Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essay on Architecture (1753 (2nd ed. 1755))

A short, polemical book by a Jesuit preacher that traced all architecture back to the primitive hut (four trees, some beams, a pitched roof) and concluded that only the column, the entablature and the pediment are essential. Everything else is licence or fault.

Laugier (1713–69) was not an architect but a writer and preacher; the Essai appeared anonymously in 1753 and was an immediate success. The second edition of 1755 carried the famous frontispiece engraved after Charles Eisen: a woman personifying Architecture, leaning on fragments of a classical entablature, points a child towards a rustic hut made of living trees.

The argument is deductive. Natural man, seeking shelter, chose four strong trees, laid branches across them and leaned others against each other to make a roof. From this model Laugier derives a severe code: the column must stand free and be round, as a tree trunk is; the entablature must be straight and carried directly by columns; the pediment must crown only the ends of a roof. Pilasters, engaged columns, pedestals, arcades on columns, broken pediments and superimposed orders on church fronts are all declared to be departures from nature.

The Essai gave a theory to the reaction against the Rococo and prepared the way for Neoclassicism. Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève (the Panthéon, begun 1757), with its free-standing columns carrying straight entablatures inside a church, was widely seen as Laugier’s programme realised; the book was translated into English in 1755 and German in 1756.

The book, part by part

I Introduction and Chapter I: General principles

The primitive hut as the model of all architecture. The essential parts (column, entablature, pediment), the parts introduced by necessity (walls, doors, windows) and the parts added by caprice, which are faults.

Fig. 1The hut, and the same three members translated into stone. Open in Models ↗

Rules: The primitive hut · The column must stand free · Licences to avoid

II Chapter II: The orders

The five orders reviewed with a critical eye: Laugier accepts them but attacks specific abuses: twisted columns, fluted shafts filled with cabling, heavy pedestals.

III Chapters III–IV: How to build and ornament churches

An ideal church of free-standing columns carrying a straight entablature, with vaults above, combining Greek clarity with Gothic lightness.

IV Chapters V–VI: Towns and gardens

The city should be designed like a park, with a variety of regular streets and squares; an early statement of urban embellishment.

Rules drawn from Essay on Architecture

The primitive hut

Judge every building against the first shelter: four trees for columns, branches laid across them for the entablature, and a pitched roof whose end makes the pediment. These three are the essential parts; all else is added.

The column must stand free

Let columns stand free, round and upright, carrying a straight entablature directly; do not engage them in walls, replace them with pilasters, or set them on pedestals.

Licences to avoid

Avoid the ornaments that have no model in the hut: broken or curved pediments, pediments on the long side of a roof, orders piled storey upon storey on a church front, arches carried on columns, and twisted or cabled shafts.

A pediment is the end of a roof

Put a pediment only where the roof actually ends in a gable, on the short sides of a building, never along its length or stacked one above another, because the pediment represents the gable of the roof.

The town as a forest

Plan a town as a park is cut through a forest: with many straight streets, squares from which several streets branch, and broad entrances, so that there is regularity in the details and variety, even a certain disorder, in the whole.

Design a city like a park

Lay out a town as a gardener lays out a forest park: wide, straight streets as its avenues, squares where they meet, well-marked entrances, and within that order enough variety of buildings that the whole never becomes monotonous.

The public, not the owner, decides the street front

Do not leave the fronts of houses to the whim of each builder: let the authorities fix their line, height and design so that a street or square is composed as a whole, and vary the designs from one street to the next so that uniformity does not become tedium.