The proposed paper will focus on the activities of the builder Bartel Ranisch from Gdańsk. Although he did not have a humanist education, he did manage to compile treatises on the churches (1695) and public buildings (1707) of his native city. The first of these is probably the first work in European literature in which works of medieval architecture are discussed not in terms of the history of their foundations and the monuments of the past they contain, but in terms of the architecture itself, especially the opulent rib vaults. Bartel Ranisch could not yet have had the ability to describe and analyse architecture that had been developed by French archaeology of architecture in the early nineteenth century, but his work, combining the experience of a designing architect and an amateur historian, represents a pioneering, extremely early step towards the formation of a new research direction, developed only a century later by Arcisse de Caumont.