Charles Garnier (1825-1898) architecte historien de L'Habitation humaine

"Charles Garnier (1825-1898), Architect and Historian of L'Habitation humaine', by Béatrice Bouvier "Do you know the fable of the blind man and the paralytic ? Well, it's nearly the same situation for the authors of this book. One is a historian who did not have a clear vision of architecture ; the other is an architect who stumbled along the roads of history." Thus begins L'Habitation humaine written by the architect Charles Garnier and Auguste Ammann, a historian and professor at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. In 1892, Hachette published a revised edition of the Guide historique à travers l'exposition [universelle] des habitations humaines, written by Charles Garnier in 1889. In this book, Garnier outlined his research on the origins of domestic architecture and proposed a kind of anthropological and ethnological method for studying the history of dwellings. For the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1889, Garnier designed some forty houses illustrating the principal stages of his history of human habitation. From these reconstructions emerged one architectural type that in Garnier 's analysis represented the most primitive form of habitation and a model for modern prefabricated housing : the chalet.