The first concept of barracks appeared at the end of the XVIᵉ century. These first barracks resembled large bourgeois houses.
It was more a concern to spare the population the problem of the garni (the obligation to house soldiers), with all the inconveniences that this entailed, than a rational idea of the distribution of soldiers that emerged at this time.
In the XVIIᵉ century, Vauban rationalised the concept of barracks by defining a basic module that could be easily and cheaply applied to all garrison towns.
