Places Royales Françaises. Réflexion d’une logique d’édification à travers une corrélation entre une analyse sémantique et un signal géométrique

Supervisors : David Lo Buglio
Submitted on September 2018

The research carried out in this thesis takes advantage of a ‘low-level’ analysis. It focuses on the analysis of elements on an architectural scale (Deldaele and Ricbourg 2018) through the examination of facade spans belonging to seven remarkable French royal squares. These spaces, built around the 17th century, offer significant stylistic coherence. Through a photogrammetric survey of one span of each square, the aim is to cross-reference their semantic (and geometric) structures to demonstrate the existence of common compositional and stylistic rules. These rules served a political purpose, which was to consolidate the royal authority over the whole of France.

The hypothesis is that these squares respond to a strict compositional logic that draws on the notion of module. These façades articulate ordered spans that are repeated to form each wing of the squares. To support this approach, 7 royal squares were studied. These were designed either by Jules Hardouin-Mansart as King Louis XIV's architect, or after him.

The creation and use of morphological signatures as part of this research meets two objectives: firstly, to verify the possibility of reducing complex data sets to ‘intelligible’ forms of analysis, and secondly, to evaluate the capacity of these new types of visualisation to renew our view of bodies of heritage objects. It should be remembered that these methods are primarily intended to provide assistance with morphological analysis and not to replace the expert's gaze.