Line and shadow: Architectural drawings from the 16th and 19th centuries

Signed by the greatest French architects (du Cerceau, Mansart, Boullée, Viollet-le-Duc...), these 150 drawings trace the history of the architecture of 16th to 19th century. Reflecting the ambition to achieve an urban ideal and shedding light on the creative process of their authors, they offer an experience sensitive and intellectual to the reader. Architectural drawing is a vast and diverse field. Architects practice it to acquire an intimate knowledge of buildings and develop their ability to imagine them; they use it as the support for their exchanges with the various building trades; they make it a means for reach the public and decision-makers, sometimes even elevating it to the rank of a work of art. Signed by the most brilliant architect designers – by Jacques Androuet from the Hoop to Etienne Louis Boullée, from Gilles Marie Oppenord to Jean Jacques Lequeu, from Charles Percier to Henri Labrouste, from Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to Charles Garnier – the 150 drawings presented in this book trace a history of French architecture from the Renaissance to the late 19th century. In a field where the major challenge is to show a building by anticipation, these drawings bear witness to the ambition shared by the architects to achieve an architectural and urban ideal. Like the writer's manuscript, They illuminate a creative process, with its hesitations, its corrections or its covers. Unlike the text, however, they have the strength and the autonomy of the figures, which "speak" to the eye immediately. They give us thus offer an experience that is both sensitive and intellectual by expressing the relationship of their authors to space, to matter, to color, to the intelligence of structures.