Jules Hardouin-Mansart

A particular skill of Hardouin was his ability to create a wide variety of structures; chateaux, churches, pavilions, private residences, parks, and urban squares.

[4] On March 1, 1676, François-Michel le Tellier, Marquis de Louvois, the Minister of War, summoned Hardouin-Mansart to take over construction of Les Invalides, the enormous hospital and chapel the King was building in the center of Paris for his pensioned and wounded soldiers.

Its distinctive feature was the dome, one of the earliest constructed in Paris, following the church of the Val-de-Grâce, designed by his great-uncle, François Mansart and Jacques Lemercier (1645–1667), and the Collège des Quatre-Nations (1662–1670).

However, while the work was in progress, the French army suffered reverses in the Netherlands, and the Superintendent of Finances, Colbert, was slow in providing funding.

He commissioned the sculptor François Girardon to make statues illustrating the themes of the building, the virtues of the Saints and the French Kings.

Once the war ended, constructed resumed, and the royal chapel was finally consecrated, in the presence of the King, on 22 August 1706, not long before the death of Hardouin-Mansart.

He transformed the first-floor terrace of the Palace overlooking the garden, into the celebrated Hall of Mirrors, richly decorated by his collaborator, the artist Charles Le Brun.

To house the growing number of staff and servants in the Château, he built the Grand Commun (1682–85), and for the horses and carriages of the royal household constructed two palatial stables on the city-side of the Palace (finished in 1682).

[9] His later additions to the Palace included the Orangerie (1684–86), halfway underground at the end of south wing, accessed by two monumental stairways and opening onto its own sunken garden.

Toward the end of his life he built a separate smaller one-story palace, the Grand Trianon (1687) as a refuge for the King from the noise and ceremony of the court.

The Place des Victoires was built as a setting for a monument to Louis XIV, surrounded by a circle of harmonious matching residential buildings.

The original statue was melted down after the Revolution, and replaced later by a copy; while the square was much altered in later years, with the addition of traverse streets and buildings in a different style.

[11] The later Place Vendôme was a larger square, but Hardouin-Mansard broke the rigid box shape with corner buildings facing inward, decorated with ornamental pediments.

[11] His most prominent position in France put him in place to create many of the significant monuments of the period, and to set the tone for the restrained French Late Baroque architectural style, somewhat chastened by academic detailing, that was influential as far as Saint Petersburg and even echoed in Constantinople.