MODELO DE LOS FACTORES DE LA OFERTA DE CRÉDITO DE LOS

for the Fete de Bara et Viala in the Pantheon, Paris. The event did not take place, however, and nothing was built. They also won several other competitions for public buildings in 1794 but none of these was built, either.

Durand’s competition successes led to an appointment at the new Ecole Polytechnique, beginning in 1795 as a draftsman, and from 1797 to 1833 as professor of architecture. During this period, the school provided only basic education for engineers who went on to more specialized work. Consequently, Durand’s architectural course was limited to a few sessions and it took second place to subj ects such as Gaspard Monge’s descriptive geometry. Durand produced two maj or publications in response to the situation: Recueil et parallele des edifices de tout genre, anciens et modemes, remarquablespar leur beaute, p a r leur grandeur, ou par leur singularity, et dessines sur une meme echelle55 and Precis des legons d ’architecture donnees a I ’Ecole polytechnique depuis sa reorganisation; precedee d ’un sommaire des legons relatives a ce nouveau travail.56 These are commonly known as the “Grand Durand” and the “Petit Durand,” respectively.

The origins o f the Recueil were in the collection o f six prints that Durand exhibited at the Salon of Year VII (1798/1799). The remainder was assembled in two groups over the next two years, and the completed work depicted more than thirty building types in plan and elevation, dating from the Egyptian period to the eighteenth-century. Although Durand’s preference was for extant structures, he included several reconstructions. The overall approach was similar to that used by Julien-David Le Roy (1724-1803) in Les m ines des plus beaux monuments de la Grece; Ouvrage divise en deux parties, ou I ’on considere, dans la premiere, ces monuments du cote de I ’histoire, etdans la seconde,

The Beaux-Arts and nineteenth-century French architecture, Robin Middleton, ed., (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1982), p. 19.

55 Paris: Gille, 1799.

56 Paris, Chez l ’Auteur, 1802-25. Durand revised the 1802-05 edition o f the Precis and published it as the

Nouveau p recis des legons d'architecture donnees a TEcole imperiale polytechnique (Paris: Chez l’Auteur, 1809-13).

du cote de I ’architecture,57 However, Durand’s work was unique for several reasons: he organized buildings by type, he simplified his models by redrawing and amending them to suit his purposes (especially those selected from Piranesi’s work), and he presented all o f the buildings at a common scale in plan, section, and elevation.58 The 1801 and 1833 editions of the Recueil were supplemented by a fifty-two page text consisting of a substantial extract from architect Jacques-Guillaume Legrand’s “Essai sur l’histoire generale de 1’architecture.”59 The “Essai” was published separately in 1809 on the advice o f Charles Paul Landon (1760-1826) with Durand listed as co-author.60 Durand concurred with Legrand when he suggested using Legrand’s text because teaching responsibilities made preparation of his own text impossible. The work was aimed at a wide public although it remained in use at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts into the twentieth-century. The Precis contained Durand’s lectures given at the Ecole Polytechnique and came in two volumes. The first focused on architectural composition, while the second was concerned with the design of public buildings. Durand declared himself an opponent of a long line o f architectural thinking stretching from Vitruvius to Marc-Antoine Laugier. In his view, economy, and fitness for purpose was the basis of architecture, and his course proposed a standard, simplified vocabulary of neoclassical forms and proportions.

57 Paris: H. L. Guerin & L. F. Delatour, 1758. Le Roy added plans to the second corrected, augmented, and re­ titled edition; Les m ines des plu s beaux monuments de la Grece: considerees du cote de I'histoire et du cote de Varchitecture, 2 vols., Paris: Imprimerie de Louis-Frangois Delatour, 1770.

58 Kruft refers to the Recueil as a “typological atlas”; Kruft, p. 273.

59 Legrand (1743-1807) was well established within the French architectural community, having studied with Jean Rodolphe Perronet and Frangois Blondel and married the daughter o f Charles Louis Clerisseau. His practice concentrated on public works projects and he published several books, written alone and with others. He wrote the first biography o f Piranesi, although it was not published until the twentieth-century; Jacques- Guillaume [Legrand], “Notice historique sur la vie et sur les ouvrages de J. B. Piranesi” in Marina Miraglia, ed.,

Grafica, M ostra della Calcografia dedicata a Giovanni Battista Piranesi, exhibition catalogue (Rome: Edizioni dell'elefante, 1976), p. 5).

60 Jacques-Guillaume Legrand and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Essai sur I ’histoire generale de I ’architecture

(Essay on the General History o f Architecture, Paris: Soyer, 1809). Landon was a prominent art historian, a student o f the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Rome, and later a curator o f paintings at the Musee in Paris, the precursor o f the Louvre. He translated and published the first French edition o f Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities o f Athens',

Durand’s course underwent few modifications. His Partie graphique des cours d ’architecture donnees a VEcole polytechnique depuis sa reorganisation61 amounted to a simplification o f his published teachings o f 1802. The Choix des projets d ’edifices publics composes par MM. les eleves de l’Ecole polytechnique62 written by Durand in collaboration with Frangois-Tranquille Gaucher (1766-1846) contained various projects by students at the Ecole Polytechnique.

Durand did not participate in the great proj ects o f the French Empire. He designed many proj ects but his few built works consisted o f the Hotel Lathuille in Paris, (1788), Maison Lermina a house for an administrator at the Ecole Polytechnique at Chessy, Seine-er Marne (ca. 1802), a house at Thiais (ca. 1811), his own house (1820) and country house (1825) in Thiais, and a portable panorama with Charles O. Barbaroux (1828).63 His buildings illustrate the principles taught in his course and his importance reflects his teaching and the extent of its influence. For more than thirty years, all students at the Ecole Polytechnique were trained by Durand, whose influence is evident in public architecture in France from the beginning of the nineteenth-century. His rationalism corresponded to the economic and ideological needs of Napoleonic France by affirming the role o f economy and function through standardization o f structural elements. Despite the radical views expressed in his writings, he did not contest the usefulness o f antique forms and contributed to their continued presence in French architecture.

Durand’s influence in Germany was also considerable and his writings ultimately came to occupy an important place in a country where architectural training was still not systematically organized. His

James Stuart, Nicholas Revett, Laurent Frangois Feuillet, C. P. Landon, Les antiquites d'Athenes, mesurees et dessinees, Paris: Firmin Didot, 1808-1822.

61 Paris, Chez 1’Auteur, 1821.