By James Wehn
Wooded hills open to reveal a complex of bright white buildings that stretch across the plains of a broad valley. A domed shrine at the center of the compound stands above the other buildings. Its nobility is reiterated by a mountain rising majestically into the clouds, where upon the plateau, a temple sits between earth and sky, exposed to all the elements of nature.
At 140 x 40 centimeters (58.27 x 15.75 inches), this large ink and wash drawing is an architectural elevation for a Monument destiné aux hommages dus à l’Etre Suprême (Monument intended for tributes due to the Supreme Being) by French neo-classical architect, Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728 – 1799).
Boullée is perhaps best known today for the grandiose building designs he completed in the last decades of the eighteenth century, none of which were ever constructed. While some of the designs from this period were conceived as actual building projects, others, like the monument to the Supreme Being, seem to be purposefully theoretical. It is possible that they were created as examples to train young architects or as illustrations for a treatise on architecture theory that Boullée was planning, titled Architecture, Essai sur l’art.
The most remarkable of these designs is arguably Boullée’s Cenotaph to Isaac Newton, an impossible 152 meter (500 foot) tall monument celebrating the physicist. Although Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) died over fifty years earlier, a cultish devotion to his life and work escalated throughout Boullée’s lifetime. Conceived as an enormous sphere, the cenotaph plans symbolically represent several scientific theories proposed by Newton, including the original shape of the earth.
Similarly, Boullée’s monument to a Supreme Being is an expression of the metaphorical, emotional, and symbolic aspects of the architecture’s purpose. Function, shape, setting, lighting, and even scent were all considered in an effort to realize the unique character of the monument within a defined aesthetic environment. Boullée believed that a building’s “character” should be poetic and evoke an appropriate feeling in those who experienced it. For example, the strong use of symmetry in his drawing – not only in the buildings, but in the pyramid-shaped mountain as well – is intended as an image of clarity, order, and perfection. The monument thus becomes a metaphor for the divine nature of the Supreme Being. In a passage of his treatise Boullée also describes the setting for this monument:
… the whole would be decorated with all that is most beautiful in nature; the buildings would be mere accessories, the base of the repository formed by a superb open-sided Temple crowning the mountain top. The Temple precincts would consist of fields of flowers exuding their sweet smell like incense offered to the Divine Being… This beautiful place would be the image of all that ensures our well-being; it would fill our hearts with a sense of joy and would be for us a true earthly Paradise.
Although Boullée’s later monumental and public architecture was never built, he was quite successful at domestic architecture earlier in his career. Between 1763 and 1779, Boullée built at least nine major luxury homes in Paris. All but one, the Hôtel Alexandre, have since been destroyed.
Fortunately, due to the popularity of his private homes, many artists documented these buildings in prints and drawings. One example shown here is a drawing in pen and brown ink with watercolor by Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (1716 – 1803). It depicts the Maison de Madame de Brunoy (House of Madame Brunoy), the last and most elaborate home designed by Boullée. Also known as the Hôtel de Brunoy, its garden faced the Champs-Élysées, which at the time created a sense of rural retreat while remaining close to the central city of Paris. Although the lavishly decorated interior was not particularly unique, the exterior represented one of the most radical uses of a temple theme in domestic architecture. Working closely with the Marquise de Brunoy, who shared with Boullée an interest in gardens, he successfully integrated landscape and exterior building design to create a temple to Flora, the goddess of flowering plants. When viewed from the Champs-Élysées, a podium of steps and flowerbeds led up from the garden to an arcade of round-headed openings behind six colossal ionic columns. Above the center of the façade, Boullée raised a stepped pyramid with a statue of Flora at the summit. This feature was perhaps an allegory of the Marquise herself, presiding over the length of her garden, and making the Hôtel de Brunoy one of Boullée’s only expressions of monumental “character” ever to have been built.
To see architectural plans and other drawings by Étienne-Louis Boullée, visit the online exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, or search the BNF collections using their digital library, Gallica.
All images displayed here are in the public domain, and made available as a courtesy of the Bibliotèque Nationale de France.
Copyright 2009 James Wehn & myartcanon.net
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