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Etienne Louis Boullée (1728-1799)

21 November 2016 By Anthony Vidler Reputations

No amount of careful philology will ever fully explain Boulleé’s extraordinary dream or evocative influence

Boullelarge

Throughout the 20th century, numerous architects whose careers were cut short by the French Revolution have been re-entered one by one into history, their works studied and their reputations restored. But few have had the fortune of Etienne-Louis Boullée, a reluctant architect, with almost no surviving built works and with only drawings to support his claim to fame. Without the notoriety of his younger colleague Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, whose ostentatious tollgates surrounding the Parisian tax-wall were the object of Revolutionary fury, his death in 1799 passed almost unnoticed. And while Ledoux had managed to publish the first volume of his L’Architecture before he died, Boullée’s essay on architecture remained unpublished, and his drawings largely unremarked on by scholars for nearly a century-and-a-half. And yet, since the 1950s his reputation as one of the major and most original figures of the late 18th century has been firmly established as the elder statesman of the radical Enlightenment in architecture, if not of the Modern Movement itself.

‘If he had any reputation in the last years of the Ancien Régime it was as a teacher, supportive of his students ‘like a father’ wrote a biographer at his death’

During his lifetime, his contemporaries agreed, he was, unlike many of his peers, reluctant to promote his career or fame. Indeed, he was a reluctant architect, having been forced to abandon his love of painting by a practical father, and building few domestic commissions before settling for a career in academic administration and teaching. If he had any reputation in the last years of the Ancien Régime it was as a teacher, supportive of his students ‘like a father’ wrote a biographer at his death. He practised architecture with paper projects, beautifully rendered in pencil and wash, and only at the very end of his life, retiring to his country estate from the events of the Revolution, did he prepare them for publication with a text that even then insisted in its epigraph taken from his hero Correggio: ‘I too am a painter.’ 

Boulledrawings

Source: Bottom left: Photos 12 / Alamy. All others: Bibliothéque Nationale de France

Clockwise from bottom left: project for the chapel of the dead; Tombeau des Spartiates; cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton

Spanning the years 1784 to 1799, that is, through the last years of the Ancien Régime, the Revolution, the Terror, the Convention, to the rise of Napoleon and his expedition to Egypt, Boullée’s drawn projects display no direct political affiliations with any of the reigning doctrines or parties; rather they espoused a belief in scientific progress symbolised in monumental forms, a generalised Rousseauism derived from the Social Contract , a dedication to celebrate the grandeur of a ‘nation’, and, more often than not, a meditation on the sublime sobriety of death. Yet taken as a collection, as an almost encyclopaedic representation of the necessary institutions for an ideal state, and joined to the preface he wrote at the end of his life, Boullée’s late works may be interpreted as contributing to his underlying vision of an ‘ideal city’.  

Like with Ledoux, this vision emerged gradually, and was the direct outcome of an active practice. Eight years older than Ledoux, Boullée left the Ecole des Arts of Jacques-François Blondel in 1746. He was immediately appointed a professor of architecture at the newly established Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, under its director, the civil engineer Jean-Rodolphe Perronet, a position that, again like Ledoux, gave him access to public commissions, but more importantly, to a new vision of the role of building in the social and economic progress of a state and its territory. While his private commissions included religious buildings, and grands hôtels for a largely philosophic circle, his public works ranged from the construction of the Prison de la Grande Force (later to house Ledoux himself under the Terror), and, beginning in 1781 on his election to the Académie, projects for a new opera house, as well as a series of designs linked to real projects, but set as exercises for his students in the school of the Académie Royale d’Architecture.  

In quick succession he produced elaborate schemes for a metropolitan church, or ‘basilica’ (1781-82); a coliseum (1782); a museum (1783); a cenotaph for Newton (1784); a palace (1785); a new reading room for the Royal Library (1784-85); and a project for a new bridge over the Seine (1787). In the late 1780s forced by severe illness – or political acumen during the Terror – to retire to his country house outside Paris, his last designs were accomplished after the Revolution: projects for a monument in celebration of one of the most popular of Revolutionary festivals, that of the ‘Fête-Dieu’, or Supreme Being; a monument to ‘public recognition’; a palace of justice, a national palace (1792) and a municipal palace (1792).  

Étienne-Louis Boullée

Hôtel Alexandre or Hôtel Soult, rue de la Ville l’Évêque, Paris, 1763-66, Hôtel de Brunoy, 1774-79, Metropolitan cathedral, Paris (unbuilt), 1782 Cenotaph for Isaac Newton (unbuilt), 1784

‘Yes, I believe that our buildings, above all our public buildings, should be in some sense poems. The images they offer our senses should arouse in us sentiments corresponding to the purpose for which these buildings are intended’

Life lessons

He shunned frivolous ornamentation, favouring the orders of Greek and Roman precedent, combining classic elements at a monumental scale for heightened dramatic effect. Regularity, symmetry and variety together  were paramount, resulting in proportion, which he saw as ‘one of the chief beauties of architecture’ 

During the excesses of the Terror he expanded his oeuvre with designs for domestic architecture, ‘private architecture’, as opposed to the ‘grand genre’ of public architecture. He was open in his hatred of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety, calling the agents of the Terror, ‘perverse beings, tigers lusting for blood’ who wanted nothing but to destroy the ‘arts, sciences, and everything that honours the human spirit’. In silent protest, his ‘reconstruction’ of the Tower of Babel, based on Athanasius Kircher’s Turris Babel , took the form of a pure cone on a cubic base, with a trail of figures winding in a spiral, hand in hand to the top, a symbol of hope for the restitution of a common language and a unified people.   

Finally, undated, but no doubt implicitly condemning similar excesses, were a series of extraordinary designs for funerary monuments, cenotaphs and cemeteries, in the form of pyramids, cones and temples, experiments in what he named as new genres of architecture: ‘buried’ architecture and an ‘architecture of shadows’ to be formed out of deep recesses cut in a stone that reflected no light.

Forgotten for most of the 19th century, he was rediscovered by the art historian Emil Kaufmann in the late 1920s. For Kaufmann, Boullée represented the fulfilment of the French and German Enlightenment in architecture. The pure geometries displayed in his projects for national institutions (cubes), monuments dedicated to Newton and Nature (spheres), funerary temples (pyramids) and lighthouses (cones), resonated with Kaufmann’s vision of a movement dedicated to abstract reasoning and individual autonomy. It was left to Helen Rosenau, another exile, to publish the first transcription and translation of his Architecture. Essay on Art in 1953.  

Boullecathedral

Source: RIBA collections

Project for a metropolitan cathedral in the form of a Greek cross with a domed centre

It was this message of an ‘autonomous architecture that architects seized on in the postwar period: Philip Johnson cited his Von Ledoux as a source for his house at New Canaan; Aldo Rossi held him up as an example of a new typology. In the field of popular culture, Boullée was rapidly assimilated into the general excitement over ‘utopian’ architecture in the ’60s and ’70s as his Cenotaph for Newton became the ubiquitous poster-image for the Whole Earth and Spaceship Earth movements – a fitting destiny for an architect who had drawn up his spherical design after witnessing the first manned balloon flight over Paris. 

That more recent historians have tried to demolish his claim to originality, prescient ‘modernity’ and theoretical radicalism is less an indictment of Kaufmann, and more a result of the shift to a historiography that refuses grand claims. But no amount of careful philology will ever fully explain his extraordinary dream world nor deny his evocative influence over generations of late-20th-century architects.

Illustration by Josephin Ritschel

The Search for a Revolutionary Architecture

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After the French Revolution, the architect Étienne-Louis Boullée produced wildly ambitious building designs that were never realized. His ideas influenced both the Right and the Left — and raised the question of whether a revolutionary architecture is possible.

A sketch of architect Étienne-Louis Boullée's plans for Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, 1784. (Wikimedia Commons)

Étienne-Louis Boullée, born in Paris in 1728, is remembered as one of the greatest architects of all time, even though the majority of his most iconic designs were never actually constructed. Steeped in the neoclassical style, which emerged in Rome but matured in France in the years leading up to the French Revolution, he began teaching at the prestigious École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées when he was only nineteen years old. His income secured through teaching, Boullée was able to devote himself to theoretical questions about the nature and purpose of architecture, questions working architects — bound by spatial and financial limitations, not to mention the tastes of their clients — could seldom afford to ask.

Grand Designs

Boullée grew up in a time that saw extensive debate over the relationship between architecture and other art forms, with some wondering if it ought to be considered an art at all. In his 1746 treatise The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle ( Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe ), the philosopher Charles Batteux argued that the imitation of “la belle nature” was the object of all artists except the architect. The primary function of a building, Batteaux argued, was not to evoke an emotion or convey an idea but to provide a service. Functionally, architecture was more akin to a bed or a couch than a painting or a poem.

Boullée disagreed. In his essay Architecture, Essay on Art ( Essai sur l’art ), which remained unpublished until 1953, he imagines what the art of architecture could accomplish if its practitioners consider not only the function of a building but its cultural significance. “To give a building character,” his essay reads, “is to make judicial use of every means of producing no other sensation than those related to the subject.” Funerary monuments, in addition to housing the dead, should induce feelings of “extreme sorrow,” something Boullée’s designs achieve via their use of light-absorbent materials, shadows, and bare walls, creating “an architectural skeleton” similar to the skeleton of a tree in midwinter. His source of inspiration was the Egyptian pyramids, which “conjure up the melancholy image of arid mountains and immutability.”

Tombs of noteworthy individuals Boullée burdened with an additional task: to inspire respect for and celebrate the achievements of those buried inside them. His hypothetical Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, who died a year before Boullée’s own birth, is shaped like an enormous sphere because the late mathematician’s law of gravity “defined the shape of the earth.” Inside, holes in the ceiling would, in broad light, create the illusion of a night sky.

Although images of Boullée’s architecture frequently surface online, the theory behind his fantastical designs — and its relevance to the French Revolution — remains unexplored. This is puzzling, as many of the designs discussed in Essay on Art are dedicated to revolutionary ideas and institutions. Take, for example, his thoughts on the Cult of the Supreme Being. Established by the lawyer-cum-revolutionary Maximilian de Robespierre in 1794, the cult, revolving around an unnamed god of rationality, was once intended to replace Roman Catholicism as the official religion of the French Republic.

Like Newton’s Cenotaph, Boullée felt that temples built for the divinity had to inspire “astonishment and wonder.” This could be accomplished with size, which “has such power over our senses” that even a deadly volcano possesses a subliminal beauty. Complementing size was light, which, when originating from a source unknown to the onlooker, would emulate the grace of the godhead itself.

Of the numerous palaces mentioned in Boullée’s essay, only one was intended for a sovereign. The others are dedicated to republican ideals such as justice, the nation, and the municipality. He designed each palace to inspire reverence for its subject. The Palace of Justice, containing the parliamentary courts, excise boards, and audit offices, rests atop a small prison — a “metaphorical image of Vice overwhelmed by the weight of Justice.”

The National Palace, more of a symbol of the strength and unity of the French Republic than a functional administrative building, would have used giant tablets of the constitutional laws as walls along with, at their base, rows of figures representing the number of republican provinces.

The Municipal Palace contained the magistrates of Paris’s districts. Designed in 1792, when Boullée was sixty-four, it would have featured large entrances and connections between galleries to signal its accessibility to all. Notably, each of these palace designs was endowed with a sense of majesty hitherto reserved for monarchs.

Boullée’s architectural style matches what Victor Hugo defined as the French Revolution’s own artistic style in his 1874 novel Ninety-Three , with “hard rectilinear angles, cold and cutting as steel . . . something like Boucher guillotined by David.” Boullée’s designs certainly match the tone of French painting and architecture produced in Year II (roughly 1793, according to the French Republican calendar), which Anthony Vidler, a professor of architecture at Cooper Union in New York, describes as a “stern, stripped, almost abstracted form of neo-Classicism.”

More recent assessments situate Boullée in the framework of the French Enlightenment as a whole rather than the French Revolution in particular, arguing that he wasn’t influenced by the latter so much as he was an influence on it. The shift from decorative baroque and rococo to austere neoclassicism far predated the storming of the Bastille, even if both processes originated from the same socioeconomic discontents. Boullée’s revolutionary aura derived not from political action but creative introspection, from the perceived importance of connecting form to function.

Architects of Revolution

Scholars have speculated that Boullée’s designs were never constructed due to doubts over his loyalty following the Revolution. In this case, his promise that the concept for the Palace of the Sovereign, created before Louis XVI’s execution in 1793, “could be adapted to other monuments not destined to be a Sovereign’s residence,” failed to convince his fellow citoyens that he was on their side and not — as some claimed — that of the royalists. Still, even if Boullée himself was indeed ostracized during this time, his architectural vision — which adapted the visual language of the ancien régime for the young republic — survived.

While aestheticians argued about the artistic merit of architecture, revolutionaries questioned its political relevance. On the eve of the French Revolution, public perception of architects and architecture — their place in the old world as well as the new one — was largely negative. Architecture, specifically in the form of large, intimidating buildings, was a physical manifestation of monarchic order. By this reasoning, dismantling the latter necessarily involved destroying the former, as evidenced by the storming and subsequent demolition of the Bastille, as well as the destruction or partial destruction of other structures in and around Paris.

Not all revolutionaries participated in this iconoclasm, however. Henri Jean-Baptiste Grégoire, a priest, campaigned for the protection of architecture dated to the “epoch of feudalism” — not because of its artistic or historic value but because, if left intact in “a kind of perpetual pillory,” it would preserve the face of tyranny as a warning for future generations.

Through his Essay on Art , Boullée helped shape a new, democratic architecture to replace its aristocratic predecessor. This democratic architecture did more than glorify the revolutionary cause; it envisioned what a civilization organized along the lines of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité could look like. Boullée’s Coliseum, a venue for national holidays and festivals based on its ancient Roman counterpart, would have been able to seat three hundred thousand people — half of the capital’s population at the time.

Under the monarchy, celebrations were often held at the Hôtel de Ville, a space “so restricted that there could hardly have been room for the carriages of the King and all his retinue.” For Boullée, public events only made sense if they took place in a venue large enough to accommodate everyone. His design includes covers sheltering people from both rain and sun, and a large number of broad staircases to ensure everyone could escape in case of an emergency.

Boullée showed similar concern for safety when designing theaters, which in his time habitually caught fire, causing countless deaths and injuries. Noting audiences could not enjoy themselves if part of them feared for their lives, Boullée designed his theaters using stone. The only flammable element, a podium made from wood, would be constructed above a water tank and submerged if set ablaze. Like the Coliseum, Boullée’s theaters had numerous spacious exits to allow for speedy evacuation.

Boullée’s impact on revolutionary architecture extends far beyond France. The scale and scope of his designs are echoed in the unrealized structures of other modernist revolutions on both the Left and the fascist far-right: the Monument to the Third International (also known as Tatlin’s Tower) and the Palace of the Soviets in Russia, but also in the Volkshalle of Nazi Germany. Conceived when the regimes they venerated were in their early years — Vladimir Tatlin’s design for Tatlin’s Tower was first unveiled in 1920, while Adolf Hitler sketched the Volkshalle sometime after his visit to Rome in 1938 — these overly ambitious construction projects are a reflection of a modernist zeal that was capable of taking protean forms.

But this same ambition also heralds the inevitable downfall of such movements, and today the impossibly large size typifying the work of Boullée and his devotees — a size that renders the individual human insect-like — is more often interpreted as dystopian than revolutionary.

Boullée’s influence on the visual culture of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes does not complicate his legacy as a revolutionary architect. On the contrary, the interest and resources both communist and fascist regimes have devoted to their respective architectural projects only reaffirms his at the time ridiculed belief that architecture’s power extended beyond functionality, illustrating ideas, evoking powerful emotions, and channeling those emotions into a political cause ­— reactionary or progressive. Boullée’s force cannot be stopped, only shifted in different directions.

If the French Republic had decided to build Boullée’s Cenotaph or Coliseum, it would have not only broken the architectural records of its time but those of our own as well. This, above any other reason, explains why they were not built and, in all likelihood, never will be. As historian Jules Michelet, born the year after Boullée’s death in 1799, put it, “while the Empire had its columns and Royalty had the Louvre, the Revolution had for its monument . . . only the void. Its monument was the sand, as flat as that of Arabia. . . . A tumulus to the right and a tumulus to the left, like those erected by the Gauls, dark and doubtful witnesses to the memory of heroes.”

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A Cenotaph for Newton: The Poetry of Public Spaces, the Architecture of Shadow, and How Trees Inspired the World’s First Planetarium Design

By maria popova.

Nineteen years after the publication of Isaac Newton’s epoch-making Principia — in England, in Latin — the prodigy mathematician Émilie du Châtelet set out to translate his ideas into her native French, making them more comprehensible in the process. Her more-than-translation — which includes several of her mathematical corrections and clarifications of Newton’s imprecisions, and which remains the only comprehensive edition in French to this day — popularized his ideas in France and, from this epicenter of the Enlightenment, spread them centripetally throughout the rest of the Continent, rendering Newton himself an emblem of the Enlightenment the sweep of which he never lived to see.

Not long after Du Châtelet’s untimely death, her legacy reached one of her most gifted compatriots — the visionary architect Étienne-Louis Boullée (February 12, 1728–February 4, 1799), who fell under Newton’s spell. Determined to honor Newton with a worthy cenotaph — a memorial tomb for a person buried elsewhere — he designed a sphere 500 feet in diameter, taller than the Pyramids of Giza, nested into a colossal pedestal and encircled by hundreds of cypress trees, giving it the transfixing illusion of being both half-buried into the Earth and hovering unmoored from gravity. It was also, in essence, the world’s first domed planetarium design.

The cenotaph was a touching gesture in the first place — a Frenchman honoring a genius born of and interred in England, a nation with which Boullée’s own had been in near-ceaseless war for centuries, with those tensions at an all-time high at the time of his design, thanks to the American Revolutionary War. Doubly touching was his choice of a sphere: One of Newton’s most revolutionary contributions — the mathematical inference that because gravity is weaker at the equator, the shape of the Earth must be spherical — had defied France’s greatest son, René Descartes, who maintained that the Earth was egg-shaped. When Boullée was still a boy, a young Frenchman — Émilie du Châtelet’s mathematics tutor — had joined a perilous Arctic expedition to prove Newton correct. Two centuries later, in the wake of the world’s grimmest war yet, a queer Quaker Englishman would do the same , risking his life to defend the epoch-making theory of a German Jew — the theory of relativity that ultimately subverted Newton. Another world war later, Einstein himself would appeal to what he called “the common language of science” — that truth-seeking contact with nature and reality that transcends all borders and all nationalisms, the impulse that animated Boullée’s bold homage to Newton.

While governed by the credo that “our buildings — and our public buildings in particular — should be to some extent poems,” Boullée also believed that science could magnify the poetry of public spaces, which must at bottom reflect the principles of the grand designer: Nature. A century before the teenage Virginia Woolf wrote that “all the Arts… imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see,” Boullée insisted:

No idea exists that does not derive from nature… It is impossible to create architectural imagery without a profound knowledge of nature: the Poetry of architecture lies in natural effects. That is what makes architecture an art and that art sublime.

Architecture in the modern sense was then a young art, because the art-science of perspective was so novel . Newton’s optics, derived directly from the laws of nature, had revolutionized it all. Boullée came to define architecture as “the art of creating perspectives by the arrangement of volumes,” but a highly poetic art:

The real talent of an architect lies in incorporating in his work the sublime attraction of Poetry.

The poetry of architecture, he argued, resides in using perspective and light in such a way that “our senses are reminded of nature.” He interpreted the laws of nature, as clarified by Newton’s optics and mathematics, to intimate that no shape embodies this serenade to the senses with greater power and precision than the sphere:

A sphere is, in all respects, the image of perfection. It combines strict symmetry with the most perfect regularity and the greatest possible variety; its form is developed to the fullest extent and is the simplest that exists; its shape is outlined by the most agreeable contour and, finally, the light effects that it produces are so beautifully graduated that they could not possibly be softer, more agreeable or more varied. These unique advantages, which the sphere derives from nature, have an immeasurable hold over our senses.

And so Boullée predicated his cenotaph for Newton on an enormous sphere that would convey his ultimate intent for the temple — to arouse in the visitor’s soul “feelings in keeping with religious ceremonies,” a sense of grandeur leaving them “moved by such an excess of sensibility… that all the faculties of our soul are disturbed to such an extent that we feel it is departing from our body” — an effect always best achieved not by an enormity of sheer size and space but by a considered contrast of scales. No building, he observed, “calls for the Poetry of architecture” more than a memorial to the dead. Believing that architecture, like all art, should ultimately serve to enlarge our sense of aliveness, and that we are never more alive than when we are rooted in our creaturely senses, Boullée insisted that the key to this sense of grandeur lies in applying the principles of nature’s mathematics with poetic subtlety — the principles laid bare in the Principia , the principles that “derive from order, the symbol of wisdom.” He wrote:

Symmetry… is what results from the order that extends in every direction and multiplies them at our glance until we can no longer count them. By extending the sweep of an avenue so that its end is out of sight, the laws of optics and the effects of perspective given an impression of immensity; at each step, the objects appear in a new guise and our pleasure is renewed by a succession of different vistas. Finally, by some miracle which in fact is the result of our own movement but which we attribute to the objects around us, the latter seem to move with us, as if we had imparted Life to them.

But my favorite part of the story is that Boullée found his formative inspiration, not only for the Newton cenotaph and but for his entire creative philosophy, in an unusual encounter with trees — those profoundest of teachers .

One evening, heavy with grief, Boullée went for a walk along the edge of a forest. Under the moonlight, he noticed his shadow. He had seen his shadow a thousand times before, but the peculiar lens of his psychic state rendered it entirely new — a living artwork of “extreme melancholy.” Looking around, he saw the shadows of the trees in this new light, too, etching onto the ground the profound drama of life. The entire scene was suddenly awash in “all that is sombre in nature.” He had seen the state of his soul mirrored back by the natural world, as we so often do in those rawest moments when we are stripped to the base of our being, grounded into our creaturely senses.

This was the moment of Boullée’s artistic awakening — that moment of revelation when, as Virginia Woolf wrote in her exquisite account of her own artistic awakening , something lifts “the cotton wool of daily life” and we see the familiar world afresh. Boullée recounted:

The mass of objects stood out in black against the extreme wanness of the light. Nature offered itself to my gaze in mourning. I was struck by the sensations I was experiencing and immediately began to wonder how to apply this, especially to architecture. I tried to find a composition made up of the effect of shadows. To achieve this, I imagined the light (as I had observed it in nature) giving back to me all that my imagination could think of. That was how I proceeded when I was seeking to discover this new type of architecture.

He called this new architecture “the architecture of shadow.” His vision for Newton’s cenotaph was its grand testament:

I attempted to create the greatest of all effects, that of immensity; for that is what gives us lofty thoughts as we contemplate the Creator and give us celestial sensations.

He attempted, more than that, to honor Newton on his own terms, by the essence of his genius:

O Newton! With the range of your intelligence and the sublime nature of your Genius, you have defined the shape of the earth; I have conceived the idea of enveloping you with your discovery… your own self. How can I find outside you anything worthy of you?

In a further homage to Newton’s legacy, with Boullée regarded as a “divine system” of laws, he chose to suspend a sole spherical lamp over the tomb as the only decoration in the entire monument — anything else, he felt, would be “committing sacrilege.” The contrast of scales — the smaller sphere of the lamp inside the enormous sphere of the building — would dramatize the contrast of light and shadow, just as the moonlight had done that fateful night of artistic revelation by the trees. This would give the visitor the sense that they are “as if by magic floating in the air, borne in the wake of images in the immensity of space.” Boullée considered the play of light the vital element in this enchantment:

It is light that produces impressions which arouse in us various contradictory sensations depending on whether they are brilliant or sombre. If I could manage to diffuse in my temple magnificent light effects I would fill the onlooker with joy; but if, on the contrary, my temple had only sombre effects, I would fill him with sadness. If I could avoid direct light and arrange for its presence without the onlooker being aware of its source, the ensuing effect of mysterious daylight would produce inconceivable impression and, in a sense, a truly enchanting magic quality.

At a time long before readily available electric light and light-projection, he leaned on Newton’s optics to envision something that was part Stonehenge and part Hayden Planetarium. A century and a half before the first modern planetarium dome, Boullée dotted the black interior of his dome with an intricate arrangement of tiny holes reflecting the positions of the constellations and the planets, streaming in daylight to create an enchanting nightscape inside. But unlike the modern counterpart, Boullée’s was a reversible planetarium — at night, the sole spherical light would irradiate the tiny holes from the other direction, making the dome appear as a self-contained universe if viewed from above. This, lest we forget, was the golden age of aeronautics, when hot-air balloons first defied gravity to lift the human animal into the sky.

Too visionary for its era, the cenotaph was never built, but Boullée’s ink-and-wash drawings circulated widely in the final decade of his life, eliciting both gasping admiration and merciless derision — the fate of the true visionary. With the publication of his impassioned and insightful writings nearly two centuries after his death, translated by Helen Rosenau, his vision went on to inspire generations of modern artists and architects with a new way of thinking about the poetry of public spaces and the relationship between nature and human creativity.

In a sentiment evocative of another pioneer’s lamentation — Harriet Hosmer’s astute remark that “if one knew but one-half the difficulties an artist has to surmount… the public would be less ready to censure him for his shortcomings or slow advancement” — Boullée wrote of his critics:

No one is more exacting than a man who is not conversant with a given art for he is unable to imagine all the difficulties the artist has to overcome.

His ultimate satisfaction was not the reception or execution of his designs, but the inexhaustible source of their inspiration — the elemental wellspring of the creative impulse behind all art and all science, that richest and readiest reward of our aliveness:

The artist… is always making discoveries and spends his life observing nature.

— Published March 18, 2021 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/03/18/etienne-louis-boullee-newton-cenotaph/ —

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AD Classics: Cenotaph for Newton / Etienne-Louis Boullée

• Written by Michelle Miller

This article was originally published on September 10, 2014. To read the stories behind other celebrated architecture projects, visit our AD Classics section. Minuscule clusters of visitors ascend a monumental stairway at the base of a spherical monument rising higher than the Great Pyramid of Giza. An arc of waning sunlight catches a small portion of the sphere, leaving the excavated entry portal and much of the mass in deep shadow. Bringing together the emotional affects of romanticism, the severe rationality of neoclassicism and grandeur of antiquity, Etienne-Louis Boullée’s sublime vision for a cenotaph honoring Sir Isaac Newton is both emblematic of the particular historical precipice and an artistic feat that foreshadowed the modern conception of architectural design. Rendered through a series of ink and wash drawings, the memorial was one of numerous provocative designs he created at the end of the eighteenth century and included in his treatise, Architecture, essai sur l’art . The cenotaph is a poetic homage to scientist Sir Isaac Newton who 150 years after his death had become a revered symbol of Enlightenment ideals.

Beyond representing his individual creative genius, Boullée’s approach to design signaled the schism of architecture as a pure art from the science of building. He rejected the Vitruvian notion of architecture as the art of building, writing “In order to execute, it is first necessary to conceive… It is this product of the mind, this process of creation, that constitutes architecture…” (1).  The purpose of design is to envision, to inspire, to make manifest a conceptual idea though spatial forms. Boullee’s search was for an immutable and totalizing architecture. 

Paris during Boullée’s lifetime (1728-1799) was the cultural center of the world as well as a nexus great transformation.  Pre-Haussmanization streets were the breeding ground of class strife as poor crops and costly wars led to financial crisis. Enlightenment ideals, particularly notions of popular sovereignty and inalienable rights, influenced the rise of malcontent and eventual revolution (2). 

Although Boullée completed a number of small-scale built commissions for private and religious patrons, he was most influential during his lifetime in academic roles at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées and the Académie Royale d'Architecture. Boullée rejected the perceived frivolity of sumptuous Rococo design in favor of the rigid orders of the Greeks and Romans.  Driven by his search for pure forms derived from nature, he looked back into history to the monumental forms of cultures that predated the Greeks.  Transcending mere adulation of historical precedents, Boullée remixed classic elements at a scale and level of drama previously unachieved.  

For Boullée the sphere represented perfection and majesty, creating soft gradations of light across its curved surface and having an “immeasurable hold over our senses” (3).  For Newton’s cenotaph a 500 ft diameter sphere is embedded within a three-tiered cylindrical base, giving the impression of a buried volume. Boullée smartly completes the figure of the sphere with a flanking pair of curved ramps.  

A single grand staircase leads up to a round plinth. The drawings privilege impact and atmosphere over legibility of the layout, for example showing a small exterior door on the second level above a band of crenellation yet illustrating no means of access. Narrow flanking stairs provide an exterior connection between the second and uppermost terrace. Closely spaced cypress trees, associated with mourning in Greek and Roman cultures, circumscribe each level.  The spherical entry portal at the lower level gives way to a dark, long tunnel that runs below the central volume.  Rising up as it approaches the center, a final run of stairs brings visitors into a cavernous void.  Here at the center of gravity lies a sarcophagus for Newton, the sole indication of human scale in the interior.  

Boullée creates an interior world that inverts exterior lighting conditions.  At night, light radiates from an oversize luminaire suspended at the center point of the sphere. Vaguely celestial in form, its light spills through the long the entry tunnels.  During the day, a black starlit night blankets the interior. Points of light penetrate the thick shell through narrow punctures whose arrangement corresponds with locations of planets and constellations. A seemingly inaccessible corridor with a quarter-circle section rings the perimeter.

The sections begin to suggest a negotiation of forces, as the dome appears to attenuate or hollow out at the top and thicken towards the supports. The bare walls and lack of ornament create a sombre impression.  Changes in tone and fog-like elements bolster the sense of mystery. 

Although unbuilt, Boullée’s drawings were engraved and widely circulated.  His treatise, bequeathed to the Bibliotèque National de France, was not published until the twentieth century.  In The Art of Architectural Drawing: Imagination and Technique , Thomas Wells Schaller calls the cenotaph an “astounding piece” that is “perfectly symptomatic of the age as much as it is of the man” (4). Considered along with Claude Nicholas Ledoux and Jean-Jaques Lequeu the work of Boullée and his contemporaries influenced the work at the École des Beaux-Arts during the mid and latter nineteenth century.  His works still inspire designers. For example, in 1980 Lebbeus Woods designed a cenotaph for Einstein, inspired by the Cenotaph for Newton.  

Check out an English language translation of Boullee’s thoughts on the architect as artist, nature, and additional projects here .

• Etienne-Louis Boullée. Architecture, Essay on Art. Edited and annotated by Helen Rosenau. Translated by Sheila da Vallée. 82. 
• http://www.history.com/topics/french-revolution
• Boullée, 86
• Schaller, 160

Main Sources

Kaufmann, Emil. “Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, 42 No. 3 (1952), 431-564

Rosenau, Helen. Boullée’s Treatise on Architecture. London: Alec Tiranti Ltd., 1953.

Pérouse de Montclos, Jean-Marie. Etienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799): Theoretician of Revolutionary Architecture. New York: George Braziller, 1974.

Boullée, Etienne-Louis. Architecture, Essay on Art. Edited and annotated by Helen Rosenau. Translated by Sheila da Vallée. Accessed at http://designspeculum.com/Historyweb/boulleetreatise.pdf

Schaller, Thomas Wells. The Art of Architectural Drawing: Imagination and Technique.   New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1997.

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Review: Boullée and Visionary Architecture, Including Boullée's "Architecture, Essay on Art" by Helen Rosenau

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Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos; Review: Boullée and Visionary Architecture, Including Boullée's "Architecture, Essay on Art" by Helen Rosenau. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 December 1978; 37 (4): 320–321. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/989270

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ON BOULLÉE'S NATURE: Scattered Beauty and the Seeing Image

This paper explores the life and work of Etienne-Louis Boullée primarily through the vehicle of his unbuilt projects and unfinished manuscripts. The intent of this essay is, in part, to culturally situate Boullée’s contribution within the intellectual history of late eighteenth century France and, if only tentatively, to re-situate the implications of his work within our own contemporary architectural and cultural discourse. The decades during which Boullée produced his most enduring works are perhaps best characterized through some of the most influential ideas and ebullient characters current in the Paris of the late eighteenth century -- a period typified by figures as divergent as Edmund Burke and John Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and Franz Anton Mesmer.

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Étienne La Font de Saint Yenne’s Réflexions emerges in 18th Century France seemingly prior to formal art criticism and at a proto-critical moment before L’Encyclopédie. One of its primary gestures, as Thomas Crow has pointed out, is to make the determination of value in painting and art a public matter, which also presents the reason why it was poorly received by artists still tied to a private system of guilds, societies, and royal patronage. Réflexions represents textual production for the sake of a parallel artistic ecosystem in which the commentary of words that was art’s Other graduates from the écriteau and public applause or boos to monographs even paving the way for Denis Diderot’s writings on the art salon mid-century. The art critical monograph of La Font then, makes a connection from artistic ecosystems to print ecosystems, bringing the former into a new framework of critical reception and a prospectus for a novel mode d’emploi for works of art. La Font’s text is still interesting today because of this equation of the value systems of print with those of the visual arts and how it therefore transforms the notion of a critical context for visual art.

Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 36, no. 1 (2007): 235-59.

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Etiennelouis boullEe

from Architecture, Essay on Art (c.1794)

Perhaps the most famous of Boullee's visionary designs is his cenotaph for Isaac Newton, a gigantic spherical monument dedicated to his theories and lit by apertures cut into the upper portion of the vault. It plays perfectly into Boullee's symbolism of forms and exploitation of mysterious sources of light. These two excerpts are followed by concluding remarks to his essay, entitled ''Summary Reflections on the Art of Teaching Architecture.''

Etienne-Louis Boullée, from Architecture, Essai sur l'art [Architecture, essay on art] (c.1794), edited and annotated at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris by Helen Rosenau, trans. Sheila de Vallée, published in Boullee & Visionary Architecture, New York: Harmony Books, 1976, pp. 107, 115.

Sublime mind! Prodigious and profound genius! Divine being! Newton! Deign to accept the homage of my feeble talents! Ah! If I dare to make it public, it is because I am persuaded that I have surpassed myself in the project which I shall discuss.

O Newton! With the range of your intelligence and the sublime nature of your Genius, you have defined the shape of the earth; I have conceived the idea of enveloping you with your discovery. That is as it were to envelop you in your own self. How can I find outside you anything worthy of you? It was these ideas that made me want to make the sepulchre in the shape of the earth. In imitation of the ancients and to pay homage to you I have surrounded it with flowers and cypress trees. [ . . . ]

The form of the interior of this monument is, as you can see, that of a vast sphere. The centre of gravity is reached by an opening in the base on which the Tomb is placed. The unique advantage of this form is that from whichever side we look at it (as in nature) we see only a continuous surface which has neither beginning nor end and the more we look at it, the larger it appears. This form has never been utilized and it is the only one appropriate to this monument, for its curve ensures that the onlooker cannot approach what he is looking at; he is forced as if by one hundred different circumstances outside his control, to remain in the place assigned to him and which, since it occupies the centre, keeps him at a sufficient distance to contribute to the illusion. He delights in it, without being able to destroy the effect by wanting to come too close in order to satisfy his empty curiosity. He stands alone and his eyes can behold nothing but the immensity of the sky. The tomb is the only material object.

The lighting of this monument, which should resemble that on a clear night, is provided by the planets and the stars that decorate the vault of the sky. The arrangement of the planets corresponds to nature. These planets are in the shape of and resemble funnel-like openings which transpierce the vaulting and once inside assume their form. The daylight outside filters through these apertures into the gloom of the interior and outlines all the objects in the vault with bright, sparkling light. This form of lighting the monument is a perfect reproduction and the effect of the stars could not be more brilliant.

It is easy to imagine the natural effect that would result from the possibility of increasing or decreasing the daylight inside the monument according to the number of stars. It is also easy to imagine how the sombre light that would prevail in this place would favour the illusion.

Continue reading here: From Architecture Considered in Relation to Art Morals and Legislation 1804

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The radically impractical 18th-century architect whose ideas on beauty endure

Today, the ideas of the 18th-century French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée influence building designs around the world. However, during his life, Boullée was more interested in the poetic potential of architecture than concocting practical plans, and built very few structures that remain standing today. Instead, his lasting impact derives from his bold proposals for buildings that reflected the beauty he found in geometric simplicity and symmetry, presented on exceptionally grand scales. Working through drawings of some of Boullée’s proposed and never-realised buildings – from a stadium with a capacity of 300,000, to a real-life Tower of Babel and a fantastical monument to Isaac Newton – this video essay from the YouTube channel Kings and Things explores how he borrowed from and expanded upon classical architecture for inspiration, as well as how his ideas had a resurgence upon the publication of his writings in 1953, some 250 years after his death.

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Home — Essay Samples — Arts & Culture — Design — Analysis Of Royal Library Design By Etienne Louis Boullée

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Boullee and Visionary Architecture, Including Boullee's "Architecture, Essay on Art" Hardcover – January 1, 1976

• Language English
• Publisher Harmony Books (Crown Publishers)
• Publication date January 1, 1976
• ISBN-10 0517525690
• ISBN-13 978-0517525692
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harmony Books (Crown Publishers); First Edition (January 1, 1976)
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critic’s notebook

When Latin America Became the Seat of Modernity

A new MoMA exhibition looks at design from six countries, spanning 1940 to 1980. Some beautiful chairs tell the tale.

A visitor looks at “Malitte Lounge Furniture” by the Chilean artist Roberto Matta at the Museum of Modern Art. Credit... Clement Pascal for The New York Times

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By Michael Kimmelman

Photographs by Clement Pascal

• April 3, 2024

Lina Bo Bardi, the great Italian-Brazilian architect, liked to say we all invent architecture just by climbing a stair, crossing a room, opening a door or sitting down in a chair. All of “these little gestures,” she said, along with the objects they involve, are richly endowed with meaning and memory.

Design is life. Life is design. We are its designers.

Bo Bardi, of course, was hardly alone in thinking this way, as “Crafting Modernity,” a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art , makes plain.

The show is a gem. It focuses on domestic design from six countries (Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela), produced between 1940 and 1980. Latin America had entered a period of transformation, industrial expansion and creativity. Across the region, design was becoming institutionalized as a profession, opening up new avenues, especially for women.

Modernism was the aesthetic throughline.

It fueled a push for national identity, improved conditions for the working poor and enabled a marriage of native crafts and mass production. It became a means of celebrating the region’s ecological diversity.

And yes, it also provided fresh excuses to design, say, an airy, low-slung chaise in which to snooze briefly under the tropical sun, next to the cool earth.

I can’t recall the last time I coveted so many beautiful chairs. The ones here run the gamut with their industrial refinement, fetishistic hand-tooling, local woods and fabrics, and suave, often witty, whisperingly delicate lines and silhouettes. The photographs give you some idea. But see the show, if you can. It’s open through Sept. 22.

During the later decades of the last century, economic free-fall and repression crippled much of the region, some of it instigated by the C.I.A., with trade agreements like NAFTA decimating many small, rural businesses, then globalization wreaking further havoc. A knowledge of what’s to come adds a layer of melancholy to the work on view.

Ana Elena Mallet and Amanda Forment, who curated “Crafting Modernity,” call it a first stab at making up for lost time. They’ve gathered photographs and black-and-white films of signature houses, along with designs by tent-pole figures like Bo Bardi, Oscar Niemeyer, Roberto Burle Marx, Gego (a spectacular black, brown and white carpet) and Roberto Matta (his groovy green foam-rubber puzzle-piece chairs).

The show also highlights designers who don’t ring as many bells here, among them Clara Porset, Gui Bonsiepe, Martin Eisler, Amancio Williams, Ricardo Blanco, Cristian Valdes, Olga de Amaral, José Zanine Caldas. The list goes on.

Zanine Caldas, for example, was a self-taught Brazilian artist, architect and model maker who switched gears and became an environmentalist and missionary for native craft traditions.

He is represented by an extraordinary object, a kind of lumberjack’s love seat, carved from a salvaged tree trunk, whose facing chairs encourage conversation and maybe a little canoodling.

Bonsiepe was a European transplant, like Bo Bardi, Eisler and Gego, who spent much of his career in Latin America. Collaboration is a leitmotif in “Crafting Modernity,” reflecting a wave of collectivist idealism that swept across the region during the midcentury. In the early 1970s, Bonsiepe oversaw a collaborative of Chilean and German designers, assigned by Salvador Allende, Chile’s newly elected socialist president, with the task of reshaping the nation’s material culture along socialist principles.

Among other things, they produced a chair for kindergartners: Creamsicle orange, with its teensy right-angled seat wedged between two triangular legs. The chair became a symbol of progress and hope. So, the whole design project was ended abruptly in 1973, when a military junta took over Chile in a bloody C.I.A.-backed coup .

As for Porset, MoMA uses her chaise from the 1950s — a butaque , it’s called — to advertise the show, and no wonder.

Butaques derive from “duhos”: ritual hardwood chairs, for communing with deities, dating back to pre-Columbian times. When conquistadors arrived, they brought their own chairs. In time, cultures merged, producing the butaque.

Porset’s version — conceived, as Mallet points out, at a “pivotal moment in Mexican history when discussions surrounding the definition of Mexican identity were paramount” — uses laminated wood and woven wicker, distilling all that earlier history into a modernist classic as suave and streamlined as a racing car.

I mentioned lost time earlier. This is MoMA’s most significant engagement with modern Latin American design since “ Organic Design in Home Furnishings ,” in 1941, which began as a pair of competitions, one open to U.S. designers, the other to Latin Americans, who were encouraged to emphasize local materials and methods. Porset and her husband and collaborator, the Mexican muralist Xavier Guerrero, were among the winners of the Latin American competition (MoMA only credited Guerrero).

Born near the turn of the last century into affluence in Cuba, Porset studied with Anni and Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, indoctrinating herself in the Bauhaus. In New York, she joined up with members of Cuba’s revolutionary junta, then headquartered in the city. Her leftist politics landed her in hot water with Cuba’s autocrats.

So she relocated to Mexico, entering a community of designers and artists that included Guerrero, all of them dreaming about post-revolutionary society.

Guerrero shared with Porset a deep respect for regional crafts. Their entry into “Organic Design” consisted of an ensemble of pinewood and fabric tables and chairs — “rural furniture,” they called it — which paid homage to objects they had come across visiting homes in Mexican villages.

Those chairs and tables no longer exist, but the drawings for them are in “Crafting Modernity,” which picks up where “Organic Design” left off. Craft and industry can and should work harmoniously — organically — was Porset’s message, an idea that, like Porset, links the MoMA shows across eight decades.

“In everything there is design,” is how she put it, “in a cloud, in a fingerprint, on the sand or in the sea, set in motion by the wind.”

As I said, Bo Bardi certainly wasn’t alone in her thinking. She’s represented here by her Bowl chair from the 1950s, its plastic-and-foam-rubber frame nesting on a slender, ringed steel base that allows the bowl to tilt and swivel.

The bowl’s hemisphere can summon to mind the 18th-century French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée’s famous unbuilt monument to Newton, a textbook example of Enlightenment idealism.

It also sort of resembles a jumbo sized sex toy.

The blend of idealism and hedonism gestures toward one last aspect of the exhibition — its lightness of spirit — which is captured as well in a photograph of the Bowl chair from the cover of Interiors magazine in 1953, reprinted on the show’s object label.

The bowl tilts upward in the picture. A woman reclines inside it, as if soaking in a tiny tub. It is Bo Bardi.

Her head turns from the camera, her legs are crossed, her feet dangle oh-so-casually over the edge.

Design is life.

Life is full.

Michael Kimmelman is The Times’s architecture critic and the founder and editor-at-large of Headway , a team of journalists focused on large global challenges and paths to progress. He has reported from more than 40 countries and was previously chief art critic. More about Michael Kimmelman

Art and Museums in New York City

A guide to the shows, exhibitions and artists shaping the city’s cultural landscape..

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At Tiffany’s flagship, luxe art helps sell the jewels . This 10-story palace is filled with famous names, for a heady fusion of relevant, and discomfiting, contemporary art and retailing.

A new exhibition tells the dealer’s story of how two rising stars, Larry Gagosian and Jean-Michel Basquiat, worked together in Los Angeles  in the ’80s.

A bounteous and playful survey of Joan Jonas ’s, career on the vanguard highway fills the museum and the Drawing Center with the 87-year-old artist’s work..

Looking for more art in the city? Here are the gallery shows not to miss in April .

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