Philibert de l'Orme

His father was Jehan de L'Orme, a master mason and entrepreneur, who, in the 1530s, employed three hundred workers and built prestigious buildings for the elite of the city.

For a period of eleven years, he supervised all of the King's architectural projects, with the exception of changes to the Louvre, which were planned by another royal architect, Pierre Lescot.

He invented a new system for making the essential wooden frameworks for constructing stone buildings, called charpente à petits bois, which was quicker and less expensive than previous methods and used much less wood.

[6][7] The death of Henry II of France on July 10, 1559 suddenly left him without a patron and at the mercy of rival architects who resented his success and his style.

His reputation rose again in the 18th century, through the writings of Dezallier d'Argenville, who wrote in 1787 that he had "abandoned the Gothic covering in order to redress French architecture in the style Ancient Greece."

Though few of his building survived to be studied carefully, later important academic works on de l'Orme were written in the 19th and 20th centuries by art historians including H. Clouzot and Anthony Blunt.

He argued that architects needed to be able to design and manage every aspect of the building, from the volumes to the lambris to adding up the cost, making detailed three-dimensional drawings of vaults, judging if wood was dry enough, and knowing to stop digging the foundation when the first sand was encountered.

[9] His other major accomplishment was to resist the tendency to simply copy Italian architectural styles; he traveled and studied in Italy, and borrowed much, but he always added a distinctly French look to each of his projects.

He was an ardent humanist and student of the antique, he yet vindicated resolutely the French tradition in opposition to Italian tendencies; he was a man of independent mind and a vigorous originality.