BOULLÉE, Étienne-Louis

French visionary architect, theorist, and teacher. Boullée wanted originally to be a painter, but, following the wishes of his father, he turned to architecture. He studied with Jacques-François Blondel and Germain Boffrand and with Jean-Laurent Legeay and had opened his own studio by the age of 19. He designed several Parisian city mansions in the 1760s and '70s, notably the Hôtel de Brunoy (1774-79). Despite the innovative NeoclassicismGLOSSARYA style in European art and architecture from the mid 18th century until the end of the 19th century. Based as it was on the use of ancient Greek and Roman models and motifs, its development was greatly influenced by the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and by the theories of the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). Intellectually and politically it was closely linked to the Enlightenment's rejection of the aristocratic frivolity of Rococo, the style of the Ancien Régime. Among Neoclassicism's leading figures were the French painter Jacques-Louis David (1744-1825), the German painter Anton Raffael Mengs (1728-1729), and the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822). of his executed works, Boullée achieved a truly lasting influence as a teacher and theorist. Through his atelier passed such masters as Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, Jean-François-Thèrese Chalgrin, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand (1760-1834), and Louis-Michel Thibault (1750-1815). In all, he taught for more than 50 years.

In his important theoretical designs for public monuments, Boullée sought to inspire lofty sentiments in the viewer by architectural forms suggesting the sublimity, immensity, and awesomeness of the natural world, as well as the divine intelligence underlying its creation. At the same time, he was strongly influenced by the indiscriminate enthusiasm for antiquity, and especially Egyptian monuments, felt by his contemporaries.

The distinguishing aspect of Boullée's mature work is his abstraction of the geometric forms suggested by ancient works into a new concept of monumental building that would possess the calm, ideal beauty of classicalGLOSSARYRelating to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome (classical Antiquity). The classical world played a profoundly important role in the Renaissance, with Italian scholars, writers, and artists seeing their own period as the rebirth (the "renaissance") of classical values after the Middle Ages. The classical world was considered the golden age for the arts, literature, philosophy, and politics. Concepts of the classical, however, changed greatly from one period to the next. Roman literature provided the starting point in the 14th century, scholars patiently finding, editing and translating a wide range of texts. In the 15th century Greek literature, philosophy and art - together with the close study of the remains of Roman buildings and sculptures-expanded the concept of the classical and ensured it remained a vital source of ideas and inspiration. architecture while also having considerable expressive power. In his famous essay La Théorie des corps, Boullée investigated the properties of geometric forms and their effect on the senses, attributing "innate" symbolic qualities to the cube, pyramid, cylinder, and sphere, the last regarded as an ideal form. In a series of projects for public monuments, culminating in the design (1784) for an immense sphere that would serve as a cenotaph honouring the British physicist Isaac Newton, Boullée gave imaginary form to his theories. The interior of the cenotaph was to be a hollow globe representing the universe.

To bring geometric forms to life, Boullée depended on striking and original effects of light and shadow. He also emphasized the potential for mystery in building, often burying part of a structure. This "poetic" approach to architecture, in some ways prefiguring the 19th-century Romantic movement, may also be seen in Boullée's extensive use of symbolismGLOSSARYAn artistic movement that arose in France toward the end of the nineteenth century, primarily in literature, in opposition to the reigning schools of Realism and Impressionism. Symbolism rejected objectivity in favour of the subjective, and turned away from the direct representation of reality in favour of a synthesis of many different aspects of it, aiming to suggest ideas by means of ambiguous yet powerful symbols. Among the artists associated with the movement were Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau and Puvis de Chavannes in France, Fernand Khnopff in Belgium, Jan Toorop in Holland, Ferdinand Hodler in Switzerland, Gustave Klimt in Austria, and Giovanni Segantini in Italy.. For example, his Palais Municipal rests on four pedestal-like guardhouses, demonstrating that society is supported by law.

Boullée's emphasis on the psychology of the viewer is a principal theme of his Architecture, essai sur l'art, not published until the 20th century. He has been criticized as a megalomaniac, because of his tendency toward grandiose proposals, but these should be regarded simply as visionary schemes rather than as practical projects. In his desire to create a unique, original architecture appropriate to an ideal new social order, Boullée anticipated similar concerns in 20th-century architecture.