Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution — The Public Domain Review

Though it was to remain conceptual, the cenotaph was a creation deeply immersed in the culture of its time. Boullée conceived of it after witnessing the first manned balloon flight over Paris in 1783. Some years earlier, Denis Diderot had issued a salon challenge to artists. Referring to the ability of music to conjure whole worlds for the listener, he challenged “the bravest among them to suspend the sun or the moon in the middle of his composition. . . . I defy him to choose his sky as it is in nature, strewn with brilliant stars.” It was Diderot, too, whose French translation of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful appeared around the same time. Burkean aspects of the sublime, including vastness in proportion, massiveness, the sense of the infinite, the contrast of light and dark, and the cumulative effect of repetition, all abound in the work of both Boullée and Ledoux. According to the architectural historian Anthony Vidler: “Boullée’s drawn projects display no direct political affiliations with any of the reigning doctrines or parties; rather they espoused a belief in scientific progress symbolised in monumental forms, a generalised Rousseauism derived from the Social Contract, a dedication to celebrate the grandeur of the ‘nation’, and, more often than not, a meditation on the sublime sobriety of death.”