Auguste Choisy

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Auguste Choisy (born February 7, 1841 in Vitry-le-François , † September 18, 1909 in Paris ) was a French engineer and architectural historian who was heavily involved in the construction of historical buildings. From 1877 to 1901 he was a professor at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées . In 1904 he won the RIBA's Royal Gold Medal .

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Auguste Choisy, son of an architect, attended the École Polytechnique in Paris in 1861, where Léonce Reynaud was teaching at the time , and from 1863 continued his studies at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées. Then, as was customary at the time, as part of his training he undertook extensive trips to Rome and Athens to study the ancient buildings there.

In contrast to many of his predecessors, Choisy was far more interested in the construction of historical buildings than in their architectural expression. He saw construction as the most important element of architecture. For him, all style changes were merely the logical consequence of technical developments.

As a result of his studies, Choisy published L'art de bâtir chez les romains in 1873 in which he deals in detail with the construction methods, construction technology, work processes and work organization which the Romans used to build structures such as the Pantheon in Rome.

The book led to Choisy being proposed by his former professors Léonce Reynaud and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to undertake an expedition to undertake similar investigations in the Middle East on Byzantine buildings. This resulted in Choisy's second work in the same style, L'art de bâtir chez les Byzantins, in 1882 .

Choisy's research led to the fact that he was appointed professor at the École nationale des ponts et chaussées and later also to the École Polytechnique. His lectures finally resulted in his magnum opus, the Histoire de l'architecture published in 1899 .

Choisy completed his studies of ancient buildings with further publications on ancient Greece in the Études épigraphiques sur l'architecture grecque published in 1883 and Egypt in L'art de bâtir chez les Egyptiens , published in 1904 .

Noteworthy and influential were the then new axonometric projections with which Choisy illustrated his works and which summarized all the essential elements of a design in a single picture with floor plan, view and section. The architecture theorist Reyner Banham believed that these objective illustrations reduce the architecture they represent to pure abstraction. A quality that, in addition to the undeniable informational value, probably contributed to the fact that this type of representation was very popular with the pioneers of modern architecture.

Auguste Perret is one of Choisy's students .

Books by Auguste Choisy

  • L'art de bâtir chez les Romains . 1873 ( digitized version )
  • L'Asie mineur et les Turcs en 1875. Souvenirs de voyage . 1876
  • Le Sahara. Souvenirs d'une mission à Góleah . 1881
  • L'art de bâtir chez les Byzantins . 1883
  • Études épigraphiques sur l'architecture grecque . 1883
  • Histoire de l'Architecture . 1899
  • L'art de bâtir chez les Egyptiens . 1904
  • Vitruve . 1909

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Richard Phene Spiers: The Late M. Choisy the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, , September 25, 1909
  2. ↑ a b c Kenneth Frampton: The architecture of modernity , Munich 2010, ISBN 978-3-421-03075-7
personal data
SURNAME Choisy, Auguste
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French architectural historian
DATE OF BIRTH February 7, 1841
PLACE OF BIRTH Vitry-le-François
DATE OF DEATH September 18, 1909
Place of death Paris , France