Visionary Architects: Boulee, Ledoux, Lequeu

by Jean-Claude Lemagny

The drawings and engravings of the French visionary architects Boullee, Ledoux, and Lequeu lie on the nervous cusp of Neoclassicism and hallucination. The three designed vast, impractical monuments, villas and temples, cathedrals and libraries, incorporating motifs from the classical era informed by the new intellectual freedoms of the Enlightenment. The resulting drawings and plans are like nothing done before or since, and their daring has reverberated through to us in the work of such architects as Speer, Graves, Sant'Elia, and Stirling.

Genres: Architecture

240 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2002

Reviews

[Kbrooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite the publication date given above, this is the catalogue for a 1968 traveling exhibition. While it serves as a decent overview of the work of these 18th-c. architects (much of it too ambitious and fantastical ever to be built), one laments its reduced scale, the poor quality of the reproductions, and lack of color plates—especially for Lequeu, whose lavishly and eccentrically annotated watercolors suffer from muddy grayscale, illegibility, and/or truncated translations. That said, it's a wonder to see how much Boullée, in particular, prefigured Fascist architecture—ironic given the revolutionary concerns of his time. This catalogue doesn't delve much into that sort of analysis and sadly draws no through-lines to ensuing centuries—that may just be its age showing, since such discourse would be de rigueur these days. Anyway, I really bought this for Lequeu, but he is treated here as an outlier (true) and with more than a hint of distaste for his various kinks. He deserves better, and had he been born in the time of Surrealism would likely have gotten it. So still longing for a definitive treatment of this somewhat deranged genius--or rather, one that is not out of print and $300.