The course taught to engineers at the new École polytechnique: architecture reduced to a method. Its aim is fitness and economy, not imitation; its tool is a grid of axes on which walls, columns and rooms are combined into any building.
Durand (1760–1834) had worked for Étienne-Louis Boullée and taught architecture at the École polytechnique from 1795 to 1830. His students were engineers who would build roads, barracks and public buildings for the French state, and they had a few weeks, not years, to learn the subject. The Précis is his answer: a system that anyone could apply.
Durand rejects both the primitive hut and the idea that the orders imitate the human body. The purpose of architecture, he says, is public and private utility; its two principles are convenance (fitness: solidity, healthiness and convenience) and économie (economy: symmetry, regularity and simplicity, which cost least for a given result). A building that satisfies these is beautiful as a consequence, not as an aim.
The method is to work on squared paper. Draw the principal axes, then a grid of secondary axes; place walls on the axes and columns at their intersections; choose from a small repertory of elements (porticoes, vestibules, stairs, rooms, courts) and combine them symmetrically. Plates show the same elements recombined into dozens of building types. The approach anticipates modular design and the systematic plan of the nineteenth century; Durand’s companion volume, the Recueil et parallèle (1800), drew the buildings of all periods at a single scale for comparison.
The book, part by part
I Introduction: Aims and principles
Architecture as the art of composing and executing public and private buildings; utility as its end; fitness and economy as its principles. A critique of Laugier and of Vitruvius’s anthropomorphic proportions.
Rules: Fitness and economy
II Part I: The elements of buildings
Materials and their use; walls, supports, floors, vaults and roofs, each shown in its simplest economical form.
III Part II: Composition in general
The “march to follow” in composing any project: axes, grid, walls on the axes, columns at intersections, openings; the combination of parts horizontally and vertically.
Rules: Axes first, then walls, then columns · Few elements, many combinations
IV Part III: The study of building types
Town gates, temples, palaces, libraries, museums, colleges, hospitals, prisons, barracks, markets and houses, each composed from the same elements on the same grid.