Étienne-Louis Boullée

Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799), French neoclassical architect, whose best-known works are the visionary but unrealized designs he created for ideal buildings. He was a gifted teacher, and his treatises and drawings influenced a generation of French architects.

Born in Paris, Boullée trained first as a painter but his father, an architect, insisted that he pursue architecture. From 1740 to 1746 Boullée studied under several leading French architects, including Jacques-François Blondel and Jean-Laurent Legeay. Boullée's early works were hotels and luxurious private town houses. Reacting against the prevalent rococo style, characterized by elaborate ornamentation, he employed many Greek and Roman architectural elements that recalled the classical taste of the 1600s. The Hôtel de Brunoy, Paris (1779), for example, is built to look like a Greek temple.

The social chaos of the French Revolution (1789-1799) made large-scale building difficult. However, the intellectual ideals of the revolution encouraged the rational and highly ordered designs favored by Boullée. At the same time, official hostility to the Catholic Church, which had been the state religion of France until the revolution, encouraged the planning of secular public monuments. In the 1780s and 1790s Boullée drew plans for a museum, theater, library, cemetery, and cathedral. These drawings combine classical elements, such as columns and porticoes, with monumental forms that predate Greece and Rome, such as pyramids and obelisks. Most of these designs were impractical and well beyond the engineering capabilities of Boullée's time.

Boullée believed that beauty was rooted in symmetry, regularity, and variety—qualities that he observed in nature. In his theoretical writings he contrasted the positive emotional effects of regular shapes, such as spheres, with those of irregular forms. Many of his projects incorporate basic geometric solids such as cubes, pyramids, and spheres varied with effects of light and shadow. Boullée's best-known design is for a monument for English mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton. The plan (which was never executed) is dominated by an immense sphere, the interior of which was to be lit by openings in the roof simulating the moon and stars.