Designing the Sublime Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution
As dissatisfaction with the old regime fermented into revolutionary upheaval in late-eighteenth century France, two architects cast off the decorative excesses of the Baroque and Rococo styles and sought out bold, new geometries. Hugh Aldersey-Williams tours the sublime and mostly unrealized designs of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, discovering utopian ideals crafted in cubes, spheres, and pyramids.
The French were slow to fall in love with Newton, who had overturned the physical worldview of Descartes, but when they fell, they fell hard. Voltaire’s mistress Emilie du Châtelet produced a comprehensible — and many said superior — edition of his great work, Principia Mathematica; the physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace proclaimed himself the “French Newton”; and in 1787, two years before the French Revolution, the future champion of the sans-culottes Jean-Paul Marat published a translation of Newton’s Opticks.
But perhaps none was more enamoured of the English scientist than the architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, who in 1784 conceived the idea of a cenotaph for the great man (notwithstanding that he had been buried in 1727 in Westminster Abbey). His monument would be a vast, hollow sphere, taller than the Pyramids, and belted by cypresses. The interior would contain Newton’s tomb and . . . space. Nothing more. Light would be its only ornament.
