Court & Garden explores the social, psychological, and especially the formal transformations that led architects to trade the city of public space for the city of private icons. This detailed history of the French hotel- an aristocratic town house developed largely in Paris between 1550 and 1800 - reveals the hotel to be a sophisticated instrument of urbanism that both chronicles the demise of the public realm and offers architectural techniques for reconstructing a spatially rich city. Michael Dennis is a practicing architect. He has taught and lectured widely, and was the 1986 Thomas Jefferson Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia. A Graham Foundation Book.