HÔTELS

French architects devoted special care to distribution (the artful planning of rooms and their functions). The design of hôtels tested their talents in this particular branch of architecture. From the fifteenth to the early twentieth centuries, architects devised increasingly sophisticated plans and balanced the conflicting requirements of geometric regularity, site constraints and programmatic complexity.

Sebastiano Serlio, an Italian painter, architect and theoretician brought to France by François I in 1544-46, contributed decisively to the evolution of the hôtel type. At the Hôtel d’Este in Fontainebleau (1546, fig. 60.7), Serlio regularized and simplified the picturesque massing and layout of late Gothic hôtels, such as the Grand’Maison or Hôtel of Jacques Coeur in Bourges (begun 1443; Key Buildings, Chapter 47, p. xxx, fig. 60.5) and the Hôtel de Cluny in Paris (1485– 98). He also laid out the main apartments of French hôtels along enfilades (series of interconnected rooms arranged in a row), an obligatory feature of hôtel plans from the seventeenth century onwards.

To respond to new functional and ceremonial needs, Serlio’s successors greatly enriched his simple scheme at Fontainebleau. Louis Le Vau at the Hôtel Tambonneau, Paris (1642), and François Mansart at the Hôtel de Jars, Paris (1648-50: fig. 60.8), doubled Serlio’s single enfilade. With two parallel enfilades, Le Vau and Mansart enabled more complex internal planning. At the Hôtel de Beauvais, Paris (1655-57, fig. 60.9), Le Vau and Mansart’s contemporary Antoine Lepautre demonstrated with astounding virtuosity how architects could negotiate difficult pre-existing conditions, in this case the reuse of medieval foundations.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières described the expressive potential of geometrical complexity in his Le génie de l’architecture, ou L’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (The Spirit of Architecture, or The Analogy of this Art with our Sensations, Paris, 1780) as Jean-François de Bastide had done in his novel La petite maison (The Little House, Paris, 1762). Avant-garde architects, however, began to criticize these masterful feats of planning. Espousing a militant primitivism, they revived the simple layout of Renaissance dwellings, as did Marie-Joseph Peyre at the Folie Leprêtre de Neubourg (early 1760s), near Paris. The late eighteenth-century vogue for pavilions surrounded by landscape gardens, such as the Hôtel Thélusson (1778-81, fig. 60.11) by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, lessened the importance of the dazzling spatial puzzles for which French architects had been renowned.