University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

ETIENNE-LOUIS BOULLÉE’S VISION OF NATURE IN ARCHITECTURE

LIANG SHUI

A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURAL STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2019

To my parents, mentors and friends, I couldn’t have done this without you

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to thank my thesis chair Dr. Hui Zou of the School of Architecture at the University of Florida, who has consistently allowed this thesis to be of my own work, while pushing me diligently to the right direction when he thought I needed it.

I would also like to thank the co-chair of the committee Dr. Vandana Baweja without whose wholehearted dedication and passionate participation the validation of the thesis could not have been successfully conducted.

I would also like to thank the graduate advisor Sheryl McIntosh for her unimpeded support and patience.

Last but not the least I thank my family for supporting me spiritually throughout the writing of this thesis and for having always been the rock of my life.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 6

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 NATURE UNDER THE LIGHT OF ENLIGHTENMENT: 18TH-CENTURY FRENCH DISCOURSE ON NATURE AND ITS ARTISTIC RERESENTATION ...... 10

Natural Aesthetic in 18th-Century ...... 12 French Garden: Nature in Order ...... 13 English Garden: Nature in Disinterestedness ...... 15 Boullée between Two Gardens ...... 17 Boullée’s Collage of Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque ...... 18 Sentimental Transition in Space and Time ...... 22 Nature in Moral and Rational Models ...... 26

2 NATURE IN COMPOSITION...... 30

Tableaux, a Self-sufficient Visual Structure ...... 31 Panorama and Horizon ...... 32 The Grand ...... 35 New Grammar in the Neoclassic Interlude ...... 39

3 NATURE IN SENTIMENT ...... 45

Re-creating Nature through Phenomenology ...... 45 Sublime as the Aesthetic Experience of Nature ...... 47 Death, the Most Sublime of All ...... 49 Theatre of Nature ...... 54 The Mise-en-Œuvre of Nature ...... 58

4 NATURE IN CONTEMPLATION ...... 64

The Mourning Nature ...... 64 Cenotaph for Newton, the Reunion of Nature and Human ...... 66

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 74

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 77

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

1-1 Painting of Funeral of Phocion, by Nicolas Poussin (1648). National Museum, Cardiff...... 14

1-2 Painting of Harbor Scene with Grieving Heliades, by Claude Lorrain ...... 15

1-3 J. Benoit, View of the Castle from the Southern Garden...... 15

1-4 Drawing of La Bibliothèque Nationale, by E. Boullée ...... 21

1-5 Detail of La Bibliothèque Nationale...... 22

1-6 Watercolor painting of Ruines et tombeaux, by Hubert Robert...... 26

1-7 Frontispiece of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l'Architecture, by Charles Eisen...... 29

2-1 Drawing of Cirque deuxième projet, by E. Boullée...... 35

2-2 Drawing of Le Fort, by E Boullée...... 38

2-3 Detail of Le Fort...... 38

2-4 Section drawing of Eglise de Madeline, by E. Boullée...... 44

3-1 Drawing of a hermitage gate and a hunting retreat , by Jean-Jacques Lequeu ...... 46

3-2 Drawing of Nécropoles, by E. Boullée...... 47

3-3 Drawing of Funerary Monument, by E. Boullée...... 53

3-4 Detail of Funerary Monument...... 54

3-5 Drawing of Cenotaph proposal for the 1785 Grand Prix competition, by Pierre Fontaine...... 54

3-6 Drawing of Cemetery Entrance by the Moonlight, by E. Boullée...... 57

3-7 Detail of Cemetery Entrance by the Moonlight...... 57

3-8 Drawing of Cénotaphe en forme de pyramide, by E. Boullée ...... 58

3-9 E. Boullée, Drawing of Cénotaphe Tronqué, by E. Boullée...... 62

3-10 Section drawing of Cénotaphe Tronqué, by E. Boullée ...... 63

4-1 Drawing of Cénotaphe de Newton, by E. Boullée...... 72

4-2 Drawing of l’effet de nuit intérieur, by by E. Boullée...... 72

4-3 Section drawing of Temple of earth, by E. Boullée...... 73

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Architectural Studies

ETIENNE-LOUIS BOULLÉE’S VISION OF NATURE IN ARCHITECTURE

Liang Shui

May 2019

Chair: Hui Zou Member: Vandana Baweja Major: Architecture

Relations with what is called “nature” are often fundamental to the understanding of our experience of the world, and therefore of our knowledge and our everyday life. Through centuries artists and architects have attempted relentlessly to integrate nature into the creative process. However, the meaning of nature is as ambiguous as it is complex and any attempt to systemize it once and for all will end in failure as nature by itself is multifaceted construct in constant evolution. Nevertheless, it is possible to examine specific narratives of nature in a particular section of history, which will provide critically important archeological examples that could potentially help today’s society to better understand our relations with nature. In this regard, the thesis conducted a hermeneutic study of the 18th-century French architect Etienne-

Louis Boullée’s vision of nature by examining his architectural works from three major perspectives: composition, sentience, and contemplative value. Boullée's architectural designs are paradigmatic of the 18th-century French understanding of nature and at the same time they represent the distillation of his critical thinking about nature. Boullée's architectural works are a successful attempt to reconcile the infinite nature and finite mankind and moreover, they

provided today's architects with a way of articulating the abstract concept of nature through tangible architectural language.

CHAPTER 1 NATURE UNDER THE LIGHT OF ENLIGHTENMENT: 18TH-CENTURY FRENCH DISCOURSE ON NATURE AND ITS ARTISTIC RERESENTATION

It does not seem to me that there is any other way at all surer than to admire Nature herself and, in general, to examine for a long time and very attentively in what manner Nature...has arranged the surfaces on beautiful members.1

—Leon Battista Alberti Treaties on Painting

Alberti stated in his book Treaties on Painting that it was equally important to imitate the appearance nature as its governing laws and principles. The imitation of nature has been a long- standing concept deeply rooted in the western culture since ancient Greece when Aristotle described nature as the reality accessible to senses and the Stoics postulated the idea of Natura sive Deus (God or Nature) which equated nature to the life-creating power. During the

Renaissance, Alberti expounded on the medieval dichotomy of natura naturans and natura naturatas and asserted the imitation of nature as the fundamental principle of architectural design.

Over the course of western history, the understanding of imitation of nature was propelled to constant changes under overlapped theoretical structures. Accordingly, the study of architecture developed into the exploration of nature and its creative power. The intricate concept of nature entailed many perplexing questions: What is nature? What is the imitation of nature? How does architecture imitate nature? And how is nature related to human dwelling? These puzzling questions became so intertwined that it was virtually impossible to untangle them by looking at the whole landscape of architectural history. However, it is possible to procure certain clarifications of these questions by reframing them in a certain historical time frame. The thesis aims to set a discussion on the 18th-century French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée and his vision of nature, as well as how he imitated and re-created nature through architectural

1 Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 55.

representations. The thesis chooses Boullée as the research subject because Boullée’s theoretical thinking exemplifies the 18th-century philosophy of natural aesthetic that reshaped the neoclassic understanding and artistic representation of nature, and at the same time it is unique in articulating such philosophy in the form of architecture. The methodology of this thesis is to apply historical hermeneutic study to Boullée's theoretical treaties Architecture, Essai sur Art

(1794), and his drawings. The thesis first develops arguments for the graphic characters of

Boullée's drawings and interweaves them with interpretations of his writing to elucidate how

Boullée visually articulated the imitation of nature through tangible architectural language. The research then explores the sensational and phenomenological aspects of the architect's designs and lastly, based on Boullée's personal experience recorded in his Essai, the thesis leaps to a discussion on the relationship between mankind and nature and how Boullée enacted their connection. It is my intention that the thesis can bring to today's architectural world a small speck of critical understanding of humanity and its poetical dwelling within nature.

O nature! Qu’il est bien vrai de dire que tu es le livre des livres, la science universelle! Non, nous ne pouvons rien sans toi! Mais si u recommences tous les ans le cours le plus instructif, le plus intéressant, combine peu d’hommes assistant à tes leçons et savent en profiter!2

Oh nature! It is true that you are the book of books, the universal knowledge! No, we can do nothing without you! Although you restart each year the most interesting and instructive course of study, how few men pay attention to your lessons and know how to benefit from them!3

The presence of nature perpetuates the theoretical discourse of Etienne-Louis Boullée. In his treaties Architecture, Essai sur l’Art, Boullée evoked the famous discussion about the conceptual

2Étienne-Louis Boullée, Essaie Sur l’Art, ed. Helen Rosenau (London: Tiranti, 1953), 43.

3 Unless otherwise stated, all English translations from French are my own. I could not seem to find any complete translation of the Essai except some excerpts. I consider my translation not entirely unsuited for the purpose of the clarity of expressing the general idea of the author. Some subtle details might be lost in the translation but I believe it will not hinder the comprehension regarding the original text.

origin of architecture between two most influential architects of the time, Claude Perrault and

Jean-Francois Blondel. Perrault, the architect of the Peristile du Louvre, advocated that architecture was the “pure invention de l’imagination d’homme”4 whereas Blondel insisted that it was nature that provided architecture with the creative ground. Boullée, taking the same stance as his teacher Blondel, upheld the firm conviction that “il est incontestable qu’il n’y a pas d’idee qui n’emane pas de la nature” (It is incontestable that there is no idea that does not derive from nature).5 In many Boullée’s quasi-utopic projects one finds his attempt to recreate the ennobling impression that nature made upon the spectator in the form of architecture. Nature to Boullée, with its changing seasons and fleeting light, was a constantly shifting aesthetic construct constituted of intricate logic and principles that ought to be regarded as the paradigm of architectural design.6 This particular appreciation of nature was typical of the 18th-century desire for an alternative and secularized model of aesthetic experience independent from monarchical power and religious authority. To understand the relations between nature and Boullée’s architecture, one must first understand how the philosophy of natural aesthetic came to its formation under the cultural climate of the 18th century.

Natural Aesthetic in 18th-Century

Until the late 17th century the notion of nature was still informed by church and monarchical authority exemplified by the supreme royal landscape design, le jardin à la française (the so-called French garden). The courtly French order later gave way to its liberal counterpart, le jardin à l’anglaise (the so-called English garden) promoted by the thriving philosophy in natural aesthetic. There was certainly a heated debate between the French garden

4 Boullée,44.

5 Ibid., 41.

6 Ibid., 40-42.

and English garden regarding which one of them should prevail in terms of representing the truth of nature accurately. The result of this debate is not of interest for the thesis as it constitutes merely an interesting historical anecdote, nor is there any point to decide which garden acquired the truth of nature for nature is no longer an objective object once it enters the man-made cultural construct. The eminent subject here is the aesthetic of nature, as in how it is understood, interpreted and represented in such construct.

French Garden: Nature in Order

In the 17th century, the French garden was still the unchallenged landscape model of

Europe. The intention of the French garden to display monarchical authority through the great perspective and the perfectly controlled symmetry was as obvious as its desire to dominate nature. The unbalanced dynamic between the secular power and nature was the direct result of

French classicism and Newtonian-Cartesian ideology that regarded nature as an untamed force to be subjugated by humanity. The expansion of such stance on nature was commonly witnessed in landscape paintings as well, such as Nicolas Poussin’s The Funeral of Phocion and Claud

Lorrain’s Landscape with Cattles and Peasants (Figure 1-1 and Figure 1-2). In both paintings, the submissive relationship between nature and human power was overtly illustrated: forest was divided to give view to the distant castle on the hill; wild grass field gave way to the sinuating road to bring out the theatricality of the site whereas the intimidating mountains were discreetly tucked away in the background.

The most sterling architectural example of the French order is to be found in the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte (Figure 1-3) outside of Paris. The building was laid out in the late 1650s by the renowned French landscape designer Andre le Notre who was also the author of the garden of Versailles. The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte embodied the very essence of French landscape paradigm: everything was arranged in absolute symmetry, flattening the existing nature so as to

create the impeccably ordered arrangement of parterres, fountains, and tree rows and reflecting pools. A grand perspective was set to be observed from the central chamber at one end of the terrain, in opposition to the statue of Hercules on the other end of the chateau, standing as the reference of the ancient era to which the time of Enlightenment zealously aspired. The alleyways were arranged at the same intervals by statues and fountains, perfectly placed along the symmetric axis. The Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte presented an extremely logical, rational and majestic imagery of monarchical authority that subdued the wild nature.

As Jacques Boyceau wrote in the Traité du jardinage selon les raison et l’art de la nature,

French gardening theory in the 17th century saw no conflict between nature and symmetry and was dedicated to the highly rational, regular and geometric landscape model conceived to emphasize the possibility of fine art to control and transform the most violent and chaotic nature.

From this perspective, it would therefore be erroneous to assume that nature’s power was negated in this concept; on the contrary, the French garden model acknowledged the immensely compelling character of nature, only with the additional assumption of its defective state and the unbridled ambition to harness its power.

Figure 1-1. Painting of Funeral of Phocion, by Nicolas Poussin (1648). National Museum, Cardiff.

Figure 1-2. Painting of Harbor Scene with Grieving Heliades, by Claude Lorrain (1640). Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.

Figure 1-3. J. Benoit, View of the Castle from the Southern Garden, from Wikipedia.

English Garden: Nature in Disinterestedness

The dominance of French garden eventually gave way to a new thriving force known as le jardin à l’anglaise which first appeared in the 18th century in England exemplified by the great

English landscape designer, Lancelot “Capability” Brown who left an abundance of extraordinary garden designs around England. Interestingly the transition from the French garden

to the English Garden was not instigated by professionals in the discipline of landscape design. It was the intellectual men of letters who pioneered the revolution of aesthetic philosophy. In the

18th century, philosophers started to regard nature as the paradigmatic aesthetic experience. The similar appreciation of nature was also found in what was known as natural religion which was set to reconcile the traditional Christian religion with the contradictory empirical ideology that had little tolerance with myth and miracle revelation. The natural religion deemed nature as the agglomeration of all beauties and therefore its existence must be the proof of God’s benevolence.

Along the development of the philosophy of natural aesthetic came the concept of disinterestedness conceived to purge all aesthetic experience of personal interest. The concept was first elaborated by English scholars Lord Shaftsbury, Joseph Addison and Francis Hutcheson and brought to exhaustion by Immanuel Kant who formally instituted the idea of nature as the exemplary object of all beauty, completing the discourse around disinterestedness. On a more rational and logical level, the appreciation of nature in absolute purity was also manifested in

Diderot’s life work the Encyclopedia where he claimed that art ought to imitate true nature:

Les productions de l’Art seront communes, imparfaites et faibles, tant qu’on ne se proposera pas une imitation plus rigoureuse de la Nature. La Nature est lente dans son opération. S’agit-il d’éloigner, de rapprocher, d’unir, de diviser, d’amollir, de condenser, de durcir, de liquéfier, de dissoudre, elle s’avance a son but par les degrés les plus insensibles.7

The works of art would be common, imperfect and thin if the artist does not propose an imagination more rigorously to Nature. Nature is slow in its own operation; it is about distancing itself, approaching itself, unifying, separating, ameliorating, condensing, hardening, liquefying, and dissolving. Nature advances in its own pace in the most undetectable manner possible.

The new appreciation of nature resulted in its different artistic representation, particularly in the inherently intertwined arts of paining and landscape design. The leading figure of English garden

7 Denis Diderot, Pensées Sur l’interprétation de La Nature, ed. Colas Duflo (Paris: Flammarion, 2005), 97.

“Capability” Brown castigated the overly emblematic nature of traditional French garden and its lack of natural authenticity; and as a response to the problematic design aesthetic, the revolutionists created the concept of le jardin expressif (expressive garden) to build an immersive and spontaneous experience for viewers by ameliorating artistically real natural scenes while preserving their authenticity to everyday-life experience. Among the scholars who initiated the development of English garden is Joseph Addison whose contribution to the English garden model mostly takes the forms of essays and letters (It is intriguing to remark on how men of letters instead of professional architects performed as the early engine of a landscape movement). Addison postulated in his book The Spectator that the constituents of the beautiful landscape were naturalness and rich diversity in opposite to the artificial arrangement of the

French order.8 Addison’s aesthetic predilection towards the innate quality of nature reflected the reversed role between art and nature where art was no longer the dictator of the wild landscape but became an ancillary expression of its feral essence.

Boullée between Two Gardens

The aesthetic and theoretical construct of Boullée’s architectural designs, when compared to that of French and English garden, present a multitude of divergence and similarity, conforming to neither the French regularity nor English Spontaneity. In his theoretical treaties

Essai sur Art, Boullée laid down three cardinal aesthetic principles of architectural design stemming from his observation of the beauty of regular geometries:

Pour quoi la figure des corps réguliers se saisit-elle au premier aspect? C’est que leurs formes sont simples, que leurs faces sont régulières, et qu’elle se répète… La symétrie plait…parce qu’elle présente l’évidence, et que l’âme, qui chercha sans cesse à concevoir, embrasse et saisit sans peine l’ensemble des

8 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, ed. Donald Frederic Bond and Richard Steele, 477 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3.

objets qu’elle présente…La variété nous plait parce qu’elle satisfait un besoin de l’âme qui, par sa nature, aime à s’étendre et à embrasser de nouveaux objets.9

Why we perceive regular bodies at first glance? This is by the virtue of their simple forms, their regular faces, and their repetitions…The symmetry pleases us because its presence is self-evident and that our souls look incessantly to comprehend, embrace, and capture figures that present themselves in whole…The variety delights us because it satisfies the desire of the soul to embrace new objects by extending itself.

Boullée’s predilection towards regularity and symmetry remained the taste of French classicism in accordance with the rational aesthetic of Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte and le Palais de

Versailles, whereas his third principle, variety, seemed to have more affinity with Addison’s postulation about the desired effect of “variety” which was to replace the prevailing regularity of

French gardens.10 The similarity and discrepancies found in Boullée’s architectural designs in comparison to French and English gardens implied the reconciliation of these two opposite landscape models in Boullée’s designs and his unique understanding of nature that made such reconciliation possible.

Boullée’s Collage of Beautiful, Sublime, and Picturesque

The clarification of the notion of aesthetic in terms of disinterestedness helped disassociate the aesthetic perception of nature from personal interest and thereby laid down the intellectual ground for three major concepts quintessential to natural aesthetic: beautiful, sublime and picturesque.11

9 Boullée, 35.

10 Addison, 3.

11 Allen Carlson, “Environmental Aesthetics,” ed. Edward Zalta, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 27 (2015): 58–76.

The concept of beauty is independent of sublime and picturesque. Edmund Burke, the

English philosopher that partly founded the philosophic framework for aesthetics defined beauty as:

By Beauty, as distinguished from the Sublime, I mean that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion analogous to it, I distinguish love, or the satisfaction which arises to the mind upon contemplating anything beautiful, from desire, which is an energy of the mind that hurries us on to the possession of certain objects.12

Burke’s vision of beauty is decisively different from the long-standing classic doctrines that bind beauty to the proportion and symmetry based on the analogy of the human body; In Burke’s view, things perceived as beautiful are characterized by their clarity and self-evidence and in this regard his conception of beauty bears a certain connotation to Boullée’s definition of regularity.

The delicate characters of beauty were associated by Burke with objects of relatively small scale and smooth surface that is the “principal cause of pleasure to the touch, taste, smells, and hearing, it will be easily admitted a constituent of visual beauty.”13

The sublime is that which is vast, immense, overwhelming and terrifying. It approximates the ides of beauty as an aesthetic experience but differs in physiological and psychological terms.

Burke thinks that the origin of the sublime comes from pain in opposite to pleasure which constitutes the source of beauty.

The concept of picturesque resides in the middle ground between beauty and sublime. It was also the notion most frequently applied in the practice of landscape design during the 18th century, first by English gardeners who looked to recreate the beautiful “picture-like” scenery from the classic Greco-Roma paintings. William Gilpin, one of the creators of the term

12 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 83.

13 Ibid., 137.

“picturesque,” advocated in his book Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty that a picturesque view was often rich in the variety of elements, lavish in curious details and expressive in atmospheric rendition:

Disputes about beauty might perhaps be involved in less confusion, if a distinction were to be established, which certainly exists, between such objects as are beautiful, and such as are picturesque, between those, which please the eye in their natural state; and those, which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated by painting.14

There is no direct reference in the Essai that suggests the influence of natural aesthetic on

Boullée’s design philosophy. But it is unlikely a coincidence that most of his reputed theoretical achievements and proposals happened to be concentrated at the same historical time where the three concepts beauty, sublime, and picturesque were reaching a prominent position in aesthetic philosophy. Boullée’s architectural drawings present a collage of these aesthetic concepts.

Boullée was, for example, fond of employing elementary geometries of unadorned surfaces for it spoke to the mind easily. The smoothness of the surface and legibility of the project clearly answered to the concept of beauty; however the notion of beautiful was contradicted by the immense dimension, which was set by Boullée intentionally to evoke the feeling of awe and terror, a signature character of the concept of sublime. The character of picturesque was less apparent in Boullée’s designs, at least in the literal sense partially due to the fact that Boullée had very little drawing of direct depiction of landscape and the concept was inherently a landscape one that simply by nature was relatively less compatible with architectural design. However certain projects of Boullée were able to translate the concept of picturesque into an interior context. In the drawing of the project l’Expansion de la Bibliothèque Nationale, he set up an arrangement that would provide the most space at the least expense, vaulting an existing

14 William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel, and on Sketching Landscape. (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2001), 3-4.

courtyard (Figure 1-4). His defense of the project was based on the perspective of functionalism, stating that his proposal provided most of the space for storing books.15 Utility of the project aside, the artistic representation of the interior resonated strongly with the essence of picturesque

(Figure 1-5) in some representation details: Boullée was so diligent in rendering the most exquisite details that he drew the books one by one; the visitors of the library were dressed deliberately in ancient Greek robes to allude to the academic allure typical of the 18th-century

Greco-Rome fantasy; the figures were arranged in an intriguing way like pictorial elements in a landscape painting; the light falling from the ceiling added a gentle final touch to soften the atmosphere. Boullée’s imagination of the interaction between space and people constituted a rich palette that brought three aesthetic concepts together and merged them into a new color that

Boullée used to paint his own universe.

Figure 1-4. Drawing of La Bibliothèque Nationale, by E. Boullée (1780). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny,Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 36.

15 Boullée, 76.

Figure 1-5. Detail of La Bibliothèque Nationale. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny,Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 37.

Sentimental Transition in Space and Time

Towards the end of the 18th century, the concept of picturesque continued to be expanded.

Landscape gardens were regarded as places of emotions and memories, offering to visitors a complete experience that went beyond visual stimulations. The complexity of sensual experience was reinforced by landscape designers’ attempts to build up a transition between space and time.

In many gardens, historical references were gathered and dispersed all around the terrains; ruins were kept in place with the rustic appearance intact as a reminder of the ancient era. Horace

Walpole in The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening commented on the use of ruins as an active player of landscape design: “He leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden.”16

The allegory described vividly the change in media of landscape representation. The exemplary nature of landscape paintings on which the former garden design was based on had its innately confined frame which excluded the factor of time. The new concept of landscape improvement reached far beyond the expression of spatiality and offered visitors a journey through time in their individual perceptions.

16 Horace Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening: Journals of Visits to Country Seats (New York: Garland, 1982), 313.

The newly discovered temporal value of historical architecture echoed with the increasing use of ancient motif in cemetery design, mainly that of the pyramid. Hubert Robert, the renowned French landscape painter used extensively pyramidal shapes to erect the image of sorrow and nobleness (Figure 1-6). Similar appropriation of historical relics was also frequently encountered in a series of cenotaph project designed by Boullée in which the symbol of pyramid was assigned, in Boullée’s words, the eruptive power of nature.17 The temporal aspect of architectural space is fully articulated by crossing boundaries in history and aesthetic experience.

The transition from space to time was later to be further elaborated by Boullée into a discourse of light and shadow, which the thesis will expound in Chapter 3.

The emphasis on creating an immersive experience in gardens alluded to certain sentimentalism that regarded personal perspective and feeling as important accounts of designing narrative. No longer governed by the rational order of French gardens, the new garden genre was to be conceived with “no center, no focus, no dominant aesthetic idea or message, signifying a truth that ‘nature’ itself possessed and revealed.”18 Curious details were placed as “accidental irregularities” to keep the visitors surprised and pleased, not knowing what awaited them at the next turning point. Through the kinesthetic experience, nature was experienced and appreciated in motion outside the limitation of a static painting frame, opening up a dynamic dialogue between the landscape and spectators.

The kinesthetic experience is paradigmatic of Boullée’s works of cemetery designs whose primary concern is erecting the image of mortality, a concept inherently characterized by temporality. To enhance the melancholy feeling of the cenotaph designs with experiential force,

17 Boullée ,48.

18 Maiken Umbach, “Classicism, Enlightenment and the ‘Other’: Thoughts on Decoding Eighteenth–Century Visual Culture,” Art History 25 (June 2002): 327.

Boullée followed his teacher Jean-Jacques Blondel’s advice to lower the level of the cemetery from the surrounding terrain to invite the spectators to the entrance of cemetery by descending, thereby evoking a powerful effect of kinesthesia. The transition from the ground level to subterranean plane prefigured the journey to the afterlife by conjuring up human kind’s latent and imbued anxiety of mortality. Boullée’s desire to transform space into a kinesthetic experience to deliver the power of nature was analogous to that of many of his contemporaries in the realm of landscape design.

The growing importance of sentimentalism in aesthetic philosophy also encouraged architects to explore the possibility of combining the abstract natural effects with architectural designs, and light is among the various natural phenomenon the instrument that translates abstraction to tangible articulation. “C’est la lumière qui fait l’architecture!”19 Boullée wrote in the Essai, emphasizing that the proper character of architecture could only be articulated through various light effect. The prominence of light in forming appropriate spiritual experience was reiterated by Boullée’s contemporary Le Camus de Megeres in his comment about the interior light condition of the Church of Val-de-Grace:

The interior of the church of Val-de-Grace, that of the Sorbonne and that of the Collège Mazarin or Collège des Quatre Nations are such as to inspire quiet meditation. Observe how the openings are arranged: a half-light prevails, our sentiments are fixed, there are no distractions, and the soul concentrates within itself. Cast an eye on our Theaters: the Opera in Paris, made ready for the Ball, and that of Versailles, above all, inspire sentiments related to the diversions, the entertainments, the festivities that they promise. The last named unites decorum with grandeur. It is an enchantment, in which there is everything to occupy the mind and nothing to hold it captive.20

19 Boullée ,48.

20 Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, The Genius of Architecture, or, The Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations, trans. Robin Middleton and David Britt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 78.

Le Camus’s view on the “half-light” echoed with Boullée in regards that controlling direct natural light was an effective approach to generate a mysterious and serene interior atmosphere for sacred buildings, and moreover, to keep the sentiment of spectators remain at a tranquil, non- disturbed state. In the Essai Boullée advocated that to properly deliver the character of architecture to onlookers, their sentiment must be protected from potential distractions and focus only on what was essential to their perception:

Le sentiment qui en résulte constitue son caractere; ce que j’apelle mettre du caractère dans un ouvrage, c’est l’art d’employer dans une production quelconque, tous les moyens propres et relatifs au sujet que l’on traite; en sorte que le spectateur n’éprouve d’autre sentiments que ceux que le sujet doit comporter, qui lui sont essentiels, et dont il est susceptible.21

The sentiment that we feel makes characters of architecture; what I call by character of architecture is, in any design, the art of using all possible ways appropriate and relevant to the subject, so the onlookers only feel the sentiments that are essential to them and to which they are susceptible.

This view on the relation between spiritual practice and sentiment was reflected in his design of the Church of Madeleine, where Boullée arranged a columnar screen and occulted skylights to prevent the visitors from being disturbed by the robust direct lighting.22

21 Boullée, 96.

22 Ibid., 45-47.

Figure 1-6. Watercolor painting of Ruines et Tombeaux, by Hubert Robert (1778). Musée du Louvre, Paris. Courtesy of Sarah Catala and Gabriel Wick, Hubert Robert et la Fabrique des Jardin (2017), Figure 29.

Nature in Moral and Rational Models

The acceptance of nature and the thriving of natural aesthetic reflected a much more important revolution of the late 18th century: the quest for greater naturalism. The traditional

French classicism dictum decides that art ought to imitate the ideal nature governed by a universal rational order. But for late- Enlightenment thinkers of natural aesthetic such as Diderot, this ideal nature prescribed by classicism is artificial and forced, standing opposite to the real nature which is inherently ever-changing and ought to be taken as the foundation of fine art.23 In

23 Denis Diderot, “Beautiful,” in The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative, trans. Philippe Bonin (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Publishing, 2006), 160-170.

the rational model of architecture, nature was regarded as the source of architectural legitimacy.

Abbé Laugier, a contemporaneous architectural theorist of Diderot as well as the teacher of

Boullée, created a parable of the origins of architecture based on the natural hut to clarify the naturalist argument and ground it with rational deduction:

Il en effet de l’architecture comme de tous les autres arts: ses principes sont fondés sur la simple nature, et dans les procèdes de celle-ci se trouvent clairement marquée les règles de celle-là. Considérons l’homme dans sa première origine sans autres secours, sans suture guide que l’instinct naturel et ses besoins. Il lui faut un lieu de repos. Au bord d’un tranquille ruisseau, il aperçoit un gazon; la verdure plait à ses yeux…il est vrai que le froid et le chaud feront tenir leur incommodité dans sa maison ouverte de toute partie; mais alors il remplira l’entre-deux des piliers, et se trouvera garanti.24

It is for architecture as for the other arts: its principles are founded in simple nature, and in the proceeding of nature are found clearly marked the rules of architecture. Let us consider man in his first state without assistance, without any guide other than the natural instincts. He needs a place to rest. At the bank of a tranquil stream he spies a lawn; its young grasses please his eyes and its softness invited him…It is true that cold and hot will bother him inside his house; but he will fill in the space between the pillars and find himself secure. Such is the way of simple nature: art owes its birth to the imitation of these proceedings…It is by staying close to the simplicity of this first model that one will avoid the essential defaults and that one will achieve true perfection.

Laugier’s parable of the primitive hut was then rendered allegorically by Charles Eisen for the frontispiece of the later edition of the former’s treaties Essai sur l’architecture (Figure 1-7). The etching depicts a goddess, possibly symbolizing Nature (and architect), pointing to the primitive hut with a winged cherub.25 As illustrated by the etching, the hut is impractical, rustic, and highly inhabitable; and yet it is pure in its representativeness of Laugier’s naturalist paradigm that architectural principles are founded in natural simplicity. Boulle was later to interpret his teacher’s idea of natural simplicity into elementary mass in the form of Euclidean geometries.

24 Abbe Laugier, Essai sur l’Architecture (Paris: Duchesene, 1755), 8.

25 Richard Etlin, Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and its Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 93.

It is important to point out that Laugier’s primitive hut was not an empirical imitation or an anthropological inquiry into the first house of mankind as this hut has not been constructed by human force; rather, the hut was a Platonic idea anchored by reason and invested with the primitive status of nature. It belongs to the same realm of discourse as Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s idea of the natural man, a hypothetical first human grounded in empirical reasons whose true happiness and virtue come from the inspiration of the natural world. Nature in the late- enlightenment stage was recognized not only as an aesthetic paradigm, but also as the authoritative figure which highlighted in contrast what was deemed injustice and errors in human moral. This particular relationship between nature and the exploration of one’s self will be further discussed in detail.

Here has been laid out a general discourse regarding the notion of nature and how it developed throughout the century of enlightenment. The thesis could only offer a glimpse of the broad social and cultural construct of the 18th century in relation to the ever-evolving narrative of nature, in hope to smooth the understanding of the relation between nature and Boullée’s architectural designs, as well as its aesthetic connotations.

Figure 1-7. Frontispiece of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Essai sur l'Architecture, by Charles Eisen (1755). Courtesy of Richard A. Etlin , Symbolic Space (1994), Figure 50.

CHAPTER 2 NATURE IN COMPOSITION

Boullée’s architectural drawings are admittedly the most direct outlook of the fascinating world of his creative mind. Rarely presenting unfinished sketches, Boullée endowed his architectural oeuvres with the finest artistic rendition layered by a ghostly monochrome hue. The masterful craft of his drawing is an inevitable result of his years of professional training as the apprentice of the famous painter Jean-Baptiste Pierre.1 Upon examining the exquisite drawings of Boullée, it comes clear that Boullée saw more possibility in conveying his ideas in painting than in practicality of building, making his artistic representation of architecture the linchpin of his design philosophies. In comparison to his contemporary Ledoux who had a more successful career in the market of commission, Boullée had relatively little built project to leave behind; however his architectural legacy prevailed in his theoretical treaties Essai sur l’art and the ink wash drawings that he bequeathed to the National Library of France in Paris.

The drawings of Boullée ought not to be considered as mere explanatory graphic expressions of his ideas architectural proposals; rather, as Emil Kauffmann poignantly said, they are “the direct expression of his artistic will.”2 For Boullée, the properly conceived and executed drawing is quintessentially the art of architecture itself; it was the tableaux of architecture founded on the most profound understanding of nature and its various effects:

Les tableaux du ressort de l’architecture ne peuvent être faits sans la plus profonde connaissance de la nature: C’est de ses effets que nait la Poésie de l’architecture. C’est la vraiment ce qui constitue l’architecture un art; et c’est aussi ce qui porte cet art a la sublimité. Les tableaux en architecture se produisent, en donnant au sujet que l’on traite, le caractère propre d’où nait l’effet relatif.3

1 Emil Kaufmann, Three Revolutionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, and Lequeu (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1952), 453.

2 Ibid., 467.

3Étienne-Louis Boullée, Essaie Sur l’Art, ed. Helen Rosenau (London: Tiranti, 1953), 41.

It is impossible to create the imagery of architecture without having the most profound knowledge of nature: it is from the effect of nature that is born the poetry of architecture and it is such poetry that makes architecture an art and sublime art. The imagery of architecture will be created when the subject that we design is given the character that creates the desired effect.

Before proceeding further into details regarding Boullée’s artistic representation and his vision of nature, it is necessary to understand the word “tableaux” within its specific 18th-century timeframe on account of its highly frequent appearance in Boullée’s treaties and its overly simplified contemporary translation which often causes misinterpretation and confusion.

Tableaux, a Self-sufficient Visual Structure

Michel Foucault stated that “the center of the knowledge in 17th and 18th centuries is tableau”.4 Indeed the concept of tableaux occupied a rather prominent position in the cultural discourse of 18th-century. Encompassing an innumerous account of disciplines in its later blossom, the concept of tableaux first budded in the art of painting. Claude Perrault, in his essay

“Parallels des anciens et des modernes,” classified the art of painting into three categories; the first two which were the representation of figure and expression of passion had already been developed les anciens artistes as Perrault called. The third category, la composition du tout ensemble (the composition of all), was still a bright new idea at the time.5 The new genre of painting was quickly recognized and translated into English by Lord Shaftesbury in obvious analogy to literature to replace the general term “picture.”6 In Shaftesbury’s definition, the word tableau has two meanings: the first one in the literal sense refers to a surface bearing an artistic representation, and the second one, which bears more interest for this thesis, refers to a visual

4 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et Les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 89.

5 Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400-1800 (New Haven: London, Zale University Press, 2000), 280.

6 Ibid., 281.

structure conceived as an organic whole existing in a coherent, mutually sustaining relationship with its constituent parts the same as the different members in an organic body.

Under the contemporaneous understanding of the term, the word tableau (tableaux in plural) within the context of Boullée’s drawings hence refers to a self-sustained visual construct of intricate interconnections between the constituents and the whole. The composition of drawing, the exquisite details and the moderate use of monochrome color constituted the vocabularies and grammar of Boullée’s theoretical framework and hence are central to the understanding of his architectural works.

Panorama and Horizon

Boullée’s architectural representations are perceived primarily in frontal views with the main structure situated in the middle and secondary structures extending to the edge of the frame

(Figure 2-1), framing the drawings in an elongated composition. The horizontal outlook of

Boullée’s drawings shares a striking similarity to the panoramic view that newly emerged at the end of the 18th century. Perhaps such similarity was no more than a coincidence in art history, but Boullée’s preference of quasi-panoramic view over the predominant bird’s-eye view cannot be passed only as a personal aesthetic fancy.

Until the late 18th century, the most commonly applied viewing technique was the bird’s- eye view. This type of view situates the viewer at an impossibly elevated ground from which they are able to perceive the totality of landscape all at once. The emotive power of the bird’s- eye view is undoubtedly compelling in its immediacy for it constitutes a visual simulacrum of the perspective of God. However, the greatest merit of the bird’s eye view is also its gravest flaw in regards to the lack of true human perspective; in other words, the visual impact cast on the viewers is strange and foreign, disconnected with reality and the human recollection. This disengaging disadvantage found its remedy in the invention of panorama by Scottish portraitist

Robert Barker who exhibited a painted landscape in 360-degree view on a circular canvas strip surrounding the viewers. The introduction of the panorama to landscape painting inaugurated a new mode of vision that was both subjective and self-reflexive in the way it isolated and controlled what it was possible to see. The spectator of the panorama would have to engage in an immersive movement along the elongated painting to perceive and learn the entirety of the landscape by reconstructing it in his mind through the recollection of memory, thereby realizing the limit of human vision, making the whole experience intimate and closer to reality.

In Boullée’s architectural drawings one finds a panoramic composition. The onlooker was placed from afar with his viewpoint traversed by the symmetry axis; the entirety of the architecture and landscape were perceived at once as if through a horizontal window. The panoramic frame opened up the immense landscape to the viewer and filled him with joy that

“nous procurent, sur la terre, les grands spectacles de la nature” (we obtained from the earth and the grand spectacles of nature). In the simulacrum of real human perspective, the panoramic drawings of Boullée delivered to the viewers an interactive experience with which their souls and bodies were familiar. As Boullée stated, when we perceived whatever was grand we rejoiced and delighted because we all have experienced the joy of discovering the view after climbing on top of a magnificent mountain.7 By placing the viewer at a natural, human point of view, the panoramic composition of Boullée’s drawing offers an imagery susceptible to the viewer’s memory through the process of recollection (in the example given by Boullée the memory referred to sight viewing from mountaintop), thereby evoking feelings that are more personal, more sincere, and more familiar to human sensibility.

7 Boullée, 48.

The panoramic composition of Boullée’s drawing brought out the important concept of the horizon, which had always been a critical mental construct in western architectural culture.

Horizon was historically perceived as the visual reference that defined the in-between limits of the sky and the earth, an omnipresent representation of the concept of separation and continuity in the visible world, and a form of universal measurement. This long-standing understanding about the horizon was interpreted by Boullée with a subtle twist by which the measuring role of the horizon is substituted by nature that helped man perceive the world accurately via assigning different scales to different objects:

Ce n’est pas par la grandeur constante de chaque objet que nous pouvons juger de l’étendue, en ce que les objets qui sont contenus dans un espace quelconque, nous font juger du contenant. Sans cette assignation particulière des choses; quel jugement pourrions-nous porter et quelle comparaison juste pourrions-nous faire?... Rapprochons–nous donc des jouissances que nous procurent, sur la terre, les grands spectacles de la nature. Ce sont eux qui nous permettront les comparaisons, les calculs, et qui nous donneront une idée nette de ce que nous devons entendre par le grand, pour en faire une application particulière à l’art.8

Is it not by the constant size of each object that we are able to judge the distances, for what is contained in a certain space enables us to judge what contains it. Without this particular assignation of size, how can we judge and what kind of comparison can we carry out? ... Let us move closer to the joy that the grand spectacle of Nature on earth gives us. It is the spectacle of nature that allows us to the comparison and calculus (of measure and scale), and gives us the clear idea what we understand as grand so that the particular application (of such a grand spectacle) can be applied to art.

As explained previously, Boullée’s tableau was a self-sufficient organic whole, therefore it must be equipped with its own scale to which all the constituents could be measured. This scale was undoubtedly the vast horizon looming in the backdrop as it was “not only an imaginary line but also a structure that holds together the individual elements of a particular situation by the

8 Ibid.

continuity of reference.”9 In other words, nature manifested its role of the universal scale in the form of the tangible horizon, making it susceptible to architectural “manipulation” in the way that it can be better integrated into the creative design process.

Figure 2-1. Drawing of Cirque deuxième projet, by E. Boullée (year unknown). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny,Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 33.

The Grand

If Boullée’s designs were built, they would probably stand taller than most of historical monuments. The particular panoramic composition could be considered to a certain degree as a necessary framing strategy to accommodate the most distinctive character of Boullée’s architecture, the colossal dimension, a particular form of presentation described by Jacques

Derrida as “almost too large for any presentation.”10 It is with the deepest conviction that “La noblesse nait surtout de l’art de savoir offirir de grande images (the nobleness comes from the art of creating grand images),” that Boullée repeatedly endowed with his creations with the colossal dimension (Figure 2-2 and Figure 2-3).11

9 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), 390.

10 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 125.

11 Boullée, 101.

It must be made clear that the quality of grandeur is not merely a concern of size; in fact,

Boullée never supported the idea of “the bigger, the better.” In his strident critique on the

St.Pierre de Rome Basilica, Boullée discerned the notion of grand from that of gigantic:

Pourquoi donc la Basilique de St. Pierre de Rome parait–elle bien moins grande qu’elle ne l’est en effet? Cet intolérable défaut provient de ce que, loin d’offrir le tableau de l’espace, par le nombre d’objets que doit naturellement contenir une grande étendue; l’Architecte a réduit l’effet de son ensemble, en donnant aux parties qui le composent, une proportion colossale; et en croyant selon l’expression des artistes, faire grand, il a fait gigantesque.12

Then why the St. Pierre Basilica of Rome appears less grand than it is in reality? This intolerable blemish derives from the failure of offering the image of space by the numerous objects that the great expansion should naturally contain. The architect has reduced the effect of the building’s great mass, by giving to its components the colossal proportion; instead of making the image of grand, the architect made gigantesque.

The phenomenon of gigantesque, in Boullée’s view, comes from the architect’s mishandling of proportion between the parts and the whole. St. Pierre de Rome Basilica’s reduced visual impact was the direct result of the discord between the constituent details and the general mass of the edifice. True grandness according to Boullée stems from the properly composed proportion that the space can naturally contain, and is therefore inherently beautiful:

Il est donc vrai que le grand s’allie nécessairement avec le beau, et sous différentes acceptions, soit que les objets nous soient agréable, soit encore qu’ils nous fassent horreur. Paraître grand, en quoique ce soit, c’est annoncer des qualités supérieures.13

It is hence true that the grand is necessarily beautiful under all different aspects, whether it appears horrible or agreeable. Appearing grand is to announce the superior virtue.

To further elucidate the concept of grandeur in order to establish a tangible theoretical structure that could be applied methodologically, Boullée advocated in the Essai that “l’art de faire grand

12 Ibid., 47.

13 Boullée, 48.

en architecture provident d’une combinaison ingénieuse des parties avec le tout (the art of creating grand images comes from the ingenious combination of parts with the whole).”14 The emphasis on the causal relation between architectural components and the aesthetic outcome was paradigmatic of the concept of tableau which was predominant in the field of architecture, music, and literature during the 18th century. All constituents ought to be arranged in coherence to form the most significant mass that instigates the noblest feelings in onlookers. Crediting nature for having inspired him the idea of“combinaison ingénieuse,” Boullée described in detail the aesthetic characters of what was considered an image of grand in the Essai:

A l’imitation de la nature, l’art de rendre les grandes images en architecture, consiste a disposer les corps qui forment l’ensemble général, de manière qu’ils ayant beaucoup de jeu, que leur masses aient un mouvement noble, majestueux, et qu’elles soient susceptibles du plus grand développement.15

As in nature, the art of creating grand images in architecture lies in the disposition of volumes in the way that there will be many plays between them, that their masses will have a majestic movement and the volumes will have the fullest possible development.

Although Boullée still applied classical architectural elements such as freestanding columns and pediments in his projects, and his theories on the “combinaison ingénieuse” resonated strongly with Vitruvius’ idea of eurythmia defined as the “beauty and fitness in the adjustments of the members that is found when the members of a work are of a height suited to their breadth, of a breadth suited to their length, and, in a word, when they all correspond symmetrically.”16 The way in which Boullée arranged these elements were utterly different from any precedent

Vitruvian references, and the actual visual results are even more so. Boullée was not the only

14 Ibid., 98.

15 Ibid., 47.

16 Vitruvius Marcus, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 15.

adventurous architect who challenged Vitruvius’s classical canon in an attempt to explore the new architectural paradigm; in fact, in 18th-century France, Many prominent figures in architecture such as Laugier, Cordemoy and Blondel, each in their proper way and modesties, tried to form a new architectural grammar to give architecture a new identity.

Figure 2-2. Drawing of Le Fort, by E Boullée (1781). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 23.

Figure 2-3. Detail of Le Fort. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 23.

New Grammar in the Neoclassic Interlude

The language of the late-18th-century French architecture remained, in general, a classic one. Classical architectural elements inherited from Vitruvius’s rules were still frequently encountered in civic buildings; however, their composition was no longer strictly adhered to the classic canon as a new architectural grammar promoted by the neoclassic architects was on the rise. Dalibor Vesely explained the advent of this new grammar as the result of the phenomenon of architectural fragmentation, meaning that architectural constituents were emancipated from their original cultural context inherited from the classic order. These “autonomous architectures,” as termed by Emil Kauffmann, are thus treated as independent elements of individual meaning and context susceptible to free expression.

The desire of ridding of the constraint of Classical order to cultivate new architectural identity was an ineluctable attempt to remedy the decadence of Baroque which was left with little scope to thrive in the neoclassic interlude by the growing empirical interest in reason and logic. The early champions of neoclassicism considered that the exuberant Baroque style violated the inherent law of architecture, which was founded on the underlying order of nature, and was therefore confusing and simply not beautiful.17

To reinforce the relationship between architecture and the natural world, Laugier created the story of the first human hut. In rejecting what he considered as the deformation of the

Baroque style and promoting the new architectural principles derived from natural simplicity,

Laugier became the promoter of the elementary geometric forms and pioneered the architectural movement towards a pure and collected aesthetic.18 Though not all subsequent architects have

17 Richard A. Etlin, Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and its Legacy, 92.

18 Ibid., 96.

adhered to the principles devised by Laugier, neoclassical architecture in general moved from using purely visual elements such as broken entablatures and engaged columns to more delineated and functional forms regarded as the manifestation of nature’s simplicity.19 Among them all, the most astonishing examples were created by Laugier’s student, Boullée.

Like Laugier, Boullée kept the columns as independent, freestanding elements, sharing a similar preference to a simple, precise and clear architectural aesthetic. His architectural grammar was in a way paradigmatic of the neoclassic doctrine: grand facades composed of the continuous blank wall and columnar screens. For Boullée and many other contemporaries seeking architectural principles in nature, they saw in regular forms the potential of powerful architectural expression surpassing the Baroque complexity:

Pourquoi la figure des corps réguliers se saisit-elle au premier aspect? C’est que leurs formes sont simples, que leurs faces sont régulières, et qu’elles se répètent. Mais comme la mesure des impressions que nous ressentons, à la vue des objets, est en raison de leur évidence, ce qui nous fait plus particulièrement distinguer les corps réguliers, c’est que leur régularité et leur symétrie sont l’image de l’ordre, et que cette image est celle de l’évidence elle-même.20

Why can we recognize the shape of the elementary (regular) shapes at a first glance? It is because it is simple in its form, its plane is regular and it repeats itself. We grasp the impression that object makes upon us (when we see it) by its clarity; what makes us single out the regular body in particular is its regularity and its symmetry, which makes up the image of order; and such order, is clarity (evidence).

Boullée’s praise of the natural and symmetrical virtue of elementary figures held a mirror to the general anxiety of 18th-century French architectural society about the excessively complicated late Baroque style which, according to Boullée, presented nothing distinguished but confusing images.21 The inability of Rocaille and Baroque style to express itself to its audiences in a

19 Ibid.

20 Boullée, 35.

21 Ibid.

concise manner was agonizing for the architects of neoclassicism whose aesthetic taste was based on the clear concept of tableau. The idea of tableau decided that any sound artistic representation must be a self-sufficient system. This "self-sufficiency" interpreted by modern language is best worded by what Vesely called "meaningful":

Meaning depends on the continuity of communicative movement between individual elements and on their relation (reference) to the preexisting latent world…In that sense, the meaning of a work can be judged by how legible and comprehensible it is.22

The legibility of architecture, in Boullée’s opinion, relies on regularity, symmetry and variation.

Regularity gives the beautiful shape, symmetry the order and variation the diversity.23 The concordant combination between these three rules is what eventually gives rise to the harmonious proportion.24 Regarding the notion of proportion, Boullée appeared to still be in agreement with certain principles pertained to classic architecture. As in his description regarding the grandeur, Boullée employed Greek temple as an example of the prudent application of ornament in creating harmonious proportion:

On doit dans un grand ensemble mettre en usage les moyens de l’art ingenieux don’t nous avons parlee, afin de multiplier les objets, autant qu’il sera possible, mais dans un juste rapport avec le tout, dans ce juste rapport que nous remarquons dans les Temple des Grecs.25

In a large project, we must use all the means of ingenious art at our disposal to multiplier the objects, but in a right proportion to the whole that we found in the Greek temple.

In brief, the thesis argued that Boullée’s new grammar in the neoclassic interlude is essentially articulated through the concept of tableau, the aesthetic discourse in direct analogy to the human

22 Vesely, 345.

23 Boullée, 35.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 48

organism with the primal focus on the coherent interconnection between parts and whole. In

Boullée’s view, it is from the ingenious combination that stems the noble quality of the grand and the harmonious and architects own the knowledge of such combination to the creative power of nature:

Il est donc démontré que la proportion et l’harmonie des corps sont établies par la nature, et que, par l’analogie qu’elles ont avec notre organisation, les propriétés, qui découlent de l’essence des corps, ont du pouvoir sur nous sens.26

It is hence shown that the proportion and the harmony of figure are established by nature; and by (nature’s) analogy with our body, (harmony) has the power over our senses.

The analogous relation between the harmonious proportion and human body proffered convincing reasons why the new architectural grammar appeared desirable to the contemporaneous architect: it appears to man because it speaks directly to human being’s innate perceptions regarding beauty without having its complete meaning lost in the literal translation.

The affinity between architecture and the human body constitutes essentially what Boullée considered as beautiful:

Ce que nous qualifions de beaux, les objets qui ont le plus d’analogie avec notre organisation, et que nous rejetons ceux qui, depourvus de cette analogie, ne conviennent pas a notre maniere d’etre.27

What we qualify as beautiful are the objects that are the most analogous to our organism, and we dislike those lacking this resemblance which does not correspond to our body.

It must be remarked that the relation between architecture and human body in Boullée’s view differs from that of Vitruvius in a physiological way: the logic behind the distribution of scale in classic architecture is largely based on a literal translation of body narrative into the architectural lingo. However, in the case of Boullée, the physiological connection is virtually non-existing;

26 Ibid., 36.

27 Ibid., 34.

Boullée’s concern with the issue of proportion boils down to the principle of tableau in regards to the interconnection of parts, in terms of whether they are arranged to function holistically like an organic body.

An exemplary instance of Boullée’s application of the three rules is the project of Madeline

Church (Figure 2-4) where the classical vocabularies were articulated by a completely new grammar. As the drawings showed, freestanding columns were used as the main components of the building, forming the lower body of the edifice which was reined over by a dome elevated by two drums of shorter freestanding columns. The columnar screen was Boullée’s attempt to create an illusion that the building was emerging from the interior space, where the “forest of columns” reined. The continuous columns also provided indirect light to the interior, creating a mysterious atmosphere.28 The columns in the ails would join up with those of the dome, conferring on it all the richness of architecture: the immense row of the columnar screen would multiply to the extent that the eyes of the beholder could no longer follow; the perspective would visually prolong the columns to render them even grander.29 With a single architectural type that featured freestanding columns, Boullée was able to imitate the immensity of nature through architectural form. Despite having proved his originality and creativity by the majestic Madeline Church,

Boullée humbly credited Nature for his ingenious achievements, stating that he was essentially an imitator who merely borrowed beauty from nature to create his own art:

J’évite avec la plus grande soin de mettre l’art aux prises avec la nature. J’emprunte les effets précieux de celle-ci, je les approprie à l’art, et c’est à la faveur des dons de la nature que j’offre les moyens d’élever l’art à la sublimité.30

28 Ibid., 52.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 54.

I try my best to avoid conflict between art and nature. I borrow the precious effect from the latter (nature) and I bring it to art, it is by the gifts of nature that I am able to elevate art to sublimity.

For Boullée, nature was the most vibrant palette of all effects and it was by borrowing from the abundant natural effects that Boullée was to transcend architecture through the power of sentience.

Figure 2-4. Section drawing of Eglise de Madeline, by E. Boullée (year unknown). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Mare Perouse de Montclos, Etienne-Louis Boullée, Theoretician of Revolutionary Architecture (1974), Figure 38.

CHAPTER 3 NATURE IN SENTIMENT

Re-creating Nature through Phenomenology

The way of creating grandness is through the ingenious combination of parts and whole, as Boullée advocated. However, merely presenting a grand image with well-articulated volumes does not represent the full landscape of Boullée’s architectural intention in recreating nature’s greatness. As he eloquently wrote in his critique on Vitruvius’ classic canons:

Mais lorsqu’on la considère dans toutes son étendue, on voit que l’architecture n’est pas seulement l’art de présenter des images par la disposition des corps, qu’elle consiste aussi a savoir rassembler toutes les beautés éparses de la nature; pour les mettre en œuvre. Oui je ne saurais trop le répéter, l’architecte doit être le metteur en œuvre de la nature…C’est des effets de nature que nait la Poésie de l’architecture.1

But when we consider the scope of architecture, we perceive that it is not only the art of creating images through the arrangement of volumes. But it also involves the savoir-faire of how to combine all the scattered beauties of nature and to put them to work. I cannot repeat enough that architects must make nature work…It is from the effects of nature that derives the poetry of architecture.

Boullée missioned himself to be the “metteur de la nature” (to put nature into work) through his architectural creations, and yet graphically he rarely used direct references of the natural world to remind the viewers the naturalist nature of his oeuvres. Unlike his contemporaries Ledoux and

Lequeu (Figure 3-1), Boullée’s architecture works are vastly unadorned in simplicity and functionalism.

Boullée’s austere artistic expression hence raises the question: How did Boullée, as an architect who missioned himself to “mettre la nature en oeuvre” (to put nature in work), succeed in doing so while abstaining himself from using natural references freely?

1Étienne-Louis Boullée, Essaie Sur l’Art, ed. Helen Rosenau (London: Tiranti, 1953), 41.

To answer this seemingly self-contradictory question, one must commit himself to hermeneutic exploration of Boullée’s drawings where his latent philosophic thinking was manifested through beautiful brush strokes. In the project Nécropoles (Figure 3-2), Boullée presented an immense edifice dedicated to the heroic spirits; the monument integrated seamlessly into the landscape in its fullest expansion. The sacred mountain of which the summit is crowned with clouds reigned over the city of death by its monumentality. The curves and lines of the contour of the building formalize discreetly the silhouette of the hill that rises in the background.

This particular composition suggests that the building is not simply in symbiosis with the mountain, but moreover, it is a metaphor for it. Through bare and unadorned walls, the city of death stands as a metaphor to the immensity of nature. Boullée was therefore trying to re-create nature in the form of architecture. On the level of design approach, Boullée has stepped out from the shallow formal imitation of nature and elevated his designs to the realm of phenomenology where his focus falls on translating the higher principles of the natural world into the tangible spatial experience. Among all the experiences of which he desired to create the most desired was the feeling of sublime.

Figure 3-1. Drawing of a hermitage gate and a hunting retreat, by Jean-Jacques Lequeu (date unknown). National Library of France, Paris. Photos taken by author.

Figure 3-2. Drawing of Nécropoles, by E. Boullée (date unknown). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 14.

Sublime as the Aesthetic Experience of Nature

Vesely described sublime as an experience emerging in the 18th century as a result of the unbridgeable gap “between our ability to form concepts of totality, wholeness, and infinity and our incapacity to experience them on the level of the finite and sensible.”2 It is a secularized version of the previous theocentric understanding of infinity. In the universe of sublime, the search of infinity coincides with individual creativity’s ability of inventing anything out of formless chaos. Such chaos seen as the primordial ocean of all creation is the basic intuition of the sublime, and this intuition is perceived as a form of aesthetic. Hence the sublime in the 18th century pre-Romantic narrative was regarded as an aesthetic experience; and as an experience, it is therefore susceptible to and largely decided by the unbounded individual creativity and subjectivity. It is this sense of freedom of imagination and expression that informed many architectural works contemporary to Boullée.3

The 18th-century architectural idea of sublime was greatly structured by the philosophic framework provided by two important philosophers, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant. Burke posited two types of sublime: pain and pleasure. The thesis will mainly focus on the sublime of

2 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), 333.

3 Ibid.

pain for it bears more relevance to the general architectural understanding of sublime whereas the latter is more associated with society and interactions between individuals.

Burke’s theory on sublime and pain established a causal relationship between the sublime and terror, suggesting that what was susceptible of creating the feeling of terror was capable of evoking the sense of sublimity:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling…When danger or pain press too nearby, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we everyday experience.4

The wild nature had always been regarded as a raw, untamed force that the empiricists had no power over despite their relentless attempts; it was seen as the harbinger of the immense power and secret knowledge that men could not resist. Boullée called nature “le livre des livres” and “le science de l’univers” as he was astounded by its overwhelming power.5 With the concept of sublime transforming terror into an aesthetic experience, the 18th-century western culture in general found new resources for approaching the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world in the uncontrollable and unpredictable character of nature. Natural objects that were feared by human kind suddenly obtained new meanings; the dark sea, the pale moon, the stretching horizon in the distance, all engaged in the discourse of natural aesthetic.

Looking back at the project Necropolis, one would see more clearly how Boullée recreated the ennobling impression of nature by channeling the sublime experience through architectural metaphor: by placing the edifice in direct juxtaposition with the sacred mountain,

4 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 36.

5 Boullée, 35.

Boullée projected the immensity of nature upon the building, endowing the edifice with the terror and noble sensation borrowed from nature. The symmetric composition further enhanced the imposing and severe imagery, and the pyramidal shape of the mountain which is complemented by the panoramic framing transformed itself into terrifying monumentality.

Death, the Most Sublime of All

Among all the terrors of nature that haunt mankind in the darkness, death is the most terrifying, reigning over all pains unchallenged as the king of terror:

But as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is in general a much more affecting idea than pain; because there are very few pains, however exquisite, which re not preferred to death; nay, what generally makes pain itself, if I may say so, more painful is that it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors.6

Since death is the terror of all terrors, it is, therefore, the most sublime. Frozen by the thought of death, Boullée tasked himself to express the tenebrous sublimity of death through architecture, calling upon his architect contemporaries to “descends dans les tombeaux pour y tracer les idées

à la Lueur pale et mourante des Lampes Sépulcrales!” (Descend onto the tombs and sketch the ideas at the pale and dying light of the Sepulchral light!). 7 Inspired by the great pyramids of

Ancient Egypt, Boullée sought to erect the temple of death to defy the passing of time and perpetuate the memory of noble spirits, as he explained in the Essai:

Il est évident que le but qu’on se propose, lorsqu’on élevé ces sortes de Monuments, est de perpétuer la mémoire de ceux auxquels ils sont consacrés…il faut donc que ces Monuments soient conçus de manière a bravé le ravage des temps…Les égyptiens nous ont laissé des exemples fameux. Leur Pyramides est vraiment caractéristique, en ce qu’elles présentent l’image triste des monts arides et de l’immutabilité.8

6 Burke, 36.

7 Boullée, 80.

8 Ibid.

It is thus evident that the objective that one sets for himself, when to erect this sort of monument, is to perpetuate the memory of those to whom the building is dedicated…These monuments therefore need to be conceived in the way to stand the ravage of time…The Egyptians left us some famous examples. Their pyramids are really characteristic in that they conjure up the image of the bare mountain and immutability.

The pyramidal shape was repeatedly used in Boullée’s funerary designs to convey the overwhelming terror of nature over man’s powerlessness. In the project Funerary Monument

(Figure 3-3), the drawing depicts a pyramidal tomb placed at the center of what appears to be sunken ground. The entrance was heightened by a pale figure and a hollow darkness in stark contrast. A closer exam revealed the figure of a dying tree in direct analogy to the sunken pyramid (Figure 3-4), crawling on the ground as if being crushed by an invisible weight. The symmetric composition reinforced by the low pyramid and the ghostly monochrome wash endowed the drawing with a sense of great sorrow and severance. The usage of the sunken pyramid as a metaphor for death conjured up an immense desperation towards the unavoidable end of all the living.

It must be remarked that the reference to ancient Egypt was not exclusive to Boullée; the mid-1780s is in general the time assigned to pantheistic funerary projects, in which nature triumphs in the form of pyramid.9 Similar examples can be found in the oeuvres of Boullée’s contemporary, Pierre Fontaine whose 2nd-place design for the Grand Prix competition in 1785 presented an immense pyramidal cone cenotaph located at a vast Egyptian wasteland (Figure 3-

5). The representation of the light effect was similar to that of Boullée in its metaphorical expression: both architects applied pyramidal reference as symbols of death and nature’s eruptive power, with the addition of the lightening in Fontaine’s drawing that lit up the scene by its

9 Richard A. Etlin, Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and its Legacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 52.

extreme velocity of motion; they both tilted the ray of light at a dramatically inclined angle to reinforce the ennobling impression; and most important of all, their designs were both given

“une proportion affaissée” (a slumped proportion) and intentionally placed at a lower level of the ground than the surrounding terrain.

This aesthetic of sunken architecture, according to Boullée, created a visual allusion that the building was being slowly devoured by the ground, hence erecting an image of death:

En réfléchissant sur tous les moyens dont je devais me server pour rendre mon sujet, j’entrevis que les proportions basses et affaissées étaient les seules que je pourrais employer…il m’a semblé que pour rendre le tableau de l’architecture ensevelie, je devais faire en sorte qu’en même temps que ma production satisferait dans son ensemble, le spectateur présumât que la terre lui en dérobe une partie.10

While thinking about all the means at my disposal to realize my ideas, I realize that I should only use the low and sunken proportions…It appears to me that in order to create an image of sunken architecture, I need to ensure that the construction of the buildings satisfies as a whole while the onlookers presume that the earth is concealing part of the building.

The metaphor of death was hence expressed through a movement in anticipation, which in the case of Boullée’s funerary design referred to the sinking of the building into the earth (as in “la terre lui dérobe en partie);” the imaginary movement of being slowly devoured by earth stood in stark contrast against the building’s enormous size which conveyed immutability and stability, thereby creating an unsettling anticipation of the complete disappearance of the cenotaph into the ground. Such tension was widely found in natural phenomenon, such as the quietness before the horrifying storm or the silence of animals before the deadly earthquake. The anticipation of something disastrous can be delightful, as Burke said, “at a certain distance, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful.” France Anatole gave similar remark on the relationship between the danger and passion in the book The Garden of Epicurus, “the

10 Burke, 81.

fascination of danger is at the bottom of all passion. There is no fullness of pleasure unless the precipice is near.”11 In a way Boullée’s temple of death was endowed with characters of natural disasters and transformed into the totem of the raw, untamed power of wild nature, like a volcanic eruption that enticed horror and admiration at once, as he commented on his project

Cemetery Entrance by Moonlight (Figure 3-6):

L’image du grand a un tel empire sur nos sens, qu’en la supposant horrible, elle excite toujours, en nous, un sentiment d’admiration. Un volcan vomissant la flamme et la mort est une image horriblement belle!12

The image of grand has such a power on our senses, that by supposing what is horrible, this [grand] image excites in us a sense of admiration. A volcano eruption being flame and death at the same time is such a horribly beautiful view!

In this project, the simple pyramidal shape took on a legendary proportion; the pyramid, occupying the entire drawing frame, grows as a puissance from the darkness of the ground. The small speckles of people were put into stark contrast with the insurmountable scale of the pyramid, overwhelmed by its grand presence. The drawing of the cemetery gate recounts an allegorical tale about the relationship between the mortal and death with the greatest sorrow: death is the inevitable destination of all men. One could almost visualize the journey that the onlookers would go through to get to the graveyard: first lost in the complete darkness only guided by the fable moonlight in the distance, then he walked into that pale light, feeling his body crushed by the immensity of the gate. Dazzled by the great weight of the pyramidal gate, he walked through the entrance and there he was, in the land of the dead, anticipating the ineluctable fate that would befall on him. Like the pyramid that was being slowly engulfed by the earth, the traveler’s body was to return to the bosom of the eternal darkness, as Richard Etlin commented:

11 Anatole France, The Garden of Epicurus, trans. Alfred Allinson (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2008), 25.

12 Boullée, 48.

In his Cenotaph in the Egyptian Genre, Boullée joined the idea of a return to the bosom of the earth through death with the image of this same natura naturans rising out of fertile chaos as a pure crystalline form.13

Unlike the Romanticist artists, Boullée did not resort to direct natural references to construct a visual association with nature. He did so by conjuring up the disastrous terror of nature through the overwhelming presence of grand imagery, and translated the dreadful experience into the unadorned wall, the bare ground, and the buried pediment, evoking the aesthetic experience of sublime characteristic of the wild nature. The status of nature invested into Boullée’s drawings transcended them from mere artistic representation to an aesthetic phenomenon of the overwhelming experience of nature.

Figure 3-3. Drawing of Funerary Monument, by E. Boullée (1781). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 18.

13 Richard A. Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth–Century Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 128.

Figure 3-4. Detail of Funerary Monument. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 18.

Figure 3-5. Drawing of Cenotaph proposal for the 1785 Grand Prix competition, by Pierre Fontaine (1785). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 147.

Theatre of Nature

As the emphasis on the authentic artistic representation of nature in late 18th-century

France brushed away the overly idealized classic doctrine, nature came to be regarded as fertile, productive and ever-changing under the nouveau empirical perspective. The idea of imitating actual nature advocated by Diderot contributed greatly to the new focus on artistic creation and expression as opposed to artistic discernment, consequently in the midst of this transitioning

occurred a discerning trend in pictorial representation towards scenery theatricality as means to interpret the ambiguous character of nature.

In many of Boullée’s drawings, one can remark the theatricality in graphic representation.

In the project of Cemetery by Moonlight, the pale moon lights up the scene; in the Metropolitan

Church, the altar is showered in brilliant light. Light in Boullée’s drawings is neither submissively quiet like the Renaissance paintings, nor was it dominated by the exuberant darkness in which Baroque style exceled; rather the effect of light bloomed in its richest variation, sometimes radiant, the others somber, conforming to its vacillating natural effects.

Instead of attempting to straighten and control the volatile character of light, Boullée chose to embrace it in all its varieties.. In the Essai, Boullée recounted his observation of how light grew strong and weary throughout four seasons: in spring light was gentle, full of joy of youth and love; in summer it grew stronger, became glamourous and radiant; in fall the light reached perfection, saturated in color and texture; in winter the light eclipsed, fading into obscurity and bleak horror.14 Boullée’s remark on the characters of four seasons was not simply a letterman’s record but more importantly, a journal of life of which each episode was assigned with a particular light effect. By associating seasons and their respective characters to various characters of light, Boullée succeed in translating the concept of time (as in seasons) into architectural lingo, thereby including time into the creative process. While many of his contemporaries were still examining the classic references, Boullée, touched by Horae the

Goddess of seasons, had deciphered the secret relationship between time and architecture. Being fundamentally a man of Enlightenment, Boullée proceeded to create an architectural taxonomy

14 Boullée, 46-47.

based on his revelation of seasons by assigning different light effects to different institutions based on the individual desired characters:

Nous avons remarqué que les images riantes de l’automne étaient produites par l’extrême variété des objets, par le contraste de la lumière et des ombres, par les formes pittoresques…pour produire des images riantes et gaies, il faut connaitre l’art de les diversifier…les monuments susceptibles a ce genre d’architecture sont des Wauxhals, des foires, des bains de sante qui se trouvent Presque toujours dans des endroits pittoresque; un théâtre ayant des alentours agréables, des promenades publiques et riantes.15

We have noticed that the radiant images of fall was produced by extreme variety of objects, the contrast of light and shadow, and the picturesque forms…to produce the gay and radiant images, one must know the art of variation…The monuments susceptible to this kind of architecture [style] were Vauxhall [pleasure gardens], markets, bathhouses which are located at a picturesque place; a theatre in an agreeable surroundings, a radiant and public walkway…

An edifice that imitates fall is brilliant and refined; whereas architecture inspired by winter is abstained from any expression of delight. The grim characters of devastating winter was assigned by Boullée to bare walls, sunken forms, crushed proportion, somber light and barren ground to recreate the “extreme sadness” that he felt during his strolling in the woods,16 presenting “le noir tableau de l’architecture des ombres dessine par l’effet d’ombres encore plus noires” (the black tableau of architecture of shadow outlined by still deeper shadows).17

In the project Cénotaphe en Forme de Pyramide (Figure 3-7 and Figure 3-8), the melancholia of winter is expressed to the fullest extent in the simplest way. Here, Boullée has achieved the architectural form of extreme purity, following the dictates of elementary geometry.

The ground is barren, the pyramid towers over the horizontal wall leading travelers to the underground; two plain obelisks are placed in symmetry, standing in deadly silence. The

15 Ibid., 44.

16 Ibid., 82.

17 Ibid., 44.

architecture is composed of very few lines with the central pyramid resembles an equilateral triangle, a conscious formal choice made by Boullée because “la proportion du triangle

équilatéral constitue la belle forme” (the proportion of the equilateral triangle constitutes the beautiful form).18 The extremely arid representation of the edifice gives an allusion that the building is almost completely dissolved into the ominous sky. The tenebrous clouds roaring in the backdrop appear to be continuous, uninterrupted by the pyramid in the front plane as if the building were transparent. It is strange to remark that the atmosphere is given more detail and definition than the building, which is depicted as a mysterious ghost. Puzzled by the representation of the cenotaph, one might even wonder whether the pyramidal form in the center is a building, or it is in fact, a ray of light descending from the sky.

Figure 3-6. Drawing of Cemetery Entrance by the Moonlight, by E. Boullée (1781-1793). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 15.

Figure 3-7. Detail of Cemetery Entrance by the Moonlight. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 15.

18 Ibid., 82.

Figure 3-8. Drawing of Cénotaphe en forme de pyramide, by E. Boullée (1781-1793). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 5.

The Mise-en-Œuvre of Nature

“C’est la lumière qui crée l’effet!”,19 Boullée argued. Form and mass alone are not sufficient to deliver the desired sensationalist expression for they are “only the modulator of light.”20 It is with the orchestration of light and shadow that Boullée was able to render tangible the immensity of nature from which derived the sublime. In account of the shifting character of light, Boullée favored the regular body over the irregular ones as the former was more susceptible to the trace and the variation of light. Among all the simple forms, Boullée crowned the sphere to be the body of perfection, which combined the most perfect symmetry and

19 Ibid., 51

20 Martin Bressani, “Étienne–Louis Boullée, Empiricism and the Cenotaph for Newton,” Architectura – Zeitschrift fur Geschichte der Baukunst (December, 1993), 45.

regularity with the richest varieties, with the smooth surface enhanced by the most continuous subtle gradation of light that reconciles infinite variety with maximum uniformity:

Par exemple, le corps sphérique, peut être regarde comme réunissant toute les propriétés des corps. Tous les points de sa surface sont également distants de son centre. De cet avantage unique, il résulte que sous quelque aspect que nous envisageons ce corps, aucun effet d’optique ne peut jamais altérer la magnifique beauté de sa forme qui, toujours, s’offre parfait a nos regards.21

For example, the sphere is possibly regarded as uniting all properties of figures. Every single point on the surface is equidistant to its center. By the virtue of that, we see always, regardless which angle or position, the same magnificent beauty of the sphere body.

Alberto Pérez–Gómez described the perfect sphere as “the image of Agathon—supreme beauty and goodness.”22 The description of the noble merit of sphere coincided with the naturalist understanding of God as the benevolent supreme architect of the Universe. The connotation of

God conjured up by the spherical form partially explained the consistent use of spherical motifs in many of Boullée’s civic projects dedicated to the imagery of knowledge, creativity, and divine; in a way, the sphere, by its perfect form, hints at the presence of the benevolent God. However,

Boullée’s adoration of the sphere body was not only evoked by the religious zeal but also by its architectural merits to the effect of light and shadow::

Ce corps est favorise par les effets de la lumière qui sont tels, qu’il n’est pas possible que la dégradation en soit plus douce, plus agréable et plus variée. Voilà des avantages uniques qu’il tient de la nature, et qui ont, sur nos sens, un pouvoir illimitée.23

The sphere is favored by the effect of light that is so beautifully graduated with the most agreeable variation. These unique features, which the sphere obtained from nature, have the unlimited power over our senses.

21 Boullée, 35.

22 Alberto Pérez–Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 140.

23 Boullée, 36.

In another proposal of the Cenotaph with Surrounding Wall and a Central Conical Pyramid

(Figure 3-9), Boullée united the perfect sphere with the pyramidal motif, placing the symbol of heaven within the totem of death. The drawing of general view of the project depicts a sepulchral complex shaped like an arena. The large, central cenotaph takes the bulk of the ensemble, lying within a surrounding wall from which rise small cenotaphs which appear to be the same shape as the central one. The central cenotaph hints at Egyptian pyramids, but the subtle gradation of shadow cast on its smooth surface implicates that the building is actually a truncated cone. The building erects in resonance with the looming mountains in the distance, signifying the “triumph of nature.”24

The central cenotaph stands as a symbol of end with the presence of the sphere yet to be discovered. However, as one proceeds to the cross-section drawing of the conical cenotaph, he is expected to be struck by the pleasant surprise hidden within (Figure 3-10). The exterior of the cenotaph gives no hint of the shape of the interior, which is a vast hemisphere. The fuming altar stands in the center with its faint light barely igniting the somber tomb. Boullée gave no description regarding the purpose of the hemisphere, but in account of his other similar projects such as the Cenotaph for Newton (Figure 4-1and Figure 4-2) and the Temple of Earth (Figure 4-

3) in which he used the sphere as “l’image de l’Univers,” it is not entirely gratuitous to assume that Boullée intended it as a re-creation of the vault of heaven. The juxtaposition of the pyramidal shape and the celestial sphere constitutes a powerful composition that places metaphorically the heaven in the embrace of death.

It is also intriguing that at the apogee of the hemisphere Boullée opened an aperture of skylight concealed in a claustrophobic space; this is an opening that receives no light as if

24 Etlin, Symbolic Space, 52.

Boullée was suggesting that the tomb was eternally excluded from the living world. The ground floor of the interior space seems to be designed as an amphitheater descending slowly to the center at the lower level where the altar is located, glowing in a faint, ghostly fire in stark contrast to the bright exterior, a somber phantom of mysticism.

In the complex metaphorical construct of Boullée’s architectural tableau, mysterious light performs as an articulating element that reconciles art and nature. According to Boullée, direct lighting is harmful and aggressive to the vision of eyes, and only the mysterious light from an occult source can properly brighten up works of art:

C’est mettre l’art aux prises avec la nature que de laisser pénétrer la lumière d’une manière directe dans un temple, surtout si on y introduit de la Peinture. En réfléchissant la lumière, les endroits où elle se porte directement, blessent l’organe de notre vue; ou bien les objets sont absorbes par l’opposition de la lumière.25

When light enters the temple directly, art is put in conflict against nature, especially when paintings are involved. Come to think of it, that wherever light falls on directly it hurts the eyes, or the objects are absorbed in the contrasting light.

In his Basilique proposal (Figure 2-4), the direct light sources are hidden, allowing only indirect light to shine on the surface of the dome painted like the celestial sky. Bressani interpreted the occult light source as Boullée’s way of controlling the rays of sun; the hidden skylight channel through which the natural light is reintroduced transforms the rays of sun into a “magical medium” that constitutes “the source of the enchantment, of the enrapturing.”26 Perouse de

Montclos addressed the similar opinion from a pragmatic perspective, stating that the skylights

“had the great advantage of leaving him free to design the facades without worrying about the

25 Boullée, 54.

26 Bressani, 54-55.

distribution of windows.”27 The mysterious overhead light, whether in response to visual or acoustic needs, aims to create the effect of diffusion and illusion:

Si je peux éviter que la lumière arrive directement, et la faire pénétrer sans que le spectateur aperçoive d’où elle part, les effets résultants d’un jour mystérieux produiront des effets inconcevables, et en quelque façon, une espèce de magie vraiment enchanteresse.28

If I can avoid having the light introduced directly, and make it penetrate without having the spectator notice its source, the mysterious light will produce an inconceivable effect and in a way, a space that is truly enchanted by magic.

Boullée’s mission to “mettre en œuvre la nature” (put nature in work) is an allegory of the sublime power of nature; the architect spoke of the sublime nature in his faithful imitation of nature’s various effects. The productive, fertile, and powerful imagery of nature was translated into simple geometries, dark shadow, gentle light, and sunken ground in the most theatrical rendition. Boullée set to harness and embrace the disastrous nature of the natural world to the fullest extent.

Figure 3-9. E. Boullée, Drawing of Cénotaphe Tronqué, by E. Boullée (1781-1793). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 2.

27 Jean–Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Étienne–Louis Boullée (1728–1799): Theoretician of Revolutionary Architecture (New York: Braziller, 1974), 11–15.

28 Boullée, 51.

Figure 3-10. Section drawing of Cénotaphe Tronqué, by E. Boullée (1781-1793). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 3.

CHAPTER 4 NATURE IN CONTEMPLATION

The Mourning Nature

In the 18th century, the increasing emphasis on the imitation of the actual nature, influenced not only the art world but also had a broad impact in many theoretical contexts, particular the one related to moral discipline. Nature was regarded by many enlightenment scholars as the authoritative figure which provided the universal scale to measure the unjust, inhumane and the harmful. The question of selfness emerged from man’s dialogue with nature; many enlightenment thinkers gradually came to recognize the value of feeling and emotion, particularly in moral matters. The champion among them was Rousseau, whom the thesis will elaborate extensively in relation to Boullée’s philosophy regarding selfhood. Rousseau saw the value of inner sentiment, and grew obsessive of it, leading to intense introspection at the late stage of his life when he finally found happiness in solitude while promenading along reverie.

Like Rousseau, Boullée learned the secrecy of shadow from nature. If Chapter 2 and

Chapter 3 portrayed Boullée as a well-trained architect who dared to challenge classic authorities in order to establish his own architectural grammar, then here he is understood as a mortal man who tried to comprehend mortality from his own interaction with nature.

The encounter with nature that brought to Boullée the revelation of death came from his night walk in the woods at the outskirt of Paris. In the attempt to inspire the divine feeling in architecture, he came to the conclusion that the art of architecture alone did not suffice to achieve the desired sentimental character.1 After long contemplation in vain, Boullée recalled his wandering in the moonlight and in his melancholic recollection, he believed that he had seen a glimpse of hope:

1Étienne-Louis Boullée, Essaie Sur l’Art, ed. Helen Rosenau (London: Tiranti, 1953), 59.

Me retrouvant a la campagne, j’y côtoyais un bois, au clair de la Lune. Mon effigie, produite par la lumière, excita mon attention. Par une disposition d’esprit particulière, l’effet de ce simulacre me parut d’une tristesse extrême. Les arbres dessines sur la terre par leurs ombres me firent la plus profonde impression. Ca tableau s’agrandis soit par mon imagination. J’aperçus alors tout ce qu’il y a de plus sombre dans la nature…la nature semblait s’offrir, en deuil, à mes regards. Frappe des sentiments que j’éprouvais, je m’occupai, dès ce moment, d’en faire une application particulière a l’architecture. J’essayai de trouver un ensemble compose par l’effet des ombre.2

Finding myself in the countryside, I encountered a wood in moonlight. My figure produced by the moon drew my attention with excitement. By a particular disposition of mind, the effect of this simulacrum appeared rather sad to me. The trees drawn on the ground by their shadow left me the most profound impression. This image of shadow grew in my imagination. I noticed all that is the most somber in nature…Nature seemed to offer herself to me, in mourning. Struck by the sentiment I felt, I decided that from that moment on, I shall try to make its particular application in architecture. I will try to create an ensemble of architecture composed by the effect of shadow.

“Fiat lux!” (Let there be light!).3 The idea of “shadow architecture” put Boullée in absolute thrill.

Full of joy and pride, he claimed that, like God brought light to the world, he brought illumination to the world of architecture.4

Boullée’s encounter with the mourning nature in the pale moonlight rediscovered the somber nature of shadow. The “extreme sadness” that he sensed from the “simulacrum” shows that color for him is related to the mournful sensation (as he wrote “nature seemed to offer herself to me in mourning).” It is the architectural implication that matters him. Boullée realized the emotional impact of shadow and hence broke the new ground of architectural design and invented three design principles for cemetery buildings: naked architecture, sunken architecture, and architecture of shadow; it is with the three principles that Boullée was able to recreate the

“extreme sadness” that he sensed during the strolling for the form of architecture:

2 Ibid., 82.

3 Ibid., 51.

4 Ibid.

Je ne sais si je me trompe ; il me semble que l’on peut tout attendre de ce procédé, pour donner le caractère qui convient le plus aux moments funéraires. Il ne me parait pas possible de concevoir rien de plus triste qu’un monument compose par une surface plane nue et dépouillée, d’une manière absorbant la lumière, absolument dénuée de détails, et dont la décoration est formée par un tableau d’ombres, dessine par des ombres encore plus sombre.5

I do not know if I am wrong; it seems to me that one can expect everything from this process, to give the most suitable character to the funerary moments. It seems to me impossible to conceive of anything sadder than a monument composed of a flat and bare surface that absorbs light, absolutely devoid of details, and whose decoration is formed by an image of shadows, outlined by still deeper shadows (Boullée was probably referring to the different intensities of shadow on the spectrum of darkness).

The idea of architecture of shadow is as original as it is personal to Boullée. Strolling in the dark woods, Boullée looked deep into the mourning tableau offered by nature and found within the emotive power of shadow. In return, the architect painted his works with the nocturnal color to recreate the very feeling of sorrow that nature inflicted upon him.

Cenotaph for Newton, the Reunion of Nature and Human

Boullée’s architecture of shadow reached its creative apogee in Cenotaph for Newton

(Figure 4-1 and Figure 4-2). The memorial in homage of Newton is probably one of the very few cenotaph projects that were not characterized by the pyramidal shape; instead, the building is dominated by a perfect sphere with half of its volume being lodged in its circular base as if in a gigantic eggcup. Such sphere, impeccable in every aspect, constitutes the perfect metaphor of both the earth and Newton’s discovery:

Newton! Si par l’étendue de tes lumières et la sublimité de ton génie, tu as détermine la figure de la terre: moi, j’ai conçu le projet de t’envelopper de ta découverte. C’est en quelque façon t’avoir enveloppe de toi-même! C’est d’après ces vues que j’ai voulu, par la figure de la terre, caractériser le Sépulture.6

5 Ibid., 84.

6 Ibid., 82.

Newton! With the range of your brilliance and sublime genius, you have determined the shape of the earth: As for me, I have conceived the project to bury you in your discovery. That is as what I did to envelop you in yourself! It is because of these views that I want to, by the figure of the earth, characterize the Sepulture.

Newton, whose imagination was given the cosmetic dimension by Boullée, rested in the

“universal peace” created by his own discoveries that determined the figure of earth.7 The devotion of the grand universal scale to a scientist such as Newton is not coincidental but characteristic of the 18th-century France where the justification of men’s being is provided by the incorporation of reason and myth.8 In the time where God was “only tolerated as a universal spectator,”9 the world had its conviction in the power of man’s mind whose subjectivity was the source of universal knowledge.10 This desire, resulting from such conviction, to expand infinitely the scope of sensory found its architectural incarnation in the Cenotaph for Newton: the perfect and regular spherical shape instigated the idea of harmony, perfection, eternity and immutability within the human mind, therefore encouraging the mind to expand its intuition and dive into the infinity of the universe. The monument is an infinite void in keeping with the Newtonian idea of absolute space: “Absolute space, of its own nature without reference to anything external, always remains homogeneous and immovable.”11 The absolute existential independence of the

Newtonian space hence obtained its legitimacy in both the realm of science and God, for it placed the empiricist man at the center of the cosmos as the autonomous source of universal knowledge and at the same time, alludes to the existence of God by hinting at immortality. In

7 Burke, 84.

8 Alberto Pérez–Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 157.

9 Martin Bressani, “Étienne-Louis Boullée. Empiricism and the Cenotaph for Newton.,” Architectura - Zeitschrift Fur Geschichte Der Baukunst 23 (December 1, 1993): 39.

10 Ibid., 38.

11 Andrew Janiak, Newton: Philosophical Writings (Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 84.

this regard, Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton should be understood as the reconciliation between scientific space, which “was primarily the hierarchical, qualitatively differentiated structure of places given to perception,”12 and the infinite, continuous conceptual space whose origin belongs to natural philosophy.13 Science and “the art itself,” according to Pérez-Gómez, constitute

Boullée’s architecture as two autonomous parts.14 Boullée acknowledged the importance of mathematical reason, while admitting its limitation which could be compensated only by the genius of art. It is imperative, in Boullée’s opinion, to have “certain irreducible and innate special faculties, in order to perceive and happily apply such beauty.”15

Boullée’s intention regarding the creation of enclosed vast interior, in accordance with the Newtonian conception of space, thus seems to be the reunion of the immense universal space of nature with the finite, palpable spaces of human life. Such conception is not exclusive to the

Cenotaph for Newton but perpetuates in many of his designs:

Si, avec de grandes images on est sur de présenter aux hommes un tableau imposant, certes un Temple, érigé en l’honneur de la Divinité, doit toujours être vaste. Ce temple doit offrir l’image la plus frappante et la plus grande des choses existantes; il faudrait si cela était possible, qu’il nous parut l’univers. Descendre à ce qu’on appelle nécessite en composant un temple, c’est oublier son sujet.16

If, with the grand images one is sure to present to men an imposing image, certainly an image, erected in honor of God, should always be vast. This temple should offer the most moving and most grandiose image of existing things; it should, if possible, have the appearance of universe. To construct a temple is to forget its subject.

12 Pérez-Gómez, 160.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., 134.

15 Ibid.

16 Boullée, 46.

From Boullée’s statement about the basilica design, “Qu’il nous parut l’univers” (The space should appear as the universe), it can be argued that the architect seems to internalize the absolute space of Newton within the enclosure of the monumental building; by delimiting nature though architecture, nature itself is put through the ritual of rebirth, hence transforming into a pure, internal space which Pérez–Gómez commented as “the absolute empty space that is God’s extension and the site of universal gravitation.”17 Boullée therefore achieved the impossible by making the absolute Newtonian space relative to human sentience through the finite articulation of architecture. The dark void of the Newton Memorial finds itself at the intersection of both the dimensions of God and human, a man-made place of dwelling that “provides the spectators with a novel access to the motion of ‘center’.”18 To some extent, the void of the sphere represents symbolically the mind of Newton; by placing the body of Newton in the “new center” of the sphere,19 Boullée metaphorically buried Newton in his great, genius mind.

The new world of “the universal peace,” which held meaningful stature in reconciling infinity and finitude, offers spectators an inward perspective regarding the inquiry of one’s selfhood through a powerful experience of solitude by stripping away spectators’ senses and left them with only the ability of contemplation. The dissolution of the identity frees the darkness caged in our bodies into the darkness of the Cenotaph; like Newton, the spectators are placed

“outside the world and within the space of subjectivity.”20 Through the contemplation in isolation one finds the “universal peace,” whose timelessness and motionless resonates with

17 Alberto Pérez Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 223.

18 Ibid.

19 Boullée, 84.

20 Bressani, 54.

Rousseau’s idea of the solitude of mind, an idea that Rousseau drew from his own heart and experience while he was carried by a boat drifting aimlessly with the flow of water:

But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it…We can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul.21

The making of the dark space in confinement of the perfect sphere is the making of the inner world where time becomes irrelevant and souls are filled with the “perfect happiness.” Such happiness is obtained at the expense of the tradition of perspective logic for there is nothing left to observe and compare as all dimensions were engulfed by the darkness. The loss of the perspective law saved the mythopoetic origin of dark space from the world preoccupied with reasons and science. The rejection of the demystifying rationality was not exclusive to Boullée.

In Giovanni Piranesi’s etchings of his dark fantasies, the space is fragmented into millions of pieces bathed in the ghostly wash of dark shades.22 The world under the “production and pragmatic shelter” was removed and replaced by “a discontinuous space that ultimately waits for the rebuilding of its dislocated parts.”23

In this world within the world, men find the “seductive point of attraction…in the universe which it (a loving and tender heart) has created to suit itself, dilate itself, and spread out freely, released from the hard shackles which compress it in our own world.”24 The spatial experience in the Cenotaph for Newton is a ritual of cleansing, which strips men of their last

21 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 68.

22 Pérez-Gómez & Pelletier, 78.

23 Ibid., 79.

24 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dialogues: Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, trans. Judith Bush, Christopher Kelly, and Roger Masters (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), 95.

shred of Amour–propre by absorbing them into the dark space “where it might be possible to come to terms with the infinite through the experience of the sublime”.25 In other words, the immense sphere of the cenotaph forms a middle ground between the transparent, artificial order of human world and the incomprehensible order of immorality and nature, on which the potential presence of the infinite reconciles with the finitude of our sensible experience.

Boullée’s funerary architecture is the point of returning to the origin of men’s being. The dark journey from the exterior to the internal world leads to the primeval state of birth where people are naturally good. Therefore, the temple of death is really the liberation of life that frees man from nonbeing to the rediscovery of his own being; in other words, it is home.

In conclusion, we can see indeed that Boullée's architectural re-creation of nature was articulated metaphorically within a framework of interconnected discourses that corresponded to the common perception in 17th and 18th century. And yet, implemented with revelations procured from intimate encounters with natural phenomenon, Boullée's architectural designs remained a highly personal and independent collection of the architect's theoretical reflection

What set Boullée apart from many of his neoclassic contemporaneous on a quintessential level was his perspective regarding the imitation of nature. Boullée saw through the surface of natura naturatas that was the visual construct of the natural world and looked into the depth of natura naturans where the latent world of natural principles and laws that governed the visible world became apparent. Moreover, Boullée did not merely gazed into the hidden realm of nature but also projected it back to the visible world of human dwelling, reproducing it in the correct architectural form. The thesis argued that perhaps one of the greatest contributions of Boullée's architectural legacy is setting up a model for articulating the abstract hidden world of nature

25 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 332.

through the tangible language of architecture. Boullée's architectural theory should be regarded as the final fulfillment of the Renaissance view of art and nature, similar to that of Alberti as seen in the beginning, as well as the precursor of the expanding conceptions of various problems gravitating towards nature which characterize today's society. It is on that immense horizon, within that grand tableau, and in that solitary darkness that we could finally bridge that gap between the infinite nature and finite human landscape.

Figure 4-1. Drawing of Cénotaphe de Newton, by E. Boullée (1784). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 8.

Figure 4-2. Drawing of l’effet de nuit intérieur, by by E. Boullée (1784). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 9.

Figure 4-3. Section drawing of Temple of earth, by E. Boullée (1793). National Library of France, Paris. Courtesy of Jean-Claude Lemangny, Visionary Architects (1968), Figure 31.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Liang Shui was born in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China. After graduating from high school in 2011, he studied at the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Rennes in France. In

2013, he transferred to the National Institute of Applied Sciences of Strasbourg in France and in

2017 obtained his Master of Architecture degree. He received his MSAS from the University of

Florida in 2019.