Roy also Leroy, Julien-David Le (1724–1803). French architectural historian, who succeeded J. -F. Blondel as Professor of Architecture at the Academy, and prevented the abolition of the School of Architecture when the Revolutionaries closed the Royal Academies during the Terror. His studies of Ancient Greek buildings had a profound effect on Neo-Classicism and on the Greek Revival, although his surveys were not always accurate and attracted adverse criticism as a result. His Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece) appeared in 1758, and gave his contemporaries a better understanding of the Doric Order. He also published Histoire de la Disposition et des Formes Différentes que les chrétiens ont données à leurs temples depuis le règne de Constantin le Grand jusqu'à nous (History of the Disposition and Different Forms that the Christians Gave to their Temples since the Reign of Constantine the Great to our Own Day—1764), and Observations sur les édifices des anciens peuples (Observations on the Buildings of Ancient Peoples—1767) which also contained reflections on criticisms of his Ruines … de la Grèce published in Stuart and Revett's Antiquities of Athens, the first volume of which had appeared in 1762. His ‘reconstruction’ of the Athenian propylaea was the model for Langhans's masterpiece, the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin. In 1775 he designed an ‘English’ landscape garden at Chantilly.

Bibliography

Builder (1980);
Egbert (1980);
Eriksen (1974);
Middleton & and Watkin (1987);
Rykwert (1980);
Wiebenson (1969)