There comes a moment in every architectural history class when an undergraduate asks how exactly did architects work out the science or mathematics of some major monument. It is not a moment I eagerly anticipate, and I suspect I am not alone. Especially in the large introductory classes I teach each year, my emphasis is on the broad cultural issues of architecture, the ways in which buildings shape human experience and respond to historical pressures. I am trying to engage students who are not necessarily art history or architecture majors and those who are in the class to satisfy some general humanities requirement—or worse, because it happened to fit their schedule. Yet their questions about the science and mathematics of architecture reflect their correct understanding of the technical nature of building, an aspect of architecture (and architectural history) that is often relegated to the historian of science with an expertise in engineering.

Early modern architects, however, understood better that the promotion of architecture as a liberal art and a proper area of study for sophisticated gentlemen depended upon its basis in mathematics and science. Following Vitruvian prescriptions for the training of an architect, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century architects and theorists struggled to find the place of architecture in a shifting landscape of professional identity and court favor. François Blondel, the first director of the Académie Royale d’Architecture and creator of the 1676 plan of Paris, forged a path to public recognition by mastering not only architecture but many of its allied disciplines: ballistics, engineering, mathematics, antiquarian studies, and urban design. In his own lifetime, Blondel was a figure of great importance, prominent in Louis XIV’s court, author of seminal texts on architecture, and a major authority on architectural matters. Yet his star quickly faded after his death due to what critics saw as his pedantry and ultimately the criticism of his rival Charles Perrault in the debate over the ancients and the moderns. Blondel’s fall from grace has unfortunately diminished his interest as a historical subject, and Anthony Gerbino’s François Blondel: Architecture, Erudition, and the Scientific Revolution is the first study of the architect’s entire career in over seventy years.

If Blondel certainly deserves a monograph that embraces the whole of his work, he does not make an easy subject. His early career in the military, as “homme de letters et homme d’épée” (10) led, not unexpectedly, to schemes for fortifications and the publication L’art de jetter les bombes (1683). The knowledge of the art of war was a useful background for any number of professions in the early modern period. War was an unforgiving teacher, and the lessons learned on the battlefield were understood as essential to a public life at court. Gerbino rightly notes that it was mathematics that unites the various phases of Blondel’s life. Mathematics was a practical art on the battlefield and in the architect’s studio, and won Blondel one of his great patrons in the figure of Henri-Auguste de Loménie, comte de Brienne. Blondel served as tutor for Brienne’s son, and Brienne operated as an entrée to the world of the court for which Blondel would serve as foreign ambassador and ultimately urban designer and architect.

There are moments of Blondel’s life that are intriguing yet little explored in Gerbino’s book. Blondel spent two and a half years in the French West Indies, preparing schemes for the fortifications of Martinique, Granada, Tortola, and elsewhere. What was this experience like? If Blondel was silent about it (drawings do survive, however, from this time), it should have been possible to delve into the rich literature on the colonial experience and examine the ways in which new world architecture might have affected such a classically trained architect/engineer. And while much is known about Blondel’s mathematical and architectural intellectual milieu, his life outside the academy and the court are passed by without comment. Maybe Blondel does deserve the dismissive judgment as a pedant, but the evidence against this is in the very richness of his architecture.

Blondel challenges any simple notion of the early modern architect as the intellectual foil to the artisan, one approaching architecture as a schematic and abstract science, the other relying on tacit knowledge and firsthand experience of making. As soldier and engineer, later mathematician and architect, Blondel moved between these poles. Blondel consistently argues for the value of erudition and expertise, knowledge that goes beyond experience. By avoiding specialization, and crafting theories that could be applied to many fields, Blondel sought to elevate architecture into an aristocratic position as a universal science, infinitely flexible and always based in ancient precedent and mathematical precision.

To his careful and deep reading of Blondel’s scientific knowledge, Gerbino adds an analysis of his major architectural works, specifically the design for Paris, conceived in 1659 or 1660 and published in 1667. This chapter reads more like a conventional urban history, and is the aspect of the book that will feel most familiar to architectural historians. Here Gerbino goes through the major aspects of the urban plan, specifically the design for the projected boulevards around the outside of the city and the design for a series of new gates. In the mid-seventeenth century the court still considered the Louvre a principal residence, and the new gates therefore made permanent the tradition of arches erected for royal triumphal entries. Gerbino convincingly compares Blondel’s design for the gate at St. Denis, for example, with sixteenth-century designs for the entry of Henri II in 1549. Blondel worked with his assistant Pierre Bullet on the design of the gates, and the collaboration between the two as master and assistant produced powerful classical designs that articulated royal themes and urban aspirations. More compelling than either Bullet or Blondel’s drawings, however, are the views made by the royal engraver, Gabriel Perelle, a few of which are included as illustrations of the work of Blondel in transforming Paris. Like the slightly earlier work of Wenceslaus Hollar in England, Perelle’s illustrations gives a sense of the juxtaposition of old and new in Paris, the ways in which Blondel’s interventions into the urban landscape set off a new political era in architectural terms.

The Paris plan and gates were certainly Blondel’s most important architectural projects. Yet I was more struck by his designs for a stable at the chateau of Chaumont (1648–1652) and the corderie (rope factory) at Rochefort (1666). These are extraordinary buildings, innovative and startling. Blondel’s manipulation of architectural details, repetition of forms, and boldness in the use of structure warrant a great deal more study in light of his mathematical interests.

There are a few mentions of comparable architects in Europe, Christopher Wren for example, who had similar scientific interests and architectural leanings. Yet the scope of Gerbino’s book remains in France and primarily within the seventeenth century. While many architectural studies, especially in the early modern period, range far and wide in the cultural and theoretical contexts of architecture, Gerbino stays closer to home. There is little engagement with European counterpoints nor with the theoretical literature on issues central to Gerbino’s discussion such as patronage and court studies, gift giving, scientific method in the early modern laboratory, or reading practice.

Research in the history of science has much to offer architectural history, and Blondel is the perfect case study. In his Cours d’architecture (1675–1683) and other writings, Blondel argued convincingly for the breadth of architecture as a discipline, and the necessity for scientific method at the heart of an architect’s work. Gerbino’s sympathetic study of Blondel will do much toward restoring the architect’s reputation in the canon of seventeenth-century architectural theory. Blondel emerges as a talented architect, and a true believer in the power of mathematics to bind all knowledge together.