The book “L’architecture moderne ou l’art de bien batir” (Modern architecture or the art of building well) was written by Charles-Etienne Briseux, published in 1728 and can be seen as a kind of manual on how to build and all that comes with it. It attentively describes different parts of the building process such as the materials one can use, how one should proceed when building, the different parts a building or a flat should be made of and gives insight into what the right distribution of the rooms should be. There is also a part dedicated to the “dos and donts” of construction.
Formally the book is separated into two volumes. While the first one is structured into five chapters and mainly contains information in long texts, the second one is only meant to provide visual examples for the second chapter dealing with the distribution of rooms and therefore only contains plans of houses and images.
Being 300 mm long, 240 mm wide and 100mm high the size of the book corresponds to the standard size “Quarto”.
Counting the first and the second volume together, the book has a total number of 291 pages and 66 illustration, 60 of which are contained in the second volume.
When looking through the pages of the book it gives the idea of being old and fragile. Despite that it is still perfectly legible.