Word: boulle
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...tent last week (and not only because of the 30° F weather) when Peter Blake, chairman of the department of architecture and planning at Catholic University of America, showed slides of the future as envisioned in the past. The "ideal cities" of Leonardo da Vinci or Etienne-Louis Boullée, although devoid of people, were at least images of fantastic beauty. The modern future, as imagined by Antonio Sant Elia in 1914, Ludwig Hilberseimer in 1928 and Le Corbusier in 1934, has a nightmarish, totalitarian quality, akin to George Orwell's 1984 foreboding of a boot...
...wearing Mickey ears, set in a capital D-is no metaphor but a frank statement of intention. The place is the last example of idealized, high-despotic city planning, a rich hick cousin of all the imaginary and perfect townships that architects from Filarete in the 15th century to Boullée in the 18th wrought from their schematic, authoritarian fantasies but never managed to build. Unlike Kublai Khan's pleasure dome, it exists on a plane of unremitting kitsch, sustained by the most advanced technology ever brought to the service of entertainment...
...swollen granite children of one mad brain. This is the stock liberal ploy of separating Hitler from history for fear of contaminating history itself. In fact, the grandiosity of his architectural fantasy belongs to a whole tradition of visionary architecture, which encompasses idealist architects like the 18th century Frenchmen Boullée and Ledoux as well as the great Italian engraver Piranesi, who saw grandeur in prisons, glory in ruins. (In his memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Speer notes that Hitler took into account how his edifices might look as ruins a thousand years later.) And a debased 18th century...
Bears for Columns. The gigantic sculptural buildings designed by the three visionary architects whose plans are exhibited at St. Thomas have long been studied by subsequent architects because they foreshadow so many buildings built in the 20th century. Etienne-Louis Boullée (1728-99) was a popular teacher at Paris' Royal Academy of Architecture who designed giant globular monuments as a means of classroom elucidation. Among the remaining sketches of his works is one of a projected monument for Sir Isaac Newton, consisting of a giant sphere pierced by tiny openings to simulate starlight. Today's planetariums...
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