Jacques-François Blondel

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Jacques-François Blondel (January 17, 1705-January 9, 1774) was a French architect. He was the grandson ("le petit Blondel") of François Blondel ("le grand Blondel"), whose course of architecture had appeared in four volumes in 1683 [1].

[edit] Biography

Born in Rouen, he began life as an architectural engraver, but developed into a conservative and thorough architect, whose rationally ordered mind consolidated French classical tradition and practice. His hugely influential work, De La Distribution Des Maisons De Plaisance, Et De La Decoration Des Edifices En General was issued at Paris, 1737–38. It contained 155 carefully engraved plates. "Blondel was the most significant French architectural educator of the eighteenth century.....his objective was to establish design principles for domestic architecture that correspond to the classical principles already in practice for civil structures" (Millard 1993, p. 25).

He opened his architectural courses, the Ecole des Arts, in Paris in 1740. In the ensuing years a long sequence of architects profited from his discourse: Boullée, Brongniart, Chalgrin, La Guêpière, Desprez, de Wailly, Gondoin, Ledoux, and Rondelet, and to foreigners who would bring Neoclassicism home with them: the Anglo-Swedish Sir William Chambers, and the Dane Caspar Frederik Harsdorff.

His four volumes, L'Architecture française (1752– 1756), brought him to official notice; he was appointed architect to Louis XV in1755. In L'architecture he covered the past century and more of French buildings, setting them in their historical context and providing a wealth of detailed information that would otherwise have been lost. Yet his approach was soundly grounded: for the Encyclopédie he contributed the article on masonry, among others.

He was among the earliest founders of schools of architecture in France, and for this he was distinguished by the French Academy; His Cours d'architecture ou traité de la décoration, distribution et constructions des bâtiments contenant les leçons données en 1750, et les années suivantes began appearing in 1771 and ran to nine volumes by 1777, a volume of plates to each two volumes of text; the last volumes were seen through the press by his disciple Pierre Patte. His practical, encyclopedic approach, largely ignoring the excesses of Rococo, had survived changes in taste and remained in the mainstream of French architectural training for several decades more.