The architect's working drawings in context: Paris, 1791-1875

The thesis examines the evolution and conventions of the Parisian architect's working, or construction drawings (dessins d 'exécution) between 1791 and 1875. Prepared by the architect in collaboration with teams of draughtmen and contractors, they functioned as a set of graphic instructions for the construction workers on the building site. Because of their difficult technical content and precarious position within the Academic tradition, they have been neglected by architectural historians. My hypothesis posits, however, that the dessin d' exécution is the fundamental architectural document reflecting and embodying, in its full physical and theoretical aspects, inclinations of nineteenth-century modernism (within French society at large and architectural culture in particular): “to enoble technical necessities by artistic aims” (Walter Benjamin). For in its artistic finish and technical language, it displays distinct contradictions, simultaneously conservative and progressive, rooted in continuity and rupture, larger themes in Alexis de Tocqueville's analysis of the Ancien Régime and the French Revolution which animate my arguments. Dualistic forces in the conceptual and material nature of the dessin d'exécution permeate post-Revolutionary architectural practices. Revolutionary decrees abolished the feudal guild system, Royal Academy of Architecture, and Royal Building Administration. To a limited degree structural iron, mechanization, and industrialization were introduced on the work site. However, rather than radically changing traditional building habits, conventional construction technology, materials, and artisanal skills prevailed. A hierarchical, bureaucratic building system was controlled by the Conseil général des Bâtiments civils, itself largely styled upon the Royal Administration. From the Revolutionary epoque through the July Monarchy, major treatises and manuals by Gaspard Monge, Jean-Baptiste Rondelet, Charles Mandar, and C. Leblanc (illustrated by two generations of draughtsmen with origins in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie) codified and vulgarized construction drawing conventions. They were adopted by Rondelet and Adolphe Jäy for the construction competition submission drawings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and by the bureaucrats at the Bâtiments civils for architects applying for building permits and directing construction. Drawing conventions, however, depended upon media, instruments, supports, and draughting skills of the 1700s, a fact corroborated by comparison of pre- 1800 drawing manuals and architects' sheets with equivalent documentation from the 1800s, including those of Henri Labrouste and Charles Garnier for the National Library and Paris Opera. The artistic finish of these working drawings (manually executed despite the availability of mechanical reproduction techiques) attests to the architect's desire to preserve personal control over the description and execution of the building. As such the dessin d'exécution mirrors and focuses upon the uneasy alliance between hand and machine labour, between individuality and conformity, between art and technology, between habits of the Old Régime and the new République.