François Blondel and the French Academic Tradition

Architectural thought in France at the start of the seventeenth century, like that in Italy and Spain, was predicated on the notion that the art of architecture participated in a divinely sanctioned cosmology or natural order: a stable grammar of eternally valid forms, numbers, and proportional relations transmitted to the present from ancient times. Jean Bautista Villalpanda, in his 1604 commentary on the prophet Ezekiel and Solomon's Temple, attempted to prove that these numbers and proportions not only were compatible with the Vitruvian tradition but were given to Solomon directly by God himself. Within a few years, this tenet, more broadly considered, would meet philosophical resistance in the person of René Descartes (1596–1650). In his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, written sometime before 1628, Descartes noted: “Concerning objects proposed for study, we ought to investigate what we can clearly and evidently intuit or deduce with certainty, and not what other people have thought or what we ourselves conjecture.” In this clash of two different systems of values – inherited tradition and the confident power of human reason – resounds the first stirrings of modern theory.

Descartes's third “rule,” as he termed it, is even richer in its implications.