Pierre Patte was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 architect

Architect

An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...

 who was the assistant of the great French teacher of architecture, Jacques-François Blondel

Jacques-François Blondel

Jacques-François Blondel was a French architect. He was the grandson of François Blondel , whose course of architecture had appeared in four volumes in 1683 -Biography:...

, whose Cours d'architecture which ran to nine volumes by 1777, he saw through the press after Blondel's death in 1774.

He has been credited for having been the first to illustrate

Illustration

An illustration is a displayed visualization form presented as a drawing, painting, photograph or other work of art that is created to elucidate or dictate sensual information by providing a visual representation graphically.- Early history :The earliest forms of illustration were prehistoric...

 a city street plan

Floor plan

In architecture and building engineering, a floor plan, or floorplan, is a diagram, usually to scale, showing a view from above of the relationships between rooms, spaces and other physical features at one level of a structure....

 with building

Building

In architecture, construction, engineering, real estate development and technology the word building may refer to one of the following:...

s and sewer

Sanitary sewer

A sanitary sewer is a separate underground carriage system specifically for transporting sewage from houses and commercial buildings to treatment or disposal. Sanitary sewers serving industrial areas also carry industrial wastewater...

 system shown in a section

Cross section (geometry)

In geometry, a cross-section is the intersection of a figure in 2-dimensional space with a line, or of a body in 3-dimensional space with a plane, etc...

 view. Under the reign of Louis XV

Louis XV of France

Louis XV was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and of Navarre from 1 September 1715 until his death. He succeeded his great-grandfather at the age of five, his first cousin Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, served as Regent of the kingdom until Louis's majority in 1723...

 Patte theorized in the middle of the 18th century about thinking about the overall structure of the city as an urban organism

Organism

In biology, an organism is any contiguous living system . In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homoeostasis as a stable whole.An organism may either be unicellular or, as in the case of humans, comprise...

 where changing one aspect would affect the whole thing. A century later some of Patte's ideas would help change Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 under the direction of Baron Haussmann

Baron Haussmann

Georges-Eugène Haussmann, commonly known as Baron Haussmann , was a French civic planner whose name is associated with the rebuilding of Paris...

.

Selected works

• Discours sur l'Architecture (Discourse on Architecture) (1754)
• Études d'Architecture (Studies of Architecture) (1755)
• Monuments érigés en France à la Gloire de Louis XV (Monuments Erected in France to the Glory of Louis XV) (1765)
• Cours d'architecture (1771–1777)
• Essai sur l'Architecture Théâtrale (Essay on Theatre Architecture) (1782)