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This thesis reflects on the Lettres sur l'Architechure of Viel de Saint-Maux, published in Paris in 1787. This period represents a crisis point at which classical architechure and a traditional means of relating-to-the-world had exhausted themselves. In the Lettres, St.-Maux privileges original agrarian societies who worship the natural force of fecundity and the agricultural bounty that results from it. He claims that this worship supplied the radical base for their iconographic and symbolic forms as applied to architecture. Viel de St.-Maux's privileging of the generative forces of nature as a site for sacred imagining and ritual constructions of the agricultural environment belie a relation to the methodology and epistemology of Natural History as formulated by the Comte de Buffon. / Viel de Saint-Maux sought to resist the threat of an overweening rationality by valuing the wonderment cast by the discoveries of Science. He put his faith in natural science and applied this same compulsion to the ancient primitives who, he believed, knew divinely how to propitiate Nature and its fecundity. Fecundity and Agriculture become metaphors for cultural harmony, enlightenment and a re-fusion of the mystery of vitality into everyday life.

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