Measuring Costs, Estimating Values
Architecture, Expertise, and Property in Eighteenth-Century France
This research examines the techniques and theories of cost estimation in eighteenth-century building practice in France. It takes as a starting point a notarized appraisal conducted by the architects Pierre Quirot and Brice Le Chauve at the Hôtel d’Évreux in Paris between June 1733 and April 1734. The pair counted among the city’s corps des experts-jurés, or body of juried experts, which worked for the municipal government to review construction and settle labor and property disputes. To compose a so-called estimation, experts would visit a property and take the measurements of its architecture and decoration, which they tallied with the going rates for land and building supplies. In the document, Le Chauve challenged his partner’s techniques, arguing that Quirot’s calculations failed to account for the initial costs of the building’s construction. Completed in 1722, the Hôtel d’Évreux (now, the Elysée Palace) counted among the many residences built during a real estate bubble that inflated the prices of land and materials. Le Chauve’s argument drew a clear distinction between financial costs and economic value—a matter of wider social importance, given that property holdings accounted for eighty percent of annual private income in pre-Revolutionary France.
Cost estimation functioned as one of the core tasks performed by the Parisian corps of experts (established in 1690 and suppressed in 1791), which acted as the government’s intermediary on the real estate market. This research argues that the technique, which required expertise in geometry, property law, and architectural theory, helped establish the architect’s professional role as an arbiter of labor, costs, and taste for an expanding commercial society. The act placed architecture at the nexus of art, craft, and a nascent concept of political economy as conceptualized by Montesquieu and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others. Indeed, a standard valuation of real estate helped to stabilize the French credit market, noting that property underwrote the statewide system of loans, investments, and annuities. As the eighteenth century progressed, building technicians from Mathias Mésange to Jean-Baptiste Rondelet emphasized the importance of measurement over and against the contingencies of law and the market, aiming to fold cost estimation into the budding field of building science. These concerns prompted a broader rumination on expertise and the architect’s civil and commercial function in public society at the dawn of the modern age.
bio:
Jason Nguyen is an assistant professor at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. He is an architectural historian of the early modern world, with particular interests in the relationship between architecture and commerce, the history of science and technology, and environmental history and theory. He is completing the manuscript for his first book, Bodies of Expertise: Architecture and Building Practice in Old Regime Paris. The project charts the professionalization of the architectural trade during the 17th and 18th centuries in France. It examines how, in the wake of the state’s centralization of building practice, architects consciously engaged the modern sciences, law, and real estate speculation in an effort to claim expertise over the craftspeople and contractors who until then managed construction. The book outlines how the effort to codify a legal category of expertise that was rooted in labor, finance, and property development contributed to a profound reframing of the architect as a civic actor at the dawn of the modern age.
He received his PhD in the history and theory of architecture from Harvard University. His work has appeared in journals such as Architecture Beyond Europe, Grey Room, Journal 18, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, The Journal of Architecture, Livraisons d’histoire de l’architecture, Oxford Art Journal, and Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes. His research has been supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Southern California, the Getty Research Institute, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Prior to his scholarly career, he practiced architecture at Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates in Philadelphia.
