Professor – Architecture

Excerpt from The School of Architecture faculty web site

B.Arch, M.Arch, McGill University; M.Phil., Ph.D., Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University

Professor Jean-François Bédard specializes in the theory and practice of French architecture during the long eighteenth century. His teaching has focused on the social rituals and political values of court society in relation to architecture, decoration, and ornament. He has investigated the parallels between rhetoric and architectural design, the invention of the modern architect, and the interrelationship between architecture, ornament, and fashion in the ‘spectacular’ politics of the Ancien Regime.

Professor Bédard completed his graduate studies in 2003 at Columbia University, where he studied with Professors Robin Middleton, Barry Bergdoll, and Joseph Connors in the Department of Art History and Archeology. His dissertation centered on the domestic work of the French architect Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672-1742), a preeminent figure of the French Regency. Bédard has developed aspects of this research as a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art and the Humanities, a Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and a Visiting Scholar at the Institut d’histoire de l’art in Paris. His first book related to that project, Decorative Games: Ornament, Rhetoric, and Noble Culture in the Work of Gilles-Marie Oppenord (University of Delaware Press, 2011) traces the importance of noble rituals in the creative process of a court architect such as Oppenord.

Prior to coming to Syracuse, Bédard was Assistant Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, 1991-95.