Germain boffrand biography

Germain Boffrand (– 19 March 1754) was a French architect.
Germain Boffrand (born May 7, 1667, Nantes, France—died March 18, 1754, Paris) was a French architect noted for the great variety, quantity, and quality of his.
Biography.

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Germain Boffrand facts for kids

Portrait of Germain Boffrand by Lambert-Sigisbert Adam

Germain Boffrand (French pronunciation: [ʒɛʁmɛ̃ bɔfʁɑ̃]) (16 May 1667 – 19 March 1754) was a French architect. A pupil of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Germain Boffrand was one of the main creators of the precursor to Rococo called the style Régence, and in his interiors, of the Rococo itself. In his exteriors he held to a monumental Late Baroque classicism with some innovations in spatial planning that were exceptional in France His major commissions, culminating in his interiors at the Hôtel de Soubise, were memorialised in his treatise Livre d'architecture, published in 1745, which served to disseminate the French Louis XV style throughout Europe.

Biography

Hôtel de Soubise (1704–1707); Boffrand returned to execute a suite of high rococointeriors (1735–1740)

Wall elevation in the bedroom of the Prince de Rohan at the Hôtel de Soubise

Born at Nantes, the son of a provincial architect, Boffrand went to Paris in 1681 to study sculpture in the atelier of François Girardon, before en

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Biography

Germain Boffrand (in full Gabriel-Germain Boffrand), French architect and writer, noted for the great variety, quantity, and quality of his work. He maintained the tradition of the Grand Style in France between Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who was born in 1646, and Ange-Jacques Gabriel, who died in 1782. His work also provided an important bridge between that of Louis Le Vau in the mid-17th century and those of the architects of the Piranesian generation of Neo-classicists in the mid-18th century, such as Etienne-Louis Boullée, whom he influenced.

Boffrand went to Paris in 1681, where, after studying sculpture for a time under François Girardon, he entered the workshop of the architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart. As early as 1690, he received a commission to design buildings for the king, and in 1709 he was placed in charge of the decoration of the apartments of the Hôtel de Soubise. In 1710 the princesse de Condé commissioned his enlargement of the Palais Bourbon, a project noted for the large staircase added by Boffrand.

Boffrand, best known for his Livre d'architecture

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Gabriel Germain Boffrand

Gabriel Germain Boffrand (1667-1754) was a French architect and interior decorator whose mastery of the new Louis XV or rococo style widely influenced 18th-century architecture in France and abroad.

Gabriel Germain Boffrand codified and disseminated the supple rococo style which borrowed, in miniature scale, more from the Italian baroque of Francesco Borromini and Guarino Guarini than from the stringent academic classicism favored in France since the Renaissance. Boffrand's book Livre d'architecture (1745) indicates that he was aware of his role as mediator of the golden mean between reason and fantasy.

Through loss of documentation and the demolition of most of the palaces and town houses Boffrand built in Paris and in the province of Lorraine, relatively little evidence of his talents subsists. He is said to have begun his artistic training under the sculptor François Girardon, but there is proof that Boffrand worked for the first architect of the king, Jules Hardouin Mansart, from 1686 to 1691 and during 1693-1694. From 1694 to 1709 Boffrand w