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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.
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville remarks that “Men living in democratic ages do not readily comprehend the utility of forms.” He is referring to the social conventions that prevent our instant gratification, but, as the architecture critic Colin Rowe has pointed out, pure geometric form is also bundled into this statement. Sheer immensity was for Boullée the most important aspect of the Newton cenotaph: “it is by this that our spirit is raised to the contemplation of the Creator and that we experience intimations of celestial sensations.” He took issue with admirers of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome who believed its beauty was achieved because its architects succeeded in disguising its huge scale. According to the architectural historian Anthony Vidler: “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 the ‘nation’, and, more often than not, a meditation on the sublime sobriety of death.”
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