Cours d’architecture enseigné dans l’Académie royale d’architecture

The lectures of the first professor of the Royal Academy of Architecture in Paris: a complete, orthodox course in the orders, openings, stairs, bridges and arches, and the classic defence of proportion as something rooted in nature, against Claude Perrault, who called it custom.

François Blondel (1618–86) was a mathematician, military engineer and diplomat before Colbert made him director of the new Académie royale d’architecture in 1671. His lectures there were published in five parts between 1675 and 1683. His best-known building is the Porte Saint-Denis in Paris (1672), a triumphal arch whose proportions he explains in the Cours. He is not to be confused with Jacques-François Blondel (1705–74), the eighteenth-century teacher and author of another, later Cours.

The course moves from the orders (compared across Vitruvius, Palladio, Scamozzi, Vignola and others) to intercolumniations, arcades, doors, windows and staircases, and then to pyramids, obelisks, bridges and triumphal arches. Blondel gives many rules of thumb of the kind that could be taught to students, and one of them, his rule for the proportion of stairs, is still in building codes today.

Blondel’s most important argument was theoretical. Against Perrault’s claim that the proportions of the orders are merely customary, Blondel held that beauty in architecture, like harmony in music, arises from fixed relations that please us naturally; the fact that the ancients varied their proportions showed only that the right ratio depended on circumstances such as viewing distance. The quarrel between the two men is one of the founding debates of modern architectural theory.

The book, part by part