Pierre Le Muet

Pierre Le Muet (7 October 1591 – 28 September 1669) was a French architect, military engineer, and writer, famous for his book Manière de bâtir pour toutes sortes de personnes (1623 and 1647), and for the châteaux he constructed, most notably Tanlay in Burgundy, as well as some modest houses in Paris, the grandest of which, the Hôtel d'Avaux (1644-1650) survives and has recently been restored to a semblance of its seveneenth-century condition.

Le Muet was born in Dijon. His father, Philippe Le Muet, was a guardsman in the artillery corps of Burgundy. Pierre Le Muet is mentioned as Architecte Ordinaire du Roi in 1616, when he was paid for a model of the Palais du Luxembourg. From 1617 to about 1637, he was a military engineer. In this capacity he accompanied the royal armies in the south of France. There are surviving plans of fortifications in Picardie (dated 1631, now in the Bibliothèque Arsenal in Paris) and documentation of work in Péronne and Corbie, Somme (1635–1638). There is also a ground-floor plan of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires in Paris, work on which was interrupted at an early stage.

From the available evidence, he was mostly active in this period as a theorist and publisher, producing in 1623 the first edition of his Manière de bâtir, a collection of models for town houses in the Parisian mode, designed to occupy eleven lots from the simplest most constricted plot of urban land to hôtels particuliers of middling importance. Claude Mignot points out that Le Muet's model in this enterprise was Sebastiano Serlio, whose sixth book, Architettura, degli habitationi de tutti li gradi degli huomini was already circulating in France in manuscript. The enlarged second edition of Manière (1647) added a second volume of Augmentations de nouveaux bastimens. Its engraved illustrations mark the earliest appearance of Jean Marot as an engraver of architectural designs.

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