Rondelet, Jean-Baptiste

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

[br]

b. 1734 Lyons, France d. 1829

[br]

French architect particularly interested in the scientific and mathematical basis of architectural structure, and who at an early date introduced reinforced concrete into supporting piers in his buildings.

[br]

From 1795 Rondelet was Professor at the Ecole Centrale des Travaux Publics and while there was responsible for a major treatise on building construction: this was his Traité théorique et pratique de l'art de bâtir, published in four volumes in 1802–17. From 1806 he taught at the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture, which was soon afterwards merged with the Ecole Polytechnique. It was when Rondelet took over the work of com-pleting the Panthéon in Paris, after the death of Jacques-Germain Soufflot, that he had the opportunity of putting some of his particular structural ideas into practice. In 1755 the King had appointed Soufflot architect of the great new church to be dedicated to the patron saint of the city, Sainte Geneviève. In this neo-classical structure based upon Greek cross plan, Soufflot intended four slender piers, each encased in three engaged columns, to support the pendentives for the dome to rise over the crossing. It was a fine and elegant building on a large scale, but by the early nineteenth century, when the church had become a pantheon, cracks were appearing in the masonry. When Rondelet succeeded as architect after Soufflot's death, he strengthened and enlarged the piers, employing a faced concrete structure reinforced with metal. He used a metalreinforced mortar with rubble aggregate.

[br]

Bibliography

An article by Rondelet appears in: 1989, Le Panthéon: Symbole des Révolutions, pp. 308–10 (book of the Exhibition at the Hôtel de Sully, Paris), ed. Picard, Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites en France.

Further Reading

M.N.Mathuset-Bandouin, 1980, "Biographie de Jean Rondelet", Soufflot et son temps, Caisse Nationale des Monuments Historiques et des Sites en France, 155ö7.

DY