The book “architecture moderne” by Charles Antoine Jombert was published in 1728, as mentioned in the previous exercise.
The title is very revealing in a way, as it shows us what people in 1728 considered modern architecture. What is an old building to us today was once the pinnacle of architectural development and technology.
Jombert’s work includes a table of contents so long it might as well be part of the written text. He really didn’t shy away from dividing an extensive text into small paragraphs.
As for the sections of the book, the online version differs vastly from the book in the ETH Zurich archives. Online, the illustrations are evenly distributed throughout the book, while the physical edition of the book itself contains illustrations only on the last pages. The illustrations, as shown in the previous exercise, depict very accurately a wide variety of elements, from facades to staircases to cornices.
The book is very thick and thus contains a lot of pages. It tells us that the author had a lot to say about the subject. Indeed, the title is so extensive that he certainly had a lot to write about.
Charles Antoine Jombert was a French bookseller and publisher who specialized in military books. He came from an old family of booksellers. This may tell us that the background of the book “architecture moderne” is purely militaristic. Some of the illustrations show machines and similar objects, which could prove this hypothesis.