Étienne-Louis Boullée, 1784
A Spherical Monument Taller than the Great Pyramid
In 1784, a set of architectural drawings by a little-known French architect appeared that were shocking in form and scale. Among the drawings, by Étienne-Louis Boullée, were some featuring a building shaped as a huge perfect sphere. The drawing was described as a cenotaph, or empty tomb, for Isaac Newton. This impossible-looking structure was never built, but it has haunted architects ever since. To discover why, we have to see Boullée’s sphere in the context of its time.
Eighteenth-century Europe was dominated by the movement in philosophy and science called the Enlightenment. The philosophers of the Enlightenment questioned the old moral authorities – especially the church – and insisted that rationalism was the best basis for human thought and conduct. A major centre of the Enlightenment movement was France, home to philosophers and writers such as Voltaire and Diderot. And there was more than rationalism in the air. People began to strive for a new social order, too, in which human rights would be upheld and power would be taken away from the aristocracy and the church.
How might architecture respond to this change? One of the people to address this question was Boullée, who rejected as frivolous the prevailing highly ornate Rococo style, associated with the pleasure palaces of kings and aristocrats, and advocated a return to the Classical orders of ancient Greece and Rome. He was also keen on the idea of taking architectural forms from nature and from ‘pure’ geometry. Boullée was an academic who did not complete many major buildings. But the projects that he published are extraordinary, and the most remarkable of all is the cenotaph for the British mathematician, astronomer and physicist Sir Isaac Newton, who had died in 1727.
Newton was one of the most influential of all scientists, and a leading intellectual of his time. His work spanned mechanics, optics and calculus, and his laws of motion and universal gravitation are fundamental to the way we understand the physical world. This work, and Newton’s method of underpinning his discoveries about the world with mathematical proof, made him a key figure in the Enlightenment.
To commemorate this stellar figure, Boullée conceived a truly cosmic building, a monument in the form of a huge empty mausoleum. It took the shape of an enormous stone sphere, hollow inside, girdled by circular platforms and rows of cypress trees. It was a sphere for reasons of symbolism and sheer visual effect. Boullée writes: ‘The shape of the sphere offers the greatest surface to the eye, and this lends it majesty. It has the utmost simplicity, because that surface is flawless and endless.’ The combination of majesty and apparent endlessness made for a remarkable design.
Looking at Boullée’s drawings, it is difficult at first for the viewer to get their bearings until it dawns on them that the tiny specks about one-third of the way up are human figures approaching a doorway. These figures give an idea of the scale of the great sphere: it was planned to be some 500ft (150m) in diameter. In the 1780s, the world’s tallest buildings were Strasbourg Cathedral, at 466ft (142m) and the Great Pyramid at Giza, at 455ft (139m). Boullée’s cenotaph would, therefore, have been the world’s tallest building, vaster by far than any tomb of king or emperor, greater than any cathedral or shrine.
From the outside, the building is obviously a sphere, although the lower half is concealed by the surrounding platforms and plinths, so that it appears to emerge from them. The bottom part of the volume is implied by a pair of curving ramps, and it is easy to get the idea that this building is at heart one great pure form. There is no ornament, no Rococo carving, not even the more restrained ornament of the Classical style, to distract the visitor’s attention from the simplicity and purity.
The platforms and plinths are planted with cypress trees (a traditional symbol of mourning) and the middle platform (one-third of the way up) leads to an entrance. However, Boullée seems to have intended the main way into the cenotaph to be at the base of the building, where a semicircular portal forms the prelude to a long corridor leading to the interior.
Inside, the visitor to Newton’s shrine would have the unearthly experience of standing inside a cavernous spherical space. The entrance corridor leads to a platform at the bottom of the sphere, where the sarcophagus is placed. Above, the spherical walls curve upwards. They are pierced with tiny holes, which let in daylight and are placed so that what opened up above one’s head was the image of a starry night, with the Moon, planets and constellations glittering in the darkness. The visitor stood at the heart of the universe that Newton’s work explained so rationally. At night the interior works differently. An illuminated armillary sphere hanging at the very centre of the building sends an eerie glow towards the walls.
Boullée’s drawings of the monument – exterior views, plans and sections – were circulated widely in the years after he produced them in 1784. The architect’s work as a teacher (at the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussés), the connections he had made as architect to Frederick II of Prussia and his fame in France meant that he had a large network of contacts. Contemporaries were impressed, but did not immediately start to design buildings in the form of gigantic spheres or other plain geometrical forms. However, Boullée was part of a movement that made architects turn more to plainer, Classical design and away from the frills and furbelows of Rococo.
Boullée has also had a more recent influence. His works were published widely in the twentieth century, and have inspired architects such as the Italian postmodernist Aldo Rossi, many of whose buildings (and designs for household objects such as tableware and coffee pots) marry purity of form with lack of ornament in a distinctly Boullée-like way. The Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, disturbing in its form and eerie in its interior, is a shining example of the way phantom architecture from long ago can continue to provoke and stimulate the mind.
