3 LAUGIER’S

PROTOTYPAL HUT,
SOUFFLOT’S
SAINTE-GENEVIÈVE,
AND THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
THEORY OF
REPRESENTATION

Neil Levine

The revolutionary concept of architectural representation based on the model of

the primitive hut formulated by the young French Jesuit priest and amateur Marc-
Antoine Laugier (1713–69) is arguably the single most important contribution to
modern architectural theory advanced in the Age of Enlightenment. Serving as
the cornerstone of his argument for reforming contemporary architecture, Lau-
gier’s mimetic theory of representation appeared in 1753 in his anonymously pub-
lished Essai sur l’architecture. It had a veritable succès de scandale and was translated
into English and German within a couple of years.1 In 1755 it appeared in a second
French edition, this one including the name of the author and containing a number
of illustrations. The most significant of these was the frontispiece, an extraordinary
engraving that provided one of the boldest and most potent images ever produced
of architectural representation as an imitation of nature (Figure 3.1). The primitive
hut it depicted became the centerpiece around which much of the debate over
modern architecture revolved during the succeeding two centuries.2

The Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume II, Eighteenth-Century Architecture.

Edited by Caroline van Eck and Sigrid de Jong.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Figure 3.1 Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture, 1753. Frontispiece, 2nd ed., by
Charles Eisen, 1755.
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 3

The redefinition of mimesis in strict accord with a natural model for architecture’s
monumental productions offered a trenchant response to the marriage of conven-
ience between truth and appearance that determined traditional classical theory
and practice since the Renaissance and, in the process, suppressed many of its inherent
ambiguities and paradoxes. Laugier’s rationalization of architecture’s fictive source in
nature laid bare the negotiation of the relationship between truth and appearance in
the concept of vraisemblance, or verisimilitude, that was at the heart of the matter of
architectural representation. His rationalization of the truth behind appearances was
both a logical explanation of classical architecture’s most characteristic forms, to wit,
the orders, and a sophistic way of justifying a desired formal end that would almost
immediately make its appearance in a building programmatically intended to embody
many of the same ideas: the Parisian Church of Sainte-Geneviève, designed by
Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713–80) shortly after Laugier’s essay was published.

Laugier contra Vitruvius

Laugier’s Essai was written as a critique of the corruption of modern architecture

that, in the eyes of its author, had lost contact with the primitive purity of the art
and had thus been led from one abuse to another. Laugier condemned almost all
the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century classical churches in Paris that
derived from the Roman baroque. He criticized their heaviness and massiveness,
their sculptured surfaces, the multiplication of redundant parts, the lack of calm,
quiet planes and clear, distinct, structurally defined shapes. His most acerbic crit-
icism was reserved for the use of thick piers with attached pilasters to support the
heavy arches and barrel vaults that defined the typical church’s interior space.3 He
considered the resulting oppressiveness to be diametrically opposed to the kind of
spiritually affective and uplifting space appropriate to a place of Christian worship.
In contrast to such decadence, Laugier described the early Imperial Roman temple
in Nîmes, known as the Maison Carrée, as a “beautiful” building that “accords with the
true principles of architecture” by virtue of “a simplicity and a nobility that strikes
everybody” (Figure 3.2).4 As Wolfgang Herrmann has shown, Laugier knew the
Maison Carrée from an early age, having been born in Provence and having spent part
of his Jesuit training, in 1742, in the city of Nîmes itself. The two buildings Laugier
held up as rare examples of good modern architecture were ones he got to know well
when he was transferred from Lyon to Paris two years later. The first of these was the
east colonnade of the Louvre, designed by the team of Claude Perrault (1613–88),
Louis Le Vau (1612–70), and Charles Le Brun (1619–90) in the late 1660s as a direct
criticism of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s (1598–1680) rejected baroque projects. The second
was the Chapel at Versailles, designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart (1646–1708) at the
end of the century and finished in the early 1700s (Figure 3.3).5 Laugier had in fact
preached there on more than one occasion during the time he was writing the Essai.
The three buildings Laugier admired most—the Maison Carrée, the east façade
of the Louvre, and the Chapel at Versailles—all have one thing in common:
4 The Main Actors: The Architect

Figure 3.2 Hubert Robert, The Temple of Augustus (Maison Carrée) in Nîmes, 1783. Credit:
Museum of Foreign Arts, Riga.

freestanding columns supporting unbroken (or nearly unbroken, in the case of the
Louvre) entablatures. This combination, which Laugier called the only true and
“essential” form of architecture, established a fundamental criterion for his critique
of the reigning style of classicism and the basis for his proposed reforms.6 To
ground that ideal combination of freestanding column and unbroken entablature
(and triangular pediment, in the case of an exterior) in a foolproof argument based
on reason and nature, Laugier turned to the myth of the “noble savage” and
rewrote the theory of mimesis around it.
Under the heading “General Principles of Architecture,” he began the first chap-
ter of his Essai in the following way:

Architecture is the same as all the other arts: its principles are based on simple
nature, and all the rules of architecture are to be found clearly indicated in the
way nature proceeds. Let us consider man in his primitive state, without any aid
or guidance other than his natural instincts. He is in need of a place to rest. On
the banks of a quietly flowing brook, he notices a stretch of grass; its fresh greenness
is pleasing to his eyes, its tender down invites him; he is drawn there and, stretched
out at leisure on the sparkling carpet, he thinks of nothing else but enjoying the gift of
nature; he lacks nothing; he does not wish for anything. But soon the scorching heat
of the sun forces him to look for shelter. A nearby forest draws him to its cooling
shade; he finds a refuge in its depth, and there he is content. But suddenly, mists swirl
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 5

Figure 3.3 Jules Hardouin-Mansart. Chapel, Palace of Versailles, 1688–1703. Interior.

Credit: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY.
6 The Main Actors: The Architect

around and grow denser, until thick clouds cover the skies; soon torrential rain pours
down on this delightful forest. The savage, in his shelter of leaves, does not know
how to protect himself from the uncomfortable dampness that penetrates every-
where. Seeing a cave nearby, he creeps into it, and, finding it dry, he praises himself
for his discovery. But new sources of unpleasantness make his stay unbearable here.
He finds himself in darkness, the air he breathes is foul, and so he leaves, this time
resolved to make good, by his own industry, the careless neglect of nature. He wants
to make himself a dwelling that would protect him without burying him. Some fallen
branches in the forest are the right material for his purpose. He chooses four of the
strongest, raises them upright and arranges them in a square. Across their top he lays
four other branches; and on these he hoists from two sides yet another row of
branches, which incline toward each other and meet at their highest point. He then
covers this sort of roof with leaves so tightly compacted that neither rain nor sun can
penetrate; and thus the savage is housed. Admittedly, the cold and heat will make
him feel uncomfortable in this house that is open on all sides; but he will soon fill
in the space between the parts and feel secure.7

So ends the first paragraph of the Essai, recounting the narrative of humankind’s
first construction. At this point, Laugier states the premise of his theory:
Such is the course of simple nature: it is in the imitation of its ways that art was born.
The little rustic hut that I have just described is the model on which all the splendors
of architecture have been imagined. It is by approaching the simplicity of this first
model that fundamental mistakes are avoided and true perfection is achieved. …
It is easy from now on to distinguish between those parts that are essential to the
composition of an architectural order, those that have been introduced by need,
and, finally, those that have been added only by caprice. It is only in the parts that
are essential that one finds beauty; in the parts introduced by need consist all the
licenses; and in the parts added by caprice are all the faults.8

The reference to the Maison Carrée directly follows this passage and terminates the
section on “General Principles of Architecture.”9 Laugier then turns his attention
in the remaining sections of the first chapter to describing the various parts of the
classical order and how they are to be used, following the “natural” model of
the primitive hut as historically represented in the Greek or early Roman temple.
In a certain sense, there was nothing new in referring to the primitive hut. Begin-
ning with Vitruvius (circa 90–circa 20 BC), architectural theorists had usually cited
the first human efforts at building in their attempts to describe the beginnings of
architecture. But rarely, if ever, were those originary events directly connected in
an evolutionary continuum with the development of the classical forms of Greek
architecture, nor—and this is the really radical step Laugier took—was the example
of the primitive hut given priority and used to justify those later sophisticated forms
by testifying to their natural origins.10
Vitruvius set the conventional pattern that was followed more or less faithfully
up until Laugier’s time. His prehistory of architecture, recounted in the fourth
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 7

book of De architectura, started not with primitive and isolated individuals living
“like animals in forests and caves and woods” but with organized groups of human
beings. Gifted “beyond the other animals” and as a result of “the discovery of fire,”
they alone had the ability to communicate with one another by means of language.
The result was “a life in common” entailing the construction of shelters. These ear-
liest structures varied in materials and techniques: “some [began] to make shelters
of leaves, some to dig caves under the hills, some to make of mud and wattles
places for shelter, imitating the nests of swallows and their methods of building.”11
But between those primitive origins and what Vitruvius referred to as
“architecture,” meaning the much later buildings of Greece and Rome, lay an enor-
mous gulf in time reflecting the passage of humanity “from a savage and rustic life
to a peaceful civilisation.” During this long period of progress and change, humans
initially “produced better kinds of huts” as a result of seeing and learning from each
other’s work.12 Variations in construction techniques abounded. “First,” Vitruvius
stated, “with upright forked props and twigs put between, they wove their walls
with mud. Others made walls, drying moistened clods which they bound with
wood, and covered with reeds and leafage, so as to escape the rain and heat. When
in winter-time the roofs could not withstand the rains, they made ridges, and
smearing clay down the sloping roofs, they drew off the rain-water.”13 Referencing
contemporary practices, Vitruvius continued his historical account of the variety of
early types of shelter by noting that, “to this day”:

In Pontus among the nations of the Colchi, because of their rich forests, two whole trees
are laid flat, right and left, on the ground, a space being left between them. …On the
furthest parts of them, two others are placed transversely, and these four trees enclose
in the middle the space for the dwelling. Then, laying upon them alternate beams from
the four sides, they join up the angles. And so constructing the walls with trees, they
raise up towers rising perpendicular from the lowest parts. …Further, they raise the
roofs by cutting off the cross-beams at the end and gradually narrowing them. And
so, from the four sides they raise over the middle a pyramid on high. … But the
Phrygians, who are dwellers in the plains [and] … lack timber … choose natural
mounds, and dividing them in the middle by a trench and digging tracks through, open
out spaces as far as the nature of the place allows. They fasten logs together at the upper
end, and so make pyramids. These they cover with reeds and brushwood and pile up
very large hillocks from the ground above their dwellings.14

All this, in Vitruvius’ view, preceded the development of “craftsmen” who,

“armed their minds with ideas and purposes” and “building up themselves in spirit,
and looking out and forward with larger ideas born from the variety of their crafts
and disciplines, … began to build, not huts, but houses, on foundations, and with
brick walls, or built of stone; and with roofs of wood and tiles.”15 Still, none of this,
in his view, had any direct bearing on the classical architecture of Greece and
Rome. As he wrote at the end of the account summarized above, his purpose at
this point was only to describe “whence the kinds of buildings have originated”
8 The Main Actors: The Architect

and not “whence architecture arises.”16 That discussion was entirely separate and
left for book 4, where the author discussed how some of the decorative details of
the upper parts of the Doric and Ionic orders, such as triglyphs, mutules, and den-
tils, although never the structure of the temple as a whole, “arose from th[e] imi-
tation of timber work” and thus were to be considered as “representations” of
existing techniques of carpentry.17 Moreover, those discrete elements had nothing
to do with the primitive huts of “savage and rustic life” that were by then entirely
lost to memory.
Vitruvius’ historical account allowed for progress and change, which in turn pro-
vided the basis for classical theory from the Renaissance through the eighteenth
century that saw Roman and postmedieval European architecture as not only
building on the Greek example but improving it in numerous ways. This was
the kernel of the British architect-theorist William Chambers’ (1723–96) critique
of Laugier’s hypothesis in his Treatise on Civil Architecture of 1759, where he con-
descendingly cautioned the “French Jesuit” to “give himself the trouble to think
again.”18 His illustrations of the “Primitive Buildings” preceding the classical tem-
ple show three successive forms of wood huts, only the last of which bears a resem-
blance to its later masonry counterpart (Figure 3.4). The first, conical in shape, was,
in his words, “a form of the simplest structure.” “Like the birds” whose “nests …
they imitated,” these early humans “composed [their huts] of branches of trees,
spreading them wide at the bottom, and joining them in a point at the top, covering
the whole with reeds, leaves, and clay.” The second type, a flat-roofed cubic struc-
ture, evolved as dwellers “found the Conic Figure inconvenient, on account of its
inclined sides.” Over time and “insensibly,” Chambers asserted, “mankind
improved in the Art of Building, and invented methods to make their huts lasting
and handsome, as well as convenient.”19
The “improvements” that resulted in the third, gabled type ultimately led to
“solid and stately edifices of stone [that] imitated the parts which necessity had
introduced into the primitive huts.” But Chambers argued that even these “first
buildings were in all likelihood rough and uncouth.” Only after “long experience
and reasoning … and by great practice” did architects reach the “perfection …
which succeeding ages have regarded with the highest veneration.” This evolution-
ary progress in the prehistoric past foreshadowed the advances monumental archi-
tecture itself would undergo from the fifth century BC to the present. To condemn
pilasters, for example, as Laugier did, because they did not exist in the “pristine
simplicity” of the “primitive wooden huts” and were, in effect, “a Roman
invention,” was therefore to write off the extraordinary achievement of Andrea
Palladio, Inigo Jones, Vincenzo Scamozzi, and so many others, something Cham-
bers was absolutely unwilling to do.20
Unlike the Vitruvian and Vitruvian-derived accounts of architecture’s earliest
beginnings, Laugier’s assumed that the creator of the “model” rustic hut was still
living in a “state of nature” and reacting to circumstances “without any aid or guid-
ance other than his natural instincts.” As with Rousseau’s contemporaneous
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 9

Figure 3.4 William Chambers. “The Primitive Buildings & c.,” A Treatise on Civil
Architecture, 1759.
10 The Main Actors: The Architect

description of the “noble savage” in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755),
Laugier explained, in the third paragraph of his section on “General Principles,”
how the primitive hut was not merely the first example of built form but also
how it had to be seen as the natural prototype for the Greek temple and the con-
ventional forms of classical architecture that derived from it.21 Natural origin and
historical continuity were essential to his program. “Let us never lose sight of our
little rustic hut,” he warned his readers. “I can only see columns, a ceiling or entab-
lature, and a pointed roof forming at both ends what is called a pediment. So far,
there is no vault, still less an arch, no pedestals, no attic, not even a door or a win-
dow. I therefore come to this conclusion: in an architectural order only the column,
the entablature, and the pediment may form an essential part of its composition.”
He concluded that “if each of these parts is suitably placed and suitably formed,”
meaning in accord with its natural “model,” “nothing else need be added to make
the work perfect.” As a case in point, he referenced the Maison Carrée, “a rectangle
where thirty columns support an entablature and a roof—closed at both ends by a
pediment—that is all.”22
Of the many points on which critics could take issue with Laugier, there was one
that was fundamental to his argument and absolutely crucial for him to dispose of
efficiently and with the least amount of discussion. This was the presumption of the
hut’s natural origins. Laugier’s account surely left the reader in some doubt as to
the “naturalness” of what might have taken place when the “savage” emerged from
his cave to start the building process. There is no more compelling evidence for
such a logical misreading of the author’s intention than the frontispiece to the
pirated, first English edition of the book, which appeared in early 1755, about
the same time the second French edition was published (Figure 3.5). The artist,
Samuel Wale, clearly interpreted the originary event quite differently from the
way Laugier described it. Instead of a solitary “savage,” probably unclothed
and, like an animal, working by “instinct” alone, Wale’s image depicts a commu-
nity of laborers, each performing a specialized task and using various sophisticated
tools to accomplish the desired ends. According to this reading, which is clearly the
most reasonable one (and the one that follows Vitruvius most closely), the hut
made of four corner posts supporting straight entablatures and a gabled roof is
a man-made artifact and in no way a natural occurrence. The attribution of the
temple-like design to an already advanced stage of human civilization, however,
robbed it of a significant aspect of the ideational power Laugier wanted it to have.23
As previously noted, the first edition of Laugier’s Essai was unillustrated. This
allowed the reader to imagine things in conventional and entirely reasonable terms.
For the second edition of 1755, a number of engravings were added, the most important
of which is the frontispiece by Charles Eisen depicting the building of the hut as Laugier
imagined the scene and as he intended his reader to imagine it (Figure 3.1).24 The addi-
tion of this image serves to preclude a “cultural” reading based on Vitruvius and to
reinforce Laugier’s belief in the “natural” state of existence of the “savage” in question.
The trees forming the four posts of the structure were neither felled nor found
Figure 3.5 Laugier, An Essay on Architecture. 1st English edition, 1755. Frontispiece, by
Samuel Wale.
12 The Main Actors: The Architect

lying on the ground. They are rooted in it and apparently still growing. It is also almost
impossible to distinguish the constructed parts of the roof from the overhanging
boughs of the trees. Most curious is the fact that there is no human in sight.
A female muse of architecture points to the hut, and her gaze is reflected by a genie
who seems to look on, as Herrmann noted, in wonder and astonishment. The hut
is thus presented, even before the text begins, as a kind of miracle of nature. The reader
will be hard put to eliminate this picture from his or her mind while attending to the
story that follows. In its uncanniness—and still to this day—the image predisposes us to
infer what is not actually stated and to accept Laugier’s interpolation in the 1755 text
explaining that the hut is “a rough sketch that nature offers us” as a model for archi-
tecture.25 The confounding of truth and appearance in the engraved image places
new emphasis on the meaning of the concept of verisimilitude, while stretching its
power of approximation to new limits.

Laugier’s “Graeco-Gothic” Synthesis and Soufflot’s

Church of Sainte-Geneviève

If the primitive hut was the “rough sketch,” the finished picture, according to
Laugier, was the ancient Greek temple. “Architecture owes all that is perfect to
the Greeks,” he wrote.26 It is unclear whether he knew Greek architecture in
any detail or had actually seen drawings like the ones Soufflot did at Paestum
in 1750, but he did know the Maison Carrée, which was considered at the time
to be a fairly accurate reflection of Greek ideals. Based on this, Laugier maintained
that the Greeks were the first to understand the significance of the hut, thus initi-
ating the cycle of imitations. They transformed the various parts of the primitive
wood structure into stone, turning the tree trunks into columns, the horizontal
branches into entablatures, and the angled ones above them into the pediment.
In this way the Greek temple as a whole imitated, in permanent materials, the
forms of nature and could thus be considered to be a pure representation of the
natural prototype of the hut. Being made permanent in stone, the forms of the tem-
ple were, in effect, idealized. They became la belle nature that later architects would
refer to and represent, just as the marble figures of Phidias and Praxiteles formed an
“ideal nature” for classically trained painters and sculptors.27
The hut, as represented by the Greek temple, was not beautiful in Laugier’s eyes
for superficial reasons. It was beautiful because it combined rationality with clarity,
both of which depended on “naturalness.” The key to this rationality and clarity
was the distinction Laugier made between those parts of architecture that are
“essential” and those that are merely the result of “need” or, worse still, “caprice.”
Here Laugier’s radical move was to bring the issue of structure, however vaguely
understood, into the open and make it definitive of the “essential,” as opposed to
the merely “necessary.” In the foreword to the second edition of the Essai, he noted
that “the parts of an architectural order are the parts of the building itself. They
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 13

must therefore be applied in such a way that they not only adorn, but actually con-
stitute the building.” In a structurally inflected paraphrase of Alberti’s definition of
beauty, he concluded: “The existence of the building must depend so completely
on the union of these parts that not a single one could be taken away without the
whole building collapsing.”28
It was by narrowing the traditional distinction between construction and deco-
ration that Laugier was able to use the argument about the representational form of
the Greek temple as a means of critiquing contemporary architecture.29 If the free-
standing column, the unbroken entablature, and the triangular pediment were the
only “essential” features of architecture, then most of the things Laugier disliked
about contemporary design could be classified as either unnecessary or willfully
bizarre, which is to say, unnatural. Walls, doors, windows, pedestals, arches,
vaults, domes, pilasters, volutes, even a second or third story—all these were
not part of the “essential,” representational construct of the hut-temple. Laugier
acknowledged that some of these elements, like walls, doors, and windows, not
to speak of upper stories, were needed in a climate like that of France and, indeed,
had already been granted a “license” by custom and tradition.30 But broken pedi-
ments and entablatures, attached pilasters, pedestals under columns, volutes, and
superimposed pediments had no reason to exist and therefore should be banned as
faults of the grossest kind. The proof of their falsehood was the way in which they
contradicted not the rules of bienséance and decorum, but those of representation as
such, meaning the criterion of verisimilitude. A pediment beneath another pedi-
ment implies, as Laugier noted, the “absurd” condition that there are “two roofs
one over the other,” and thus one building inside the other, since the pediment by
definition “represents the gable of the roof.” A pilaster, in his view, represented
nothing so much as a squared column shorn in half, which could only be inter-
preted as the result of an exceedingly “bizarre” and “unnatural” act. A pedestal
under a column was a tautology that undercut the very function a column was
meant to represent, which was to carry the load of a building down to the ground.
“Since the columns are the legs of a building,” Laugier noted, “it is absurd to give
them an additional pair of legs.”31
The hyperboles, tautologies, redundancies, and other rhetorical figures of
speech Laugier found so unnatural and irrational in later Renaissance and baroque
architecture filled pages and pages of his book. But before he could actually offer
his own proposal for how to proceed in current day France, he had to figure out
what to use as a model for the interior space of buildings—and ultimately how to
represent that. The primitive hut would obviously not do. Nor, for that matter,
would the antique temple, whose dark, narrow, enclosed cella hardly suited eight-
eenth-century needs. Rejecting the cavernousness and massiveness of Renaissance
and baroque churches, Laugier was led, almost by elimination, and like a number
of French theorists before him, such as Jean-Louis de Cordemoy (1631–1713), to
the Gothic cathedral, of which the Chapel at Versailles was considered to be a dis-
tant relative.32
14 The Main Actors: The Architect

Despite his absolute animadversion to what he described as the “barbarism” of

the Gothic style, “in which the lack of proportions and bizarre and childish orna-
ment produced nothing but a filigree stonework of [an unparalleled] formlessness,
grotesqueness, and excessiveness,” Laugier declared that “our Gothic churches are
still the most acceptable [we have].” He was bowled over by the openness, light-
ness, structural elegance, and height of the Gothic cathedral’s interior space. “I
enter Notre-Dame,” he wrote, and “at first glance my attention is captured, my
imagination is struck by the size, the height and the unobstructed view of the vast
nave; for some moments, I am lost in the amazement that the grand effect of the
whole stirs in me. Recovering from this initial astonishment and taking note now of
the details, I find innumerable absurdities, but I lay the blame for them on the mis-
fortunes of the time [in which the cathedral was built].”33
The openness and lightness he admired in Gothic churches clearly derived from
the same type of structural precision, clarity, and expressiveness that he believed
the Greek temple owed to its origins in the primitive hut. But how could one
redeploy such interior effects—what Laugier referred to as the “spirit” of Gothic
construction—without reproducing the grotesque “formlessness” of Gothic deco-
ration? The representational identity between decoration and construction, so
carefully secured by the reconstruction of the mimetic process based on the pro-
totypal hut, was thus almost immediately called into question. To understand
how Laugier resolved the problem and how his interpretation of architectural
representation ultimately differed from that of his predecessors, it is useful to turn
to the building by Soufflot that echoed his ideas.
In the fourth chapter of the Essai, Laugier provided a description of an ideal
church in which he tried to combine the effects of a Gothic interior structure, based
on the use of arches and rib vaults, with the representational forms of Greek tra-
beation. The result, though not uninteresting, simply proved to his detractors that
he was not an architect. But within less than two years of this effort, the most
progressive architect of the period, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, would give a truly
professional imprimatur to what Robin Middleton has described as Laugier’s
“Graeco-Gothic ideal.”34 The building in which Soufflot achieved the desired
synthesis of structural and decorative elements is the Parisian Church of Sainte-
Geneviève (now known as the Panthéon). Laugier himself recognized it as the
expression of his most cherished ideals, writing to the Academy of Lyon in 1761
that “this church will become the true masterpiece of French architecture. It will
overshadow all the wonderful works that Italy has produced. … Here all faults
common elsewhere are carefully avoided, and of all the refinements of which archi-
tecture is capable, none has been forgotten. Here is a genius that aims high without
ever missing the natural and the simple.”35
The building has a complicated history of which I will give only the most sig-
nificant details. Sainte-Geneviève was a votive church dedicated to the patron saint
of Paris, whose remains, along with those of the first Christian king and queen of
France, Clovis and Clothilde, were buried in the crypt beneath the baldachin at the
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 15

crossing. A Church of the Holy Apostles had originally been built on the left-bank
site by Clovis to contain the remains of Sainte-Geneviève, as well as to serve as a
royal mausoleum. Rebuilt in the Middle Ages, it had fallen into disrepair by the
mid-eighteenth century. In 1744 Louis XV vowed to rebuild the church when
he was taken grievously ill at Metz during the War of the Austrian Succession.
Ten years later, the vow was consummated, and Soufflot was hired as architect
in early 1755 by the recently appointed directeur des bâtiments, the Marquis de
Marigny.36
Soufflot had accompanied Marigny on a lengthy educational tour of Italy
just a few years before, and it was on that trip that he visited and drew
the Greek temples at Paestum, becoming, in effect, the first architect of
any note to do so.37 Aside from the buildings he designed in Lyon in the
interim, he also made a certain reputation for himself as a critical historian.
He lectured in a notably intelligent fashion to the Lyon Academy in 1741 on
the positive values of Gothic architecture, pointing to the advances during the
period in the areas of construction and spatial composition. Soufflot therefore
brought with him a fairly uncommon knowledge of and sensitivity to the two
historical types of architecture Laugier had proposed as constituting the basis
for reform. And, according to most recent historians, there is no question that
Marigny appointed Soufflot to the job with a program of architectural reform
in mind.38
The design produced by early 1757 established the parti that remained essentially
unchanged despite a number of important alterations made during the nearly
35 years that it took to complete the building (Figure 3.6). The perfect biaxial sym-
metry of the Greek cross plan was almost immediately compromised by the addi-
tion of bays at the west and east ends to lengthen the nave and choir. The height of
the dome was raised considerably, with a triple-shell system based on Christopher
Wren’s St. Paul’s (1666–1711) being substituted for the original double-shell design,
and a peripteral colonnade, again like that at St. Paul’s, being added to mask the tall
exterior drum (Figure 3.7). To increase the interior’s sense of lightness and open-
ness, the rather high pedestal-like bases of the columns in the 1757 project were
reduced to mere plinths, and the vaults supporting the cupolas over the arms of
the Greek cross were hollowed out to allow for a gallery above the ground-floor
peristyle (Figure 3.8).
The one aspect of the design that was never changed, however, was the nearly
independent, full-height temple portico, unique in French architecture of the
time.39 This feature of the building, no doubt in large measure a consequence
of Soufflot’s trip to Italy just a few years before, was in fact considered so signif-
icant that a full-scale painting of the portico was set up on the site in 1764 when
the king laid the cornerstone after work on the foundations was completed
(Figure 3.9). With its enormous freestanding Corinthian columns, nearly unbro-
ken entablature, and triangular pediment, the portico was literally understood as
representing the entire structure. The building that would be erected behind it,
16 The Main Actors: The Architect

Figure 3.6 Jaques-Germain Soufflot. Church of Sainte-Geneviève (now Panthéon), Paris,

1755-1790. Plan, exterior perspective, and side elevation, 1757. Engraving, by François-
Philippe Charpentier (based on drawing by Soufflot), 1757. Credit: Bibliothèque nationale
de France, Paris.

however, had a very different character and issued from quite a contrasting world
of ideas.
The centralized, Greek-cross plan reflected a long tradition of Renaissance archi-
tecture including, most notably, the early plans for St. Peter’s in Rome.40 The tra-
dition had its origins in the early medieval East rather than West. The most
celebrated occurrence of the type was Justinian’s sixth-century Church of the Holy
Apostles in Constantinople, a most apt choice of model for Soufflot, since the orig-
inal church built on the Paris site had been dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul.
But probably even more important was the general association of the central-plan
type with martyria. The baldachin under the central dome protected and celebra-
ted the relics of Sainte-Geneviève below the crossing in the crypt.
Like St. Peter’s and Justinian’s Holy Apostles, Soufflot’s church employs a cen-
tral dome surrounded by transverse barrel vaults and subsidiary cupolas. But
there is a vast difference between its articulation of the support system and that
of St. Peter’s. In Soufflot’s design, the massive piers and thick walls of the Roman
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 17

Figure 3.7 Church of Sainte-Geneviève. Exterior perspective, 1775. Engraving,

by Claude-René-Gabriel Poulleau (based on drawing by Soufflot), 1757. Credit:
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

church have been completely eliminated, leaving in their place an almost skeletal
structure of freestanding point supports (see Figure 3.8).41 These clearly defined
architectonic elements translate the trabeated system of the main portico into the
church’s interior. At the same time, they provide a reticulated screen of fluted
Corinthian columns that is permeated by space, flowing in all directions just
as Laugier had desired.
The classical system of post-and-lintel construction, where freestanding columns
carry unbroken entablatures with only a minimal amount of mass in the crossing’s
corner piers to support the dome, is transformed, however, in the upper stages of
Soufflot’s church, into the categorically different system of arcuated construction
that derives not from Greek but from medieval reinterpretations of late imperial
Roman construction. Just as one can point to the similarity of the final design of
Soufflot’s triple-shell dome to that of St. Paul’s, one can also relate the skeletonized
interior construction to the Church of St. Stephen, Walbrook (1672–87), one of the
18 The Main Actors: The Architect

Figure 3.8 Church of Sainte-Geneviève. Interior perspective, 1775. Credit: Réunion des
Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

Figure 3.9 Pierre-Antoine Demachy (1723–1807). Laying of the foundation stone ceremony at
the new church of Sainte-Geneviève, 6th September 1764 Paris, 1765. Credit: Roger-Viollet/
Topfoto.
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 19

many churches Wren built in London after the fire of 1666. This parallel is partic-
ularly intriguing given Wren’s interest in medieval architecture and his precocious
desire to find a formal solution that would combine the structural elegance and
economy of Gothic architecture with the ornamental detailing of the classical
orders.
As Soufflot refined the design of Sainte-Geneviève throughout the 1760s and
1770s, he worked toward an even greater sense of dematerialization of the build-
ing’s mass. The transverse arches supporting the cupolas and central dome were
cut into by deep voids to produce the riblike effect of Gothic construction that
Soufflot continued to study throughout his career. The reduction of the mass to
lines of force ultimately led him to adopt the typically Gothic device of flying
buttresses, which he used to relieve the thrust of the vaults and domes. But unlike
the exposed exoskeleton of a Gothic cathedral, these props were kept from the
observer’s view. As in Wren’s St. Paul’s, they are hidden by the parapet that rises
above the walls to the height of the roofline (Figure 3.10). The large openings
created by the lunette-shaped clerestory windows are also masked by the masonry
screen and thus prevented from disturbing the external appearance of solidity and
monumentality.
The exterior of Sainte-Geneviève thus preserves the classical composure and
decorum promised by the representational frontispiece of the Corinthian portico,
just as the parapet topping the side walls and the peristyle ringing the dome dis-
guise any evidence of Gothic structural gymnastics. “Soufflot’s principal goal,”
his collaborator Maximilien Brébion (1716–circa 1792) said on the architect’s
death in 1780, “was to unite in the most beautiful of forms the lightness of con-
struction of Gothic buildings with the purity and magnificence of Greek architec-
ture.”42 That the word “architecture” here meant something more superficial
than constitutional is made clear by Charles-Nicolas Cochin’s (1715–90) comment
on the same subject 10 years before. In defense of his friend Soufflot’s design of
the dome, which had come under severe criticism for structural reasons, Cochin
remarked that Soufflot had “found a way of uniting the noble decoration of the
Greeks with the lightness of the Gothic.”43 Soufflot’s intention at synthesis is well
known, but what is rarely, if ever, remarked is that the marriage of the two his-
torical traditions was of unequal partners: only one of the pair—the classical—was
allowed to represent itself; the other—the Gothic—had to remain behind the
scenes in the role of servant.
It should by now be apparent that the union of the Gothic and the classical was
not, as Laugier’s argument might have suggested, a matter simply of encasing an
interior modeled on the former with an exterior representing the latter. The exte-
rior of the interior—meaning the actual decorative appearance of the interior
elevations—also had to be represented in Greek or Roman terms, for these were
the only valid terms of representation understood as an imitation of nature. In
other words, whatever went on behind the scenes was not a matter fit for public
display. Only the antique order had a natural (read “divine”) right to
20 The Main Actors: The Architect

Figure 3.10 Church of Sainte-Geneviève. Flying buttresses, masked by parapets. Credit:

Author.

representation. Well before Soufflot adopted the expedient, Laugier had recom-
mended, in the Essai, the use of “flying buttresses, as … in Gothic churches,” as
long as they were “so well hidden that nothing appears that indicates the pressure
of the vaults.”44 Such “artifice,” as he called it, ensured the truth of appearance by a
verisimilar appearance of truth.
Putting the larger issue of truth and appearance in terms of the architectural dis-
course of construction and decoration, Laugier summarized—and predicted—
Soufflot’s synthesis in the following way:
The great secret and true perfection of the art [of architecture] consists in joining solid-
ity to delicacy. Whatever our artists say, these two qualities are not at all incompatible.
In buildings of the Gothic style, delicacy has sometimes been taken as far as it can go,
even beyond the generally accepted limits. … I wish that at least in this respect
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 21

architects would adopt the spirit of this ridiculous style and study the astonishing
workmanship of this way of building. … [Gothic architects] were sparing with the
use of stone and lavish with that of iron; in this way … they succeeded in joining
the solid and the delicate. What would be the disadvantage of doing as they did?
We understand decoration infinitely better than they did, but they were more skilled
in construction than we are. If we want to improve [our architecture], do not let us
consult them in matters of decoration but let us never stop consulting them in those
of construction.45

In distinguishing between construction and decoration in this way, the “Graeco-

Gothic ideal” of Laugier not only revealed the inequality of the partners in the
marriage it was intended to effect; it also clarified, as perhaps never before, the
fundamentally decorative constitution of the classical elements of design.

A Verisimilar Reductiveness

The relationship between truth and appearance in post-antique European classical

architecture had fundamentally devolved from the distinction between decoration
and construction. In this sense, Soufflot’s church and Laugier’s text were part of a
long history. Alberti’s Church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua, begun in the 1470s, can be
read as an unsuspecting, or rather unenlightened, precedent (Figure 3.11).
Although its interior and exterior are both classical, in contradistinction to the
architect’s earlier Church of San Francesco in Rimini (circa 1450), where the exte-
rior columns and arches encase a preexisting Gothic interior, the temple portico
cum triumphal arch of Sant’Andrea is essentially a monumental, decorative fron-
tispiece. Like Soufflot’s portico, it stands synecdochically for the whole and thus
represents, in the linguistic sense of the term, the idea of church as temple. To pre-
serve the existing Gothic tower on the left while providing space for a large circular
window to light the nave, the portico was designed to front only a portion of the
building’s façade. Its decorative design appears to reflect the interior space of
the nave and side aisles by virtue of the hierarchical division into three distinct
vertical units, but the portico is actually only as wide as the nave and not nearly
equal to it in height. Moreover, this confusion of truth and appearance—or con-
struction and decoration—permeates the very decorative system itself. In the por-
tico, for instance, Alberti combined a thin and relatively flat post-and-lintel system
with arches substantiating the thickness and massiveness of the solid walls.
Following Laugier’s rational argument for eliminating any element foreign to
the structural components of the Greek temple in its imitation of the primitive
hut, Soufflot avoided the contradictions in the appearance of Alberti’s façade,
though not those that would inhere in the realities of construction. Unlike its
antique model, Sainte-Geneviève’s entablature is not built of uniform horizontal
lintels spanning fully from one column to the next. Rather, it is made up of
22 The Main Actors: The Architect

Figure 3.11 Leon Battista Alberti. Church of Sant’ Andrea, Mantua, begun 1472. Exterior.
Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

voussoirs locked together in flat arches, which, through a hidden and complex
deployment of iron cramps and ties, gives the illusion of an antique pediment
to a system of counterbalancing arches that even employs a pointed Gothic arch
at the apex (Figure 3.12).46 The tie-rods were in fact incapable of eliminating all
the outward thrust of the arches, which forced Soufflot into devising a method
of buttressing that, because it was highly visible, had to be consistent with the dec-
orative system of exterior trabeation. His solution was a pair of columns added to
both sides of the portico and joined to the front by means of reentrant angles
(see Figure 3.6).
Laugier had no compunction about such expedients as metal cramps and ties.
Arguing that Gothic architects made “lavish” use of iron, he recommended its
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 23

Figure 3.12 Church of Sainte-Geneviève. Pediment. Section, showing details of

iron reinforcement, by Gabriel-Pierre-Martin Dumont, 1781. Credit: Centre Canadien
d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

employment as a way to achieve the desired visual ends. It was visual appearance
rather than actual constructed fact that was always uppermost in his mind; and it is
this that we must keep in mind in assessing the full implication of his theoretical
position and its delineation of the mimetic process of representation in the transfor-
mation of the primitive hut into the classical temple.47 In one of his most significant
and often quoted propositions, added to the second edition of the Essai to bolster and
clarify its argument, Laugier wrote: “I should like to convince everybody of a truth in
which I myself believe absolutely, namely, that the parts of an architectural order are
the parts of a building itself. They must therefore be applied in such a way that they
not only adorn but actually constitute the building.”48
Laugier never for a moment meant that the fictive character of architectural
decoration or “display,” as he put it, should give way to brute reality. The very
idealism of his construct of the primitive hut as imitative model makes this self-
evident. Laugier was interested not in the truth of the structural facts of the “free-
standing columns that carry entablatures” but rather, as he stated in response to
one of the critics of the Essai, in “the truth of the architectural display they [re]pres-
ent.” What distinguished nature—that is to say, the hut—from architecture—that is
to say, the temple—was not merely the change from wood to stone but, even
24 The Main Actors: The Architect

more, the embellishment, the polish, and the sophistication of the “decoration” that
the stone forms themselves received at the hands of art.49
For all that, however, Laugier—and, by extension, Soufflot—should in no way
be thought of as merely proceeding on the same basis as Alberti and his successors.
The differences, though subtle, are profound. The key to understanding them lies
in the concept of verisimilitude, or vraisemblance, a concept that was central to
eighteenth-century artistic theory, though only occasionally applied directly to
the discussion of architecture.50 The idea had its origins in Aristotle’s Poetics. “It
is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened,” Aristotle wrote,
“but what may happen—what is possible according to the law of probability or
necessity.” In contrast to the truth of everyday existence, verisimilitude, or that
which is made to appear to be likely to be true, defines the “higher” truth of
art: “The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or prose. … The true
difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen.
Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history; for
poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal
I mean how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according
to the law of probability or necessity.”51
Laugier’s celebration of the “essential” virtues of the primitive hut served to
establish, with greater firmness, more precision, and much greater scope than
had previously been attempted, the “law of probability or necessity” for the plau-
sible appearance of truth in architecture.52 His critique of the “licenses” and
“caprices” of the buildings he grew up with derived from a perception of the enor-
mity and incommensurability of the gap between truth and appearance in Renais-
sance and baroque architecture and of the need to narrow it to within reason. In
Alberti’s Church of Sant’Andrea, for example, the material realities of structure and
space are so completely overridden by the representational devices of the decora-
tive facing that one never even thinks to question how what appears to be true
relates to what might in fact be true. No matter how forcefully the apparent or
virtual structure seems to express the conditions of load and support, appearance
is fundamentally what counts. For this reason, arched construction can be mixed
with trabeated construction, just as exterior forms of expression can be dissociated
from the spaces to which, in actuality, they respond. Credibility depends on the
power and display of the architectural rhetoric.53
While constructing a myth in his own right, Laugier sought a basis for represen-
tation in the primitive hut that could be credible in an age of reason and enlight-
enment. Never once in the Essai did he make the obligatory reference to the
legendary analogy between the column and the human body, nor did he spend
any time on the issue of proportions, the quasi-mystical subject that was generally
paramount in earlier theorists’ minds.54 Focusing on the question of imitation and
representation, he was able to rationalize the relation between truth and appear-
ance through an understanding of verisimilitude that would give his conclusions a
relatively modern ring. The idea, if not the reality, of construction makes itself felt
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 25

in his argument. Appearance and reality are no longer entirely separate domains
but begin to affect one another in a new kind of dialectical relationship. A “law
of probability or necessity” based on a structural paradigm, albeit itself a product
of fiction, now governs both the kinds of deceptions architecture is allowed to
entertain and the manner by which they can be visualized.
The key to this, in Laugier’s thought as in Soufflot’s church, is a characteristically
modern methodology of reductiveness—the setting of limits in relation to struc-
ture. Laugier was well aware of what he was doing. An “objection will perhaps
be made,” he wrote, “that I reduce architecture to almost nothing, since with
the exception of columns, entablatures, pediments, doors and windows, I more
or less cut out the rest.” “But let there be no mistake about it,” he continued,
“I do not take away anything from the work or the resources of the architect.
I [merely] force him to proceed in a simple and natural manner. …Those belonging
to the profession will agree that, far from reducing their work, I sentence them to
take great pains and to work with an extraordinary degree of precision.”55
The representational link Laugier forged between the primitive wood hut and the
sophisticated stone temple served to rationalize the relationship between truth and
appearance by limiting that which could be represented exclusively to that which
might be believed to be the likely structure of the building. Artistic illusion and con-
structed reality now neatly coincided in the realm of the verisimilar. In drastically
reducing the architect’s range of decorative/architectural elements to those deriving
from the structural paradigm of the hut, Laugier’s theoretical construct produced a
relative equivalence between decoration and construction that seemed not only
“simple and natural” but also “rational” and “precise.” In effect, what Laugier did
was to make truth approximate appearance so closely that the appearance of truth
became one with the truth of appearance. The result was that for at least a generation
or two, the temple portico could be taken for the primitive hut.

Quatremère de Quincy’s Dogmatic Defense

of Laugier’s Rationale

Where Laugier’s hypothesis was radical, and progressive, in terms of mid-

eighteenth-century Vitruvian conventions and late baroque practices, it quickly
took on a conservative, even reactionary cast once it became dogma. The person
most responsible for turning Laugier’s concept of verisimilitude into the neoclas-
sical doctrine of imitation was the sculptor, academician, and theorist Antoine-
Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849). He used Laugier’s theory over
the length of his career to affirm an almost religious position that raised the rep-
resentational model of the hut into an article of neoclassical faith. Quatremère
developed his views between 1785 and 1788, first in a prize-winning essay compar-
ing Egyptian architecture with that of Greece and then in the initial volume of
entries for the section on architecture in Charles-Joseph Panckoucke’s Encyclopédie
26 The Main Actors: The Architect

méthodique (1782–1832). Between 1801, when he completed the second of the three
architecture volumes for the Encyclopédie (the third was published in 1825), and
1832, when he published a two-volume version of the entries as the Dictionnaire
historique d’architecture, Quatremère reigned supreme as the secrétaire perpétuel of
the French Academy of Fine Arts and the era’s dictator in the domains of criticism
and theory.56
A major innovation of Quatremère’s De l’architecture égyptienne considérée dans
son origine, ses principes et son goût, et comparée sous les mêmes rapports à l’architecture
grecque was to place the concept of a natural model within a comparative frame-
work that historicized Laugier’s theory while at the same time taking into account
the Vitruvian narrative of origins. In order to prove the independence of Greek
architecture from any external influence and thus assert the unique quality of
the originary form of classicism, Quatremère defined three historical architectural
types relative to the three main stages in human development and claimed that
each of these types was founded on the imitation of a distinct natural, or nearly
natural, model: the cave, which responded to the needs of hunters and gatherers,
was imitated in the architecture of Egypt; the nomad’s tent, characteristic of a pas-
toral society, became the model for the architecture of Asia; and the hut, developed
by sedentary farmers, was imitated in the buildings of Greece. By definition, these
models were not equal, and only one of them, the hut, was articulate enough in and
of itself and susceptible to a proportion system derived from the human body that it
could serve as the basis for a significant and progressive evolution.57
The critical factor in the process of imitation that distinguished Greek architec-
ture from the two others was the transformation from one material to another.
This, and this alone, gave rise to a verisimilitude in representation. Only the
hut, in Quatremère’s view, naturally lent itself to the transformational process
of imitation from one less permanent material to another more permanent one.
The “transposition from wood to stone,” he wrote, gave Greek architecture a met-
aphorical dimension, “associating [it] with the other arts” and endowing it with “the
pleasure of imitation.” The masonry temple’s “imitation at once illusory and real …
of the hut” thus offered a form of representation that “fools us in telling us the
truth.”58 “This imitation … of the hut … cannot be given up or changed … without
undermining the laws of Nature, of verisimilitude, and destroying all our impres-
sions of pleasure.” 59
Quatremère’s article on “Architecture” in Panckoucke’s Encyclopédie elaborated
the argument of the earlier essay and focused it on the origins of classicism in
Greece and the concept of imitation from which it derived. In effect, “only” Greek
architecture was “worthy of the name of art,” and this because of “the advantage it
had in finding in its first attempts a simple, rich, and varied model the fruitful imi-
tation of which gave it the means to rise to the level of perfection it attained.”60 This
representation of the wood structure of the primitive hut in the monumental
masonry of the Greek temple provided Quatremère with the example he needed
to explain the meaning and importance of representation for the art of architecture.
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 27

“Let there be no doubt whatsoever,” he wrote, that the “pleasing fiction” main-
tained by architectural representation offers the same sort of “pleasure that accom-
panies all the other arts and that constitutes their charm.” It is “the pleasure of being
semi-deceived, … of preferring the truth disguised to the naked truth.” The “arti-
fice is always to hold as close to the truth as to the lie” in a process in which the
beholder becomes “less the dupe than the confidant.”61
Although the methodology and intention of representation in architecture,
painting, and sculpture were fundamentally the same for Quatremère, architecture
involved a more complex relationship with nature than the other two arts.62 It had
its primary model in the primitive hut, as Laugier explained; but in order to
become the truly expressive art the Greeks created, architecture soon turned to
another source, for which the “wood skeleton” of the hut was “the most fortunate
preparation” and which functioned, “if not as a new model, at least as a new ana-
logue of a model.” This was the “rational imitation of the human body,” which
allowed architecture, “by the application of its system of proportions and natural
relationships,” to appear to be “part of Nature.” “Broadening to a greater and
greater degree the idea of its model, architecture,” according to Quatremère, ulti-
mately “succeeded in extending the sphere of imitation” to incorporate “the gen-
eral imitation of Nature in its principles of order, of harmony relative to the
affections of our senses, and to the perceptions of our understanding.” “No longer
a copyist, nor an imitator, but the rival of Nature itself,” the art of building thus
took on as its “model … the order of Nature, [which] exists everywhere without
being visible anywhere.”63
The three stages or levels in architecture’s imitative reach—from the hut to the
human body to the order of nature itself—represented an attempt on Quatremère’s
part to expand Laugier’s reductive position and bring it into line with the history of
architectural theory as it had evolved since the Renaissance. Still, the acceptance of
the primitive hut as the starting point of the classical development—the “frame-
work of the art,” as Quatremère described it—made it the primary factor in archi-
tecture’s representational apparatus. But this created a major problem for
Quatremère. Although convinced of the value and efficacy of the model of the
hut as an explanation and justification for the uniqueness of the Greek system
of design, he was unable to present Laugier’s argument for the direct imitation
of nature as innocently as Laugier did. Quatremère hesitated and wavered, some-
times declaring unequivocally that “the imitation or transposition of the forms of
the hut is an actual fact” and the architect nothing “but its copyist.” More often,
however, he hedged in stating that “the imitation is at once illusory and real,” that
the mimetic process in architecture is “metaphysical and indirect,” and that the
model—“real or ideal”—is “much less absolute, much less positive than that of
the other arts” and is at once “imaginary.”64
But Quatremère, like Laugier, had to maintain the reality of the fiction in order
for the fiction of representation to attain reality. The evidence he offered bordered
on the theological: “I will not attempt … to prove the reality of the model [of the
28 The Main Actors: The Architect

primitive hut] for Greek architecture. There are two things that it is impossible for
one to prove: either some things are so obviously false that they cannot be justified
for any reason, or they are so obviously self-evident that they can only be proven by
a greater degree of evidence; and it is in this latter group that one must place our
certitude that Greek architecture is an imitation of the rustic hut and [its] wood-
frame type construction.”65
As for the naturalness of the model itself, Quatremère had this to say: “It is under-
stood … that imitation in architecture is less absolute, less positive than in the other
arts that model themselves directly on Nature. … However, this model [of the hut]
whose authenticity is questioned, if it is not to be found in Nature, it is nonetheless a
product of it; if it is not a work of Nature, it is a result of it; if Nature in no way pro-
duced it, Nature suggested it: it is so bound to Nature that to deny it would be to
deny Nature itself, or at least the impressions of Nature that produced it.”66
As the frontispiece of the second edition of Laugier’s Essai proposed, “Nature,”
Quatremère finally admitted, “undoubtedly did not make the hut; but Nature
directed man in its formation, and [this primitive] man, guided by an instinct,
crude, if you will, but sure, and by a sentiment that in the beginning of time could
not be misled, transmitted in it [the hut] the true impressions of Nature.” This
“original imprint” of nature thus gave to the hut/temple construct, according to
Quatremère, a “basic truth” comparable to an “axiom in ethics.”67
In historicizing and conventionalizing the natural model of the hut, Quatremère
took Laugier’s argument to its logical conclusion, irrevocably disconnecting the
theory of the hut from any remaining mythological or legendary associations
and thereby aligning it with modern reason. To do so, however, he resorted to
another kind of mythmaking, this one based on theological models. Quatremère’s
explanation demanded belief, unqualified and unimpeachable:

We will go as far as granting that [the primitive hut] is nothing but a fable, an allegory
invented to contain this or that meaning and doctrine. One can give up the outside
skin if one wants, but the principles it contains will remain nonetheless irrefutable.
One will have but chased a shadow, fought a chimera, and one would have gained
nothing.
Yes, without a doubt, it is the principles contained in the rustic hut that, independ-
ent of all the proofs of its existence, render it unshakable, and make it triumph over
all attacks. Those who have wanted to proscribe the imitation of it have not realized
that it was no longer possible to repudiate it.68

The belief in the theory of the hut was clearly intended by Quatremère to forestall
any divergence from the classical system of representation suggested by contempo-
rary ideas of materialism, utilitarianism, and historical relativism. In opposition to
those who “find it bad that stone might be the representative of another material,”
Quatremère claimed that the history of Egyptian architecture proved the contrary:
“stone, in copying itself, which is to say, in copying nothing, has never produced any
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 29

form of art.”69 A strict adherence to the Greek model of imitation would not only
ensure a work having the values of classical form; it would prevent the dissolution of
classicism itself.70 Those who had forsaken the “real or fictive imitation of the hut,”
he stated, had simply proven that one cannot do this “without abandoning at the
same time the principles of which it is the demonstration.”
Quatremère thus warned architects in words closely recalling those of Laugier:

Always keep your eyes fixed on the real or ideal model [of the hut] that has given
existence to architecture; such that all the constituent parts of your buildings
are … in conformity with the parts of the model they represent; never lose sight
of their origin, the needs that motivated their structural relationships, and the reality
of the objects of which you are doing nothing but rendering, in a way, the image.
This primitive model, of which you are but the copyist, will … preserve you from
those dubious and mongrel forms that leave the spirit in painful doubt about their
utility; … it will distance you, above all, from those irrational forms and ornaments
that act in a contrary sense to the imperious forms of construction, creating continual
contradictions between the appearance and the reality of objects.71

Through his writing, his critical role in architectural production, and perhaps
most important, his powerful hold on the education system of the École des
Beaux-Arts, Quatremère de Quincy brought Laugier’s message from the belle-
lettristic circles of the eighteenth-century amateur into the nineteenth-century
world of professional discourse with results that profoundly affected the course
of architecture through the first third of the new century.

Notes

1. On Laugier, see Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth-Century French Theory

(London, 1962). The second edition of the Essai, originally published in 1755, was re-
printed by Gregg Press (Farnborough, England) in 1966 and by Pierre Mardaga
(Brussels and Liège) in 1979. An English translation by Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann
was published as Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture (Los Angeles, 1977).
The pirated English edition of 1755, which made no mention of the author’s name, is titled
An Essay on Architecture; In Which Its True Principles are Explained, And Invariable Rules
proposed, For Directing the Judgment and Forming the Taste of the Gentleman and the Architect,
With regard to the Different Kinds of Buildings, the Embellishment of Cities, And the Planning of
Gardens. It was published by T. Osborn and Shipton (London). The 1756 English edition,
titled An Essay on the Study and Practice of Architecture; Explaining The true Principles of the
Science; and Directing the Gentleman and Builder to Design and Finish in every Article, with
Judgment and Taste, was published by Stanley Crowder and Henry Woodgate (London).
The first German translation, titled Versuch über die Baukunst, was published in Frankfurt
and Leipzig in 1756. It was followed by editions of 1758, 1768, and 1771. On the pub-
lishing history of the Essai, see Wolfgang Herrmann’s introduction to Laugier, An Essay
30 The Main Actors: The Architect

on Architecture, xx–xxii; W. Herrmann, Laugier, 173–90; Eileen Harris with Nicholas

Savage, British Architectural Books and Writers, 1556–1785 (Cambridge, 1990), 280–3;
and British Architectural Library, Royal Institute of British Architects, Early
Printed Books 1478–1840: Catalogue of the British Architectural Library Early Imprints Collec-
tion (London, 1995), vol. 2, 938–9. An earlier version of this essay was published as
chapter 2 in my Modern Architecture: Representation and Reality (New Haven, CT,
2009), 45–74.
2. See, for example, Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construc-
tion in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, ed. John Cava (Cambridge, MA,
1995); and Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art
(Berlin, 1986), trans. Mark Jarzombek (Cambridge, MA, 1991). The most useful study
of the primitive hut is Joachim Gaus, “Die Urhütte: Über ein Modell in der Baukunst
und ein Motiv in der bildenden Kunst,” in Wallraf-Richarts-Jahrbuch: Westdeutschen Jahr-
buch für Kunstgeschichte (Cologne, 1971), 7–70. A more wide-ranging treatment is given
in Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Archi-
tectural History (New York, 1972).
3. Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture, 2nd ed. 1755 (Farnborough, England,
1966), 13–28 and passim.
4. Laugier, Essai, 11. My translations from the French generally follow those by Wolfgang
and Anni Herrmann (see note 1, above). But since I make certain modifications, all my
references will be to the original 1755 French edition.
5. Laugier, Essai, 17–25.
6. Laugier, Essai, 10–12.
7. Laugier, Essai, 8–9.
8. Laugier, Essai, 9–10.
9. In the second edition of 1755, Laugier added a final paragraph that was, in effect, a
response to the (unsigned) critical review of the first edition by La Font de Saint-Yenne
and Charles-Etienne Briseux, published in 1754 as Examen d’un Essai sur l’architecture.
10. Herrmann, Laugier, 47, notes that “during the second half of the seventeenth century
the view gained ground that in the same way as the column had been modelled after
the shape of trees and the members of the Doric Order after the carpentry of wooden
buildings, architecture as a whole [and here Herrmann quotes from Pierre Bullet’s
Architecture pratique of 1691] ‘was formed on the idea of its first models’ and that in
effect the hut, ‘the simplest and most natural of all (buildings), had been taken by
the ancient Greek architects as a model to be imitated in their most beautiful build-
ings.’” For other readings of the subject, see Rykwert, On Adam’s House; and Anthony
Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton,
NJ, 1987), 7–21.
11. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura (On Architecture), ed. and trans. Frank Granger
(Cambridge, MA, 1945), 2.1.1–2.
12. Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura, 2.1.8, 6, 2.
13. Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura, 2.1.3.
14. Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura, 2.1.4.
15. Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura, 2.1.6–7.
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 31

16. Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura, 2.1.8.

17. Vitruvius Pollio, De architectura, 4.2.3, 5.
18. William Chambers, A Treatise on Civil Architecture, in Which the Principles of that Art are
Laid Down and Illustrated by a Great Number of Plates (London, 1759), 58. In the expanded
third edition of 1791, Chambers maintained the critique of Laugier despite the fact that
he used Laugier’s definition of architecture (preceding that of Vitruvius’) to open the
new introduction. William Chambers, A Treatise on the Decorative Part of Civil Architec-
ture, 3rd ed. (London, 1791), 7.
19. Chambers, Treatise on Civil Architecture, 1–2. Cf. Robin Middleton, “Chambers, W. ‘A
Treatise on Civil Architecture,’ London 1759,” in Sir William Chambers: Architect to
George III, ed. John Harris and Michael Snodin (New Haven, CT, 1996), 68–72. Eileen
Harris, “The Treatise on Civil Architecture,” in Sir William Chambers: Knight of the Polar
Star, ed. John Harris (London, 1970), 128–43, makes no mention of the dispute with
Laugier, and she does not base her analysis on the first edition.
20. Chambers, Treatise on Civil Architecture, 31. As Harris, “Treatise on Civil Architecture,”
139–41, points out, the third edition of 1791 was even more explicitly pro-Roman and
“progressive” than the earlier two editions.
21. Vidler, Writing of the Walls, 20, notes that Charles Eisen, who drew the frontispiece for
the second edition of Laugier’s Essai, also drew the frontispiece for Rousseau’s Dis-
course on the Origins of Inequality. He compares the images from the two books to make
the point that, whereas “the site of Rousseau’s natural society might … be envisaged as
somewhere between the savage forest and the civilized town,” “Laugier … had chosen
to eliminate altogether the social roots of dwelling, preferring architectural criteria
derived from the internal logic of architecture to the external influences of customs
or mores” (16, 20).
22. Laugier, Essai, 10–11.
23. Harris, British Architectural Books, 281, notes that the first English edition became avail-
able on 15 April 1755. The second French edition passed the censor on 22 November
1754, and was published by April 1755, when the first review of it appeared.
24. In addition to the frontispiece by Eisen, there are eight other plates, all drawn by Quirijn
Fonbonne. Placed at the end of the volume on foldout sheets, they comprise the follow-
ing: Doric order; Ionic order; Corinthian order; Composite order; four pediments;
arcade with detached Corinthian columns supporting balustrade; arcade with engaged
Doric columns supporting triangular pediment; and arcade with Ionic pilasters support-
ing segmental pediment. In his “Avertissement” to the second edition, Laugier, Essai,
xxxi, noted that he included the additional plates to “facilitate the understanding” of
a newly appended “dictionary of [architectural] terms.” Although he made no reference
to the frontispiece, it is clear that he intended the second edition to appeal to a broader
audience and, as he wrote, “either to resolve difficulties that have been pointed out to
me or to make points clearer that had seemed to be a bit obscure” (Laugier, Essai, xxxii).
Unfortunately, we do not know the degree to which Laugier instructed Eisen in the
production of the image of the hut.
Charles Eisen (1720–78) was one of the most important French book illustrators of the
second half of the eighteenth century, serving for a time as the drawing master to Mad-
ame de Pompadour. Vera Salomons, Charles Eisen, 18th Century French Book Illustrator
32 The Main Actors: The Architect

and Engraver [London, 1914] (Amsterdam, 1972); Claire Lemoine-Isabeau, “François et

Charles Eisen, ou les tribulations d’un peintre belge et de son fils vignettiste entre la
France et les Pays-Bas méridionaux,” Cahiers de Mariemont 24, no. 25 (1993): 68–75;
and Antony Griffiths, “Publishers and Authors,” in Prints for Books: Book Illustration in
France, 1760–1800 (London, 2004), 1–56. I am indebted to Cammie McAtee for this
information.
25. Laugier, Essai, 13. Giusta Nicco Fasola, in Ragionamenti sulla architettura (Bari, 1949),
177, wrote that “the hut is the image around which the eighteenth century developed
its architectural aesthetic. … Art is imitation, and all arts have their model; this happens
naturally because every kind of knowing or human operation is based on nature …
[and thus] the hut, a work of primitive man in his innocence, retains the near-sanctity
of natural things.”
26. Laugier, Essai, 3.
27. This was a point Chambers reiterated in the third edition of his treatise: “Nature is the
supreme and true model of the imitative arts upon which every great artist must form
his idea of the profession, in which he means to excel; and the antique is to the architect,
what nature is to the painter or sculptor; the source from which his chief knowledge
must be collected; the model upon which his taste must be formed.” But in contradis-
tinction to Laugier, Chambers urged a discerning eclecticism rather than a puristic
“primitivism” in deciding what models to follow. “But as in nature few things are
faultless,” he continued, “so neither must it be imagined that every ancient production
in architecture, even among the Romans, was perfect; or a fit model for imitation. …
On the contrary, their remains are so extremely unequal, that it requires the greatest
circumspection, and effort of judgement, to make a proper choice.” Chambers, Treatise
on the Decorative Part of Civil Architecture, 23.
28. Laugier, Essai, xvii.
29. The distinction, which can be traced back to Vitruvius, was embedded in students’
minds by the very organization of the teaching of classical architecture as revealed
in the period’s major texts. The most significant for the mid- to late eighteenth century
was Jacques-François Blondel’s Cours d’architecture, ou, Traité de la décoration, distribu-
tion & construction des bâtiments, 6 vols. [1771–77] (Paris, 2002), wherein the Vitruvian
triad of venustas, commoditas, and firmitas, translated as décoration, distribution, and
construction, governed the organization and sequence of the lessons. Volumes 1–3 were
exclusively devoted to décoration, meaning the application of the orders and other ele-
ments of the classical vocabulary to the physical design of both exterior and interior
wall surfaces; volume 4 to distribution, or planning; and part of volume 5 and all of
volume 6 to construction (the other part of volume 5 returned to the matter of the
décoration of interiors).
30. Laugier, Essai, 39–60.
31. Laugier, Essai, 27, 25, 16–17, 24. In this argument against representational redundancy
and disavowal of verisimilitude, Laugier echoes the logic of Vitruvius, De architectura,
4.2.5: “In the Doric order, the detail of the triglyphs and mutules was invented with a
purpose. Similarly in Ionic buildings, the placing of the dentils, has its appropriate
intention. And just as in the Doric order the mutules have been the representation
of the projecting principal rafters, so, in the case of Ionic dentils, they also imitate
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 33

the projection of the ordinary rafters. Therefore in Greek architecture no one puts den-
tils under a mutule. For ordinary rafters cannot be put beneath principals. For if what
ought to be placed above principals and purlins in reality is placed below them in the
imitation, the treatment of the work will be faulty. Further, as to the ancients neither
approving nor arranging that in the pediments there should be either mutules or den-
tils, but plain cornices, this was because neither principals nor rafters are fixed to proj-
ect on the front of gables, but are placed sloping down to the eaves. Thus what cannot
happen in reality cannot (they thought) be correctly treated in the imitation.”
32. In his Nouveau traité de toute l’architecture; ou, l’art de bastir; utile aux entrepreneurs et aux
ouvriers (Paris, 1706), Cordemoy expressed a sympathy for the lightness and elegance of
Gothic construction and proposed a trabeated columnar architecture owing much to it.
Laugier openly acknowledged the influence of Cordemoy, stating in the preface to the
first edition of the Essai: “All modern authors, with the exception of M. de Cordemoy,
give no more than commentaries on Vitruvius, following him uncritically in all his
errors. … This author, being more profound than most of the others, saw the truth
that was hidden from them. His treatise on architecture … contains excellent principles
and well-considered notions” (xxvi–xxvii).
33. Laugier, Essai, 3, 173–4.
34. Robin Middleton, “The Abbé de Cordemoy and the Graeco-Gothic Ideal: A Prelude to
Romantic Classicism,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, no. 25 (1962):
278–320; no. 26 (1963): 90–123. This article has had an enormous and fully justified influ-
ence on later scholarship. Among the most significant recent examples are Frampton,
Studies in Tectonic Culture, esp. 29–59; and Antoine Picon, “The Freestanding Column
in Eighteenth-Century Religious Architecture,” in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from
Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York, 2004), 67–99. A different, wider ranging
take on the Laugier-Soufflot connection was developed by Picon in his “Architettura ed
espressione costruttiva: Il problema del razionalismo costruttivo/Architecture and Con-
structive Expression: The Problem of Structural Rationalism,” Lotus International: Rivista
trimestrale di architettura/Quarterly Architectural Review 47, no. 3 (1985): 6–18.
35. Marc-Antoine Laugier, “Discours sur le rétablissement de l’architecture antique”
(1761), in Herrmann, Laugier, 129. Laugier repeated this encomium in his Observations
sur l’architecture (The Hague, 1765), 182, describing the church as “a work whose effects
will be singular, majestic, sublime, a work that will be unique in Europe, and that will
mark its epoch in the History of Architecture, where it will be referred to as the first and
most beautiful of monuments since the renaissance of the Arts.”
36. On the church, see Michael Petzet, Soufflots Sainte-Geneviève und der franzözische
Kirchenbau des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1961); and Le Panthéon, symbole des révolutions:
De l’église de la nation au temple des grands homes, exh. cat. (Paris, 1989). On Soufflot,
see Jean Monval, Soufflot: Sa vie, son oeuvre, son esthétique (1713–1780) (Paris, 1918);
Soufflot et l’architecture des lumières, Actes du Colloque Soufflot et l’architecture des
lumières, colloque international du C.N.R.S. organisé par l’Institut d’Histoire de l’Art
de l’Université de Lyon II, Lyon, 18-22 juin 1980 (Paris, 1980); and Jean-Marie Pérouse
de Montclos, Jacques-Germain Soufflot (Paris, 2004).
37. Soufflot’s drawings were used by Gabriel-Pierre-Martin Dumont in his Suitte de plans,
coupes, profils, élévations géométrales et perspectives, tels qu’ils existoient en mil sept cent
34 The Main Actors: The Architect

cinquante, dans la bourgade de Poesto qui est la ville Poestum de Pline (Paris, 1764) and his Les
ruines de Paestum, autrement Posidonia, ville de l’ancienne Grande Grèce, au Royaume de
Naples (London, 1769). The latter was based on a translation of John Berkenhout’s
anonymously published The Ruins of Poestum or Posidonia, a City of Magna Graecia in
the Kingdom of Naples (London, 1767). On the “discovery” of Paestum, see S [uzanne]
Lang, “The Early Publications of the Temples at Paestum,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 13, no. 1/2 (1950): 48–64; and Joselita Raspi Serra, ed., Paestum and
the Doric Revival, 1750–1830: Essential Outlines of an Approach (Florence, 1986).
38. Daniel Rabreau, “La Basilique Sainte-Geneviève de Soufflot,” in Le Panthéon, 37–96.
Soufflot’s 1741 lecture to the Lyon Academy, titled “Mémoire sur l’architecture
gothique,” was reprinted in Petzet, Soufflots Sainte-Geneviève, 135–42, and in Le
Panthéon, 305–8. According to Pérouse de Montclos, Soufflot, 43, the architect presented
the same “Mémoire” at the Royal Academy in Paris in December 1761 and
December 1762.
39. Allan Braham, The Architecture of the French Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA, 1980), 13–15.
England preceded France in this regard. Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Church of St. George,
Bloomsbury, was built in 1716–27, and James Gibbs’ St. Martin-in-the-Fields in
1721–26. Both have single-story temple portico façades. Even earlier was the temple
portico of Inigo Jones’ St. Paul’s, Covent Garden (1630–31). According to Herrmann,
Laugier, 116, Pierre Patte proposed a design in 1754 for the façade of the Parisian
Church of Saint-Eustache based on the temple portico model.
40. Julien-David Le Roy, Histoire de la disposition et des formes différentes que les Chrétiens ont
données à leurs temples depuis le règne de Constantin le Grand jusqu’à nous (Paris, 1764),
offers a contemporaneous history and comparative analysis of the development of
church types, the basilical Latin cross culminating in Pierre Contant d’Ivry’s first design
for the Madeleine in Paris (1763) and the centralized Greek cross in that of Sainte-
Geneviève.
41. Although Bramante’s project for St. Peter’s had much thinner piers than those later
designed by Michelangelo, the earlier architect still did not employ freestanding col-
umns in the arms of the church, nor were his piers at the crossing articulated, like Souf-
flot’s, to give the appearance of being composed of essentially freestanding supports.
42. Maximilien Brébion, “Mémoire à Monsieur le Comte de la Billarderie Angiviller,
Directeur et Ordonnateur Général des Batimens” (1780), in Petzet, Soufflots
Sainte-Geneviève, 147.
43. [Charles-Nicolas Cochin], Doutes raisonnables d’un marguillier de la paroisse de S. Eti-
enne-du-Mont sur le problême proposé par M. Patte, architecte, concernant la construction
de la coupole de l’Eglise de Sainte-Geneviève (Amsterdam, 1770), 11 (“Lettre de M.
C∗∗∗∗∗ à M. D∗∗∗∗∗, ancien Commissaire des Pauvres de la Paroisse de la
Magdeleine”). Although the pamphlet was issued anonymously, Cochin almost
immediately took credit for it in a letter published in the Mercure de France the same
year.
44. Laugier, Essai, 182, 198. Laugier, Observations, 297–8, repeated this advice, stating that
the buttressing of vaults “must be disguised and hidden from view as much as possible.
The building should be constructed so that nothing appears to exert thrust or to
buttress,” this in contradistinction to “gothic buildings” where a “forest of flying
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 35

buttresses and abutments surround their exterior perimeter…giving the appearance of

a building propped up and threatening to collapse.” “The vaults of the new Church of
Sainte Geneviève,” by contrast, “will be perfectly buttressed, but no one will perceive
how they are. Nothing on the exterior will announce the effort and the resistance. …
Free of any anxiety in this regard, one will only be concerned with the beauty of
the work.”
45. Laugier, Essai, 127–29.
46. Soufflot gained experience in using iron to reinforce stone construction while restoring
the colonnade of the Louvre’s east façade (begun 1756). Dating from the later 1660s,
the colonnade was considered to be the earliest and most prominent example of such a
structural system. See Robin Middleton, “Architects as Engineers: The Iron Reinforce-
ment of Entablatures in Eighteenth-Century France,” AA Files: Annals of the Architectural
Association School of Architecture 9 (Summer 1985): 54 et seq.; Antoine Picon, Claude Per-
rault, 1613–1688; ou, la curiosité d’un classique (Paris, 1988), 184–96; and Picon, “Free-
standing Column,” esp. 72–81. The generation following Soufflot’s began to
question such iron reinforcement, although initially on purely technical grounds. In
an unpublished “Note sur l’Employ du Fer en Bâtimens” written in 1804 and revised
in 1842, Antoine-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer (1756–1846) noted that although “it has
become proverbial to say that iron is the soul of a building,” it “is often one of the
causes that accelerates the ruin of buildings” through “rusting.” Vaudoyer pointed
out that Soufflot had learned from his experience at the Louvre to “take the precaution
of giving two coats of paint to all the internal pieces of iron” in the Church of Sainte-
Geneviève. While “none of the iron so far has caused any rupture [of the stone],” Vau-
doyer wondered whether Soufflot’s solution was “durable enough to conserve” the
building in the long run. Vaudoyer concluded that one should use iron only “with pru-
dence” and when “forced” to do so and “not to place an absolute confidence” in this
method of construction. Carton 32 architectes, dossier A.-L.-T. Vaudoyer, Bibliothèque
d’Art et d’Architecture Jacques Doucet, Institut Nationale d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris.
47. Laugier, Observations, 298–99, praised the way the flat lintels of the Louvre colonnade
“disguised any idea of thrust and buttressing” without, however, mentioning the role
played by the internal iron bars and cramps.
48. Laugier, Essai, xvii.
49. Laugier, Essai, xviii. This argument differs from that of most historians and critics, who
have preferred to see Laugier as predicting a more modern form of structural ration-
alism in which the distinction between truth and appearance is less the issue than what
Picon, in “Freestanding Column,” 94, speaks of as “the emergence of modern structural
thought.” In somewhat parallel fashion, Vidler, in Writing of the Walls, 17–21, sees
Laugier as the source of a modernist “autonomous architecture”: “Laugier had elimi-
nated all reference to the traditional symbolic and allegorical meanings of architecture,
religious and secular. …The elements of building [in his theory] were first and foremost
constructional and logical; their assembly followed a law of geometry; architecture was
not a language but a construct.” Alan Colquhoun, in Modern Architecture (Oxford, 2002),
37–38, writes that Laugier “argued for…the expression of a skeleton construction” that
had its ultimate outcome in the steel-frame system adopted in Chicago in the 1880s.
36 The Main Actors: The Architect

50. Laugier did not use the term vraisemblance in the Essai. By contrast, Jacques-François
Blondel, in his Cours d’architecture, 1: 286, considered a respect for verisimilitude, along
with a sense of decorum and good judgment, critical to the creation of good architec-
ture. Most of his references to the concept, however, do not extend beyond the surface
of illusion. More often than not, they point to the lack of verisimilitude in the use of
such elements as caryatids, trophies, consoles, and corbels or brackets, where the sculp-
tural or ornamental object does not appear to be capable of doing the job it would do
were the situation a real rather than a virtual one (1:339, 346, 348, 349, 361; 3:448). On
the other hand, Blondel noted the risk of a lack of verisimilitude when using the colos-
sal order due to the resultant incompatibility between exterior expression and interior
arrangement (3:49); the potential lack of verisimilitude when the vaults or domes of a
church are painted rather than decorated with ribs or coffers, which would be more in
keeping with the actual construction (3:419); and the lack of verisimilitude when inex-
perienced architects substitute bombast and complexity for simplicity by “introduc[ing]
many elements of Architecture and Sculptural ornaments in the decoration of façades
and the interior of Apartments” (4:lvi).
In the important chapter on the “Analysis of the Art [of Architecture]” in the first
volume of the Cours, Blondel devoted an entire section to “Verisimilitude in Architec-
ture” [“De la vraissemblance en Architecture”], although here he used the term in a
different and more restricted way than throughout the rest of the text. His main pur-
pose in this section was to distinguish the vraisemblable from the vrai in terms of the idea
of architectural style (1:391–3). The “style vrai en Architecture,” the definition of which
immediately precedes the discussion of vraisemblance, “presents a resolute character,
which puts each element in its place, [and] which uses ornaments that are only neces-
sary to embellish it”; it “is devoid of any equivocation, reveals itself beautiful in
its ordonnance, commodious in its distribution, and solid in its construction.” “This
character of truth alone can produce unity, which must be seen as the highest
quality of art.” “The verisimilar [vraisemblable],” by contrast, must be understood as
something that “substitutes” and “compensates for the true style” when the architect
finds himself under financial, material, or programmatic constraints. Through such
devices as optical corrections of proportions and increased appearance of support,
it reveals the architect’s ability to overcome difficulties and achieve a sense of
“beauty.” Whereas “a true architecture pleases all eyes, a verisimilar architecture
pleases only the enlightened mind,” Blondel states. It “is more the fruit of reasoning
and of the meditation on the part of the architect than the strict application of precepts,
verisimilitude therefore being sometimes preferable to a truth that rebuffs often more
than it pleases.”
Although Blondel never subjects the concept of verisimilitude to a reading in terms
of structural truth along the lines opened up by Laugier, Antoine-Chrysostôme Qua-
tremère de Quincy’s Architecture, 3 vols., in Encyclopédie méthodique, ou par ordre de
matières, par une société de gens de lettres, de savans et d’artistes, ed. C[harles] J[oseph]
Panckoucke (Paris, 1788, 1801, and 1825), 1: 114 (s.v. “Architecture”) and 1: 385
(s.v. “Cabane”), uses the term vraisemblance in precisely the way I have done.
51. Aristotle, Poetics, 9.2–4.
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 37

52. Alina Payne, “Ut Poesis Architectura: Tectonics and Poetics in Architectural Criticism
circa 1570,” in Antiquity and Its Interpreters, ed. Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and
Rebekah Smick (Cambridge, 2000), 147–8, refers to the Aristotelian concept of ver-
isimilitude in her discussion of Palladio’s explanation of the ornamental aspect of
volutes. She notes that his “departure point is clearly Vitruvius’ origin story of the
ornamenta above the columns (4.2.1–5 [see note 31 above]), where the temple’s entab-
lature and pediment are described as “stone simulacra of wooden structure.” Laugier,
by contrast, extended the domain of verisimilitude from the ornamental detail to the
entirety of the building.
53. The association of reality with appearance permeates discussions of Leon Battista Alber-
ti’s work and clearly derives from the architect’s own, sometimes ambiguous writing on
the subject. In his On the Art of Building in Ten Books (De re aedificatoria) [Florence, 1486],
trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 6.13,
Alberti states that “the column is the principal ornament, without any doubt…to adorn a
portico, wall, or other form of opening.” Earlier on he defines “ornament, rather than
being inherent [as having] the character of something attached or additional” (6.2).
On the other hand, while stating that “columns may either be added to the wall or
inserted into an opening” (7.11), he also describes the “piers, columns, and anything else
that acts as a column and supports the trusses and roof arches” as composing the “bones”
of the structure (3.6), such “bones” being “the solid part of the wall” (7.4). The “wall,” he
describes in another part of the text, as comprising “skin, infill, bonding, and bones” (9.8).
54. In his Observations sur l’architecture of 1765, however, Laugier came back to the subject
with a vengeance, devoting the entire first part of the book to it—71 out of the book’s
overall 314 pages.
55. Laugier, Essai, 56.
56. Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne considérée
dans son origine, ses principes et son goût, et comparée sous les mêmes rapports à l’architecture
grecque, dissertation qui a remporté, en 1785, le prix proposé par l’Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres (Paris, 1803); Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture; and Quatremère de
Quincy, Dictionnaire historique d’architecture, comprenant dans son plan les notions histor-
iques, descriptives, archéologiques, biographiques, théoriques, didactiques et pratiques de cet
art, 2 vols. (Paris, 1832). The entries on “Architecture,” “Character,” “Idea,” and “Imi-
tation” from Architecture were translated by Tanis Hinchcliffe and published (with some
editing) in “Extracts from the Encyclopédie méthodique d’architecture: Antoine-
Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, 1755–1849,” 9H 7 (1985): 25–39. Selections from
the Dictionnaire historique were translated into English in Samir Younés, ed., The True,
the Fictive, and the Real: The Historical Dictionary of Architecture of Quatremère de Quincy
(London, 1999). On Quatremère, see René Schneider, Quatremère de Quincy et son inter-
vention dans les arts (1788–1850) (Paris, 1910); René Schneider, L’Ésthétique classique chez
Quatremère de Quincy (1805–23) (Paris, 1910); and Sylvia Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy and
the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1992).
Quatremère’s adoption of a more doctrinaire and reductive neoclassicism can be
seen clearly in his critique of Soufflot’s design of the Church of Sainte-Geneviève.
38 The Main Actors: The Architect

While praising the church for being the most responsible for “bringing the style of
antiquity back into favor,” Quatremère criticized Soufflot in his Histoire de la vie et
des ouvrages des plus célèbres architectes du XIe siècle jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1830), 2: 344, 341, for failing to endow the church with “the great simplicity
of line and detail, the severity of forms, the density of intercolumniations, [and] the
economy of ornaments” appropriate to such a building, and instead giving it “a style
of elegance and variety…that, in the language of his art, become the marked expression
of gaiety and pleasure.” In addition, Quatremère condemned the mixing of unrelated
elements, such as “naves with freestanding columns” supporting “cut-stone vaults” or a
“triple-shell stone dome surrounded on the outside by a freestanding colonnade” (341).
More than anything else, the dome contradicted Quatremère’s neoclassicism. In his
Dictionnaire historique, 2: 100–1, he called the form an expensive and wasteful “super-
fetation” or “pleonasm,” the “mania for the erection of [which] is a vestige of the Gothic
legacy.”
57. Quatremère de Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne, esp. 239–41.
58. Quatremère de Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne, 242–3. These thoughts were
repeated almost word for word in Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture, vol. 1,
114–15 (s.v. “Architecture”).
59. Quatremère de Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne, 114.
60. Quatremère de Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne, 111.
61. Quatremère de Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne, 115.
62. Quatremère more fully developed the concepts of fiction and verisimilitude in the con-
text of the imitation of nature in painting and sculpture in his Essai sur la nature, le but et
les moyens de l’imitation dans les beaux-arts (Paris, 1823); repr. as De l’imitation, 1823, ed.
Leon Krier and Demetri Porphyrios (Brussels, 1980).
63. Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture, 1: 118–20 (s.v. “Architecture”).
64. Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture, 1: 115, 123 (s.v. “Architecture”); and 500, 505 (s.v.
“Caractère”). In his De l’imitation, 1823, 147, however, Quatremère wrote that “archi-
tecture, which imitates nothing that is real or positive, nevertheless takes its place on
this imitative ladder [of the arts of imitation] due to the fact that its characteristic feature
is to employ matter, its forms, and the relationships of their proportions to express
moral qualities, or at least those that nature makes visible in its works, and by which
is produced in us the ideas and the sensations correlative to order, harmony, grandeur,
richness, unity, variety, duration, eternity.”
65. Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture, 1: 382 (s.v. “Cabane”). In Quatremère de Quincy,
Architecture, 1: 115 (s.v. “Architecture”), Quatremère resorted to an argument similar to
the one maintaining that “if God did not exist, he would have to be invented,” obser-
ving that “Even if one succeeded in proving to us that this imitation [of the hut] did not
exist at all, that it was nothing but a system created after the fact, and the result of a later
comparison of ideas subsequently fabricated, one could only conclude that what might
not have existed should have existed, and that it would be a new obligation for us to the
art to create voluntarily for it a model the imitation of which is for us an added
pleasure.”
 Laugier’s Prototypal Hut, Soufflot’s Sainte-Geneviève 39

66. Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture, 1: 115 (s.v. “Architecture”). In his entry

on “Décoration” in the second volume of Architecture (1801), 178, Quatremère
reiterated his argument for the hut as a “constructed” model of imitation in
Greek architecture:

It is in the creations of nature, or the manner in which nature creates, that this art [of archi-
tecture] finds its models and its rules …[,] drawing the primitive types and characters of its
constitution from the analogy with the first constructions made by the instinct of need. …
There is no architecture more than that of Greece … where the imitative and decorative
system is visibly written in the nature of things.
The Greeks did two things that rendered their combinations the most excellent of all;
they gave themselves a positive model, which preserved them from the deviations of any
fantasies; they then demanded that the ornaments proper to embellishing this model also
be drawn from the same source; so that for want of a model of building in the works of
nature, which creates no houses, they chose the work of art closest to the inspirations of
need, of instinct and of the habits of nature. … They demanded that everything that
announced the crude framework and anatomy of the undeveloped model that they took
as a type should become the principle of the ornament in the copy.

67. Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture, 1: 115 (s.v. “Architecture”). Quatremère de

Quincy, De l’architecture égyptienne, 230, noted that “such a model [as the hut] acquires,
relative to the imitative art [of architecture] the force and the authority of nature.”
Vidler, Writing of the Walls, 147–64; and Lavin, Quatremère de Quincy, esp. 102–13, offer
quite different readings of Quatremère’s understanding of the imitative basis of archi-
tecture in the hut.
68. Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture, 1: 116 (s.v. “Architecture”).
69. Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture, 1: 114 (s.v. “Architecture”).
70. For an example of Quatremère’s hard-line conservatism, see his critique of Soufflot in
note 56 above.
71. Quatremère de Quincy, Architecture, 1: 500 (s.v. “Caractère”).

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