Acknowledgments
Introduction
lberto Pérez-Gómez
Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients Claude Perrault
Preface
Part One
I Ordonnance and the Architectural Orders
II The Dimensions Regulating the Proportions of the Orders
III The General Proportions of the Three Main Parts of Entire Columns
IV The Height of Entablatures
V The Length of Columns
VI The Height of Entire Pedestals
VII The Proportions of the Parts of Pedestals
VIII The Diminution and Enlargement of Columns
IX The Projection of the Base of Columns
X The Projection of the Base and Cornice of Pedestals
XI The Projection of the Cornice of Entablatures
XII The Proportions of Capitals
XIII The Proportions of the Astragal and the Lip of the Column Shaft
Part Two
I The Tuscan Order
II The Doric Order
III The Ionic Order
IV The Corinthian Order
V The Composite Order
VI Pilasters
VII Abuses in the Alteration of Proportions
VIII Some Other Abuses Introduced into Modern Architecture
Bibliography
Index

“The beauty of the presentation and the importance of the original text will make this of interest to all architectural historians.” — Art Book Review Quarterly

Claude Perrault was an architect in seventeenth-century Paris. Born in 1613, he is best known for designing and constructing the main eastern wing of the Palais du Louvre, known as the Colonnade, in the French classical style. Perrault was also a prominent physician and physicist, and in 1666 became a founding member of the French Academy of Sciences. He wrote an important translation of Vitruvius’s The Ten Books of Architecture, published in 1673. With his brother Charles, the famous writer, Perrault defended modern science in the great querelle des Anciens et des Modernes that defined the intellectual climate in France at the end of the seventeenth century. Claude Perrault died in 1688 of a wound he suffered while dissecting a camel.

Alberto Pérez-Gómez has taught at universities in Mexico City, Houston, Syracuse, and Toronto, and at the Architectural Association in London; he was director of the Carleton University School of Architecture in Ottawa from 1983 to 1986. In January 1987 Pérez-Gómez was appointed Saidye Rosner Bronfman professor of the history of architecture at McGill University in Montreal, where he is currently director of the master’s program in the history and theory of architecture. Since March 1990 he has also been director of a research institute that is cosponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Université de Montréal, and McGill University.