A history of world architecture in two volumes, written by an engineer who believed that every style follows from its way of building. Choisy explained each tradition through its materials and structure and illustrated it with his famous axonometric drawings seen from below.
Auguste Choisy (1841–1909) was an engineer of the French Ponts et Chaussées and a professor at its school. Before the Histoire he wrote two books on construction that are still consulted: L’Art de bâtir chez les Romains (1873), on the concrete vaults of the Romans and the brick ribs and formwork that shaped them, and L’Art de bâtir chez les Byzantins (1883), on the domes, pendentives and vaults built in brick without centring.
The Histoire de l’architecture (1899) runs from prehistory to the eighteenth century. Its argument is that form is the logical consequence of technique: the Greek temple is the translation of a timber structure into stone, the Roman vault the product of a concrete poured over light formwork, the Gothic cathedral the working-out of the rib and the flying buttress. Choisy was careful, sceptical of legend, and mathematically literate; he treated a building as a problem that had been solved.
The book is famous for its illustrations. Choisy drew most buildings in axonometric projection seen from beneath: plan, section and elevation in one image, as if the building were lifted up and viewed from the ground below. The drawings show at a glance how a vault is carried, how a dome is buttressed, how a space is shaped. They made a deep impression on the architects of the next generation: Auguste Perret admired them, and Le Corbusier reproduced several in Vers une architecture (1923).
Choisy also wrote one of the most influential pages ever written about Greek planning: his analysis of the Athenian Acropolis as a sequence of views composed from the gateway, in which the buildings are balanced asymmetrically like masses in a picture rather than set on a single axis. It became a founding text for the modern idea of architecture as experienced in movement.
The book, part by part
I Greece
The Doric temple as petrified carpentry; the orders and their proportions; the optical refinements; and the celebrated reading of the Acropolis as a picturesque composition balanced around the visitor’s path.
Rules: The Doric corner conflict
II Rome
Concrete poured in thin layers between brick-faced walls, vaults turned on light centring with brick ribs, and the great spaces of baths and basilicas that followed from them. The Pantheon as the masterpiece of the method.
III Byzantium
The dome on pendentives, the squinch, domes built without centring in rings of brick, and the balance of thrusts in Hagia Sophia, where semidomes and buttress piers take the push of the great dome.
Rules: The pendentive: a sphere cut by a square · The squinch: from square to octagon · Semidomes lengthen the dome
IV Medieval and later
Romanesque vaulting, the Gothic system of rib, pier and flying buttress, the architecture of Islam, India and the Far East, and the Renaissance return to the orders, each explained by its structure.