I started my search by entering the title of the book “Maniere de bastir pour touttes sortes de personnes” and found a quote taken from Aureli in “the possibility of an absolute architecture”, a book in which the author proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city and in which he generally discusses the various theories and histories that have characterised architectural history, where he considered the work of Pierre le muet as a theoretical source of the generic city of the new emerging middle class (le muet’s book was addressed to a wide audience).
He goes on to say that according to le Muet’s principles, the schematic and simplified facades he proposed implied that a single order could organise an entire block, a street or even an entire city. Finally, he mentions another source that I will rely on in this task, which is the famous plan General de Paris, which is a map of Paris where the city is defined by a series of urban spaces based on the entries to a competition to design a new Royal Square and which can therefore be considered as a kind of master plan for Paris.
I then asked Alice to look in the architecture Library for “guide architecture”, as Pierre le muet’s book, as also written by Aureli, can be defined as a theoretical source of the city and therefore a sort of guide on how to build the city, so that she could direct me to another book that correlates with my example. What caught my attention among the different quotes was a quote from Ackroyd, from “London a Biography”, in which he talks about case studies of 20th century London and in which he mentions the most important architectural guide to the city, which is the pevsner series.
The pevsner series is a series of guide books to the architecture of Great Britain and Ireland numbering 46 volumes published between 1951 and 1974 and was compiled to classify British and Irish architecture as it noted that architectural history had little reputation in academic circles at the time.
This series I find has in common with le muet’s work only the status of a guide to architecture, which both works share, although one is about an architecture already made and the other about one to be made.
At this point to try to be more precise and to find a book that has the same objective as Pierre le Muet’s I thought of asking alice for “architecture manual”, inserting as topic of Conversation “book” as architecture library and I found in a quote by Cupers taken from “Use Matters An Alternative History of Architecture”, the book published in 1896 by Otto Wagner “Modern Architecture”, in which the author according to an article by Lyiang Ding “modern Architecture” “was the assertion that new purposes and new materials must necessarily give rise to new methods of construction, which in turn lead to new forms that gradually acquire artistic value. ” He also added a quote from the author that “Well-conceived construction is not only the prerequisite of every architectural work, but it also, and this cannot be repeated often enough, provides the modern creative architect with a number of positive ideas for creating new forms-in the fullest meaning of this word.” In this case, what the two works have in common is precisely the aim of the book, which is to provide the architect with a model of architectural thinking to follow.
Sources:
https://ask.alice-ch3n81.net/alice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pevsner_Architectural_Guides
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/possibility-absolute-architecture