This dialogue addressed the shifts in architectural ideas surrounding the life and work of Claude Perrault. It considered the shifting centers of power from Renaissance Italy to absolutist France; the context of Perrault’s life and work during the reign of Louis XIV and the creation of the French Academies; the shifting relationship between architecture and the rise of modern science; and the debates between tradition and reason that lay at the heart of the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.” The dialogue focused in particular on Perrault’s arguments in his Ordonnance and situated them within this broader context.