The French architect Pierre Lescot (ca. 1500-1578) was one of the creators of the French classical style of architecture.

Pierre Lescot was probably born in Paris of a family sufficiently prosperous to provide him with an education in the liberal arts, for the poet Pierre de Ronsard, a fellow courtier, recorded that Lescot had a natural talent for painting and that he had studied mathematics and architecture. There are no records of Lescot's activity before 1544 and after 1559. Though less a practitioner of architecture and more a theorist and decorator than Philibert de l'Orme, Lescot emerged as a talented amateur whose esthetic influence at court in the last years of the reign of Francis I (1515-1547) and throughout the reign of Henry II (1547-1559) was greatly enhanced through his collaboration in implementing new classical concepts with the sculptor architect Jean Goujon.

Lescot's major surviving monument is the Cour Carr...