Pierre Le Muet

Pierre Le Muet (French pronunciation: [pjɛʁ lə mɥɛ]; 7 October 1591 – 28 September 1669)[1] was a French architect, military engineer, and writer, famous for his book Manière de bâtir pour toutes sortes de personnes (1623 and 1647),[2] 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 seventeenth-century condition.

[1] 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.

[1] In 1631–1632, Le Muet published a French translation of Vignola's Regola delle cinque ordini d'architectura, from a four-language Dutch edition of 1619.

[1] The additional designs in the 1647 edition of Maniere also show Le Muet the builder of three Parisian residences, the maison Tubeuf,[5] and the hôtels Coquet and d'Avaux (1644–50).

The engraver Marot worked from drawings furnished by Le Muet which corrected some irregularities demanded by exigencies of the actual sites, regularizing the court at Tanlay, for instance or giving an elevation and section never executed at the hôtel d'Avaux.