Abstract
In addition to the superficial visual similarities between the architectural theories of the Silesian-born, seventeenth-century Dutch mathematician Nicolaus Goldmann and the early nineteenth-century French architect Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, there is a more profound interconnection: their use of the grid. This article evaluates the relation between the two theories and argues how Durand could have been influenced by Goldmann’s writings. It turns out to be more than likely that the two were linked by Durand´s German pupils who brought the tradition of German eighteenth-century architectural theory with them. This corpus was nourished by Leonhard Christoph Sturm´s ‘Goldmannic’ architecture.
Highlights
The gulf between Dutch seventeenth-century architectural theory and architectural education in early nineteenth-century France is large
Durand eventually developed a radical new teaching method, not so much by discarding tradition as by redefining the traditional elements of architectural theory.33. With his spare, almost mechanistic approach to design he demonstrated an interest in questions of architectural type and in the grid as a coordinating tool for the operations of combination and composition in which the orders still had their place
The way in which Durand systematised architectural knowledge and reduced it to a set of theoretical design principles with emphasis on architectural type, as well as the way in which he articulated his method by means of a grid, bears the hallmarks of eighteenth-century German architectural theory, to a certain degree
Summary
The gulf between Dutch seventeenth-century architectural theory and architectural education in early nineteenth-century France is large. The character of the first of these contrasts with the other two, being a diachronic comparison of historical buildings, classified according to type and all presented on a single scale, Recueil et parallèle des edifices de tout genre, anciens et modernes [...] (Paris 1799–1801).18 He was not the first author to draw architectural parallels — think of Julien-David Leroy — Durand is exceptional in transcending the differences in time, culture and style. One of the most important developments in the context of this argument is that the design principles are completely detached from the purposes of the various building types and the large variety of local practices.20 In this detachment Durand went back to a seventeenth-century ideal of systematisation aspired to by Goldmann, and certainly went against the growing historicist tendency by cutting across the scientific archaeological enterprises of the late eighteenth century (Szambien 1982: 33).. This radical modification of the design process and the simplification of the orders in their ratios and detailing
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