Charles Alfred Chastel de Boinville

Charles Alfred Chastel de Boinville ARIBA (1849 – April 25, 1897) was an Anglo-French architect,[1] who worked in Japan and Britain.

His father was a well known clergyman who completed 30 years of missionary service in France, and left several publications on his life such as Thomas Constable's Memoir.

When the French Revolution broke out, and the King and Queen were brought from Versailles to Paris, they were escorted by Lafayette, who rode on one side of the carriage, and by De Boinville on the other.

Through his father's connection with Thomas Constable, a publisher in Edinburgh, De Boinville entered the office of Campbell Douglas, an architect in Glasgow as assistant, and stayed in his house for about a year and a half.

At that time, Douglas' friend Colin Alexander McVean was in the Civil Service of the Japanese Government, being chief surveyor of the Public Works Department.

De Boinville arrived in Japan in December 1872, and soon started to work under MacVean for construction of the buildings of the Imperial College of Engineering.

He expressed his full talent of the detail drawings for the foreign Embassies, such as Brussels, Paris, and Lisbon, where he instituted and carried through important works.

Indeed, it was on account of his much valued services at Whitehall Place—-or at least largely a direct result of them-—that he was appointed to the honourable position of Surveyor to the India Office by the Government.

[6] The De Boinvilles lived at the Yamato Yashiki, the Public Works foreign officers' quarter, now site of the Hotel Okura Tokyo.

Hideo Izumida, Life and Works of Charles Alfred Chastel de Boinville, Japan's Journal of Architectural Historians, 2009, pp. 13–17.

Hideo Izumida, Reconsideration of Foundation of Imperial College of Engineering, Transaction of Japan Institute of Architecture, September 2017, pp.