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Gondoin [Gondouin], Jacques
(b St Ouen, nr Paris, 7 June 1737; d Paris, 29 Dec 1818). French architect. He was the son of the gardener at the royal château of Choisy-le-Roi and attended Jacques-François Blondel’s school of architecture, the Ecole des Arts, winning third place in the Prix de Rome competition of 1759. He spent five years in Rome (1761–6) on a bursary granted by Louis XV, and he made friends there with Giovanni Battista Piranesi. He returned to France via Holland and England. In 1769, at the suggestion of the King’s surgeon Germain Pichault de la Martinière, he was commissioned to design the new Ecole de Chirurgie (1771–86; now the Faculté de Médecine, Paris; see NEO-CLASSICISM, fig. 4). The layout is in the manner of an hôtel particulier, with a court surrounded by an Ionic colonnade and closed off from the present Rue de l’Ecole de Médecine by a columnar screen. It was this feature that made a great impression on Gondoin’s contemporaries, lacking as it does the usual inflections by projecting end pavilions and central avant-corps. A line of Ionic columns on pedestals runs right across the elevation at ground-floor level, supporting a perfectly straight entablature that lacks the canonic architrave. In the centre the columns, doubled in depth, form a walk-through colonnade giving access to the courtyard. This open feature is contrasted with three arched bays at each end, which the columns punctuate. The upper storey has a rectangular window in each bay, save for three that are replaced by an oblong panel with relief sculpture. In the courtyard, which is lined by low, columned galleries, stands the anatomy lecture theatre with a hexastyle temple front. The lecture hall, seating 1500, takes the form of an amphitheatre roofed by a coffered half dome and lit by an oculus. To each side of this hall are other lecture rooms, hospital wards, a laboratory and a chapel, with a library at first-floor level over the entrance. Although the design of the school appeared to diverge from all the academic rules, it was admired by the public, both professional and lay, for what was perceived as its Greek simplicity, the disposition of its massing with its contrasting features and its subtle proportions. It was hailed by Antoine Quatremère de Quincy as ‘the most classical building of the 18th century’. Gondoin’s original scheme placed the school within the context of an urban plan that involved converting the Franciscan friary opposite into a debtors’ prison, with a massive ashlar wall punctuated by bare windows, and adding a massive Doric portico to the church of St Côme on one of the adjacent sides. The plan remained unexecuted, however, because of the unwillingness of the Franciscans to comply.
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