Jean Nicolas Louis David Durand
b. Paris, 1760;
d. Thiais, Val-de-Marne, 1834.

Influential theoretician; Neo-Classical “Rationalist”. Durand’s parents were poor and he studied architecture through the generosity of patrons. He entered the office of Boullee in 1776 and became his favourite pupil. He earned enough to enroll at the Academie d’Architecture and was placed second in the Prix de Rome competitions of 1779 and 1780. In 1795 he became professor of architecture at the recently established Ecole Polytechnique, where he remained until shortly before his death. He built very little, but his introductory lectures to engineering students, published as the Précis, were enormously influential and represent the culmination of French “rationalist” architectural thinking. Although he accepted the prevailing Neo-Classical style, it was conventional for Durand, with no expressive function as it had for Ledoux or Boullee. Instead he reduced architecture to its essentials of structure and geometry, and its utilitarian purpose; for the first time Durand considered architecture in terms of the history of building types. In this way his writing anticipated and helped to create the intellectual foundations of C20 Modernism.

List of major buildings / works
Museum protect, 1779.
Hotel Lathuillc, rue du Faubourg-Poissoniere, Paris, 1788.
Country house at Thiais, 1825.

Bibliography
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Harmondsworth, 1958, 1977.
A. Braham, The Architecture of the French Enlightenment, Los Angeles, 1980.
R. Middleton (ed.), The Beaux-Arts and Nineteenth Century French Architecture, London, 1982.
Sergio Villari, f. N. L. Durand, tr. E. Gottlieb, New York, 1990.