque value of ancient districts. The monumental legacy of past centuries led also to evolutions such as the reintroduction of color, after the Greeks and the Gothic, in contemporary buildings. The visual experience of the modern city thus appeared as a contested field full of tensions and even contradictions.