| Summary: | From 1722 to 1728, Antoine Desgodets, professor at the royal architectural academy, gave a course on the commodity of different building types. He offers a model for a Hôtel-Dieu and gives one of the first theoretical syntheses for this sort of building. The text is also novel for its contents. Desgodets is interested by all aspects of the spatial ordering of the establishment, and does not hesitate to go into minute detail. He offers precise attention to the way Hôtels-Dieu were run during the eighteenth century. Inspired by architectural practice, he also has a traditional approach to the special place that has to be given to the chapel. This course, given to future royal architects, is consequently a vital stage in the theoretical thinking about Hôtels-Dieu and has an impact, if indirectly, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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