LAUGIER, Marc-Antoine (1713--1769)
[Essai sur l'architecture. 1753]

Essai sur l'architecture.
A Paris (Place), chez Duchesne,, 1753.
xiv, [2], 293, [19] p. ; 15.6 cm. (12º)

Anonymous. By Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier. First edition of this enormously influential essay; Laugier is named as the author on the title-page of the second edition (1755, q.v.). On the theoretical background to Laugier's attempt to strip architecture to its first principles, the widespread appeal of his Essai as an rational appel à l'ordre in reaction to rococo excess, and the hostility his ideas provoked in official academic circles in France, see Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and eighteenth-century French theory, London 1958. The final leaf has a list of errata and the imprint of 'la Veuve Delatour'.

Copy Notes This edition which does not name Laugier as the author is probably the 'Essai sur l'Architecture 12mo' bought by Soane from T. & W. Boone for 2s. on 14 April 1823. (Spiers Box).

Binding C18th mottled calf, gilt-tooled spine, red spine-label.


Reference Number 2602

Additional Names T. & W.$Boone