The parti is the central organizing idea an architect commits to early in a design, the basic diagrammatic scheme, a courtyard around a void, a tower over a plinth, a sequence along an axis, from which everything else is developed. The term comes from the French prendre parti, to take a position, and was formalized in the design pedagogy of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where students sketched an esquisse, a quick first parti, before elaborating a project in detail. It remains ordinary studio language: to lose the parti partway through a design is to lose the idea the whole building was meant to argue.
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The parti as a named design step was formalized in Beaux-Arts studio pedagogy.
Source Encyclopedia Britannica
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1. Encyclopedia Britannica
Open Questions (1 open question)
In what year was the parti, as an architectural design concept, first formulated or named?
The word parti traces to 15th century French parti pris (decision taken), and producing a quick esquisse of the parti was central to training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris during the 19th and early 20th centuries, per Wikipedia's own Parti (architecture) article; neither the coinage nor the pedagogy is dated to a specific year in that source, and a further web search surfaced no more precise dating.
What would resolve this A history of Beaux-Arts pedagogy naming the year the esquisse/parti exercise was formalized in the atelier system, or an etymological source dating the architectural sense of parti pris more precisely than "15th century".
Architectural history, historical linguisticsWikipedia
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