Death's pyramids and Boullée's domes

While BLDGBLOG just explored Etienne-Louis Boullée's Cenotaph for Newton – of which some better images appear here –


– complete with an internal view of the dome's constellational ceiling –


– Boullée also designed another, if substantially less well-known, cenotaph (complete, again, with monumentally over-sized dome and somewhat ridiculous, almost elephantiasis-stricken, pyramidal shell), revealed here in both elevation and section –


– as well as yet another tomb – or cénotaphe – here a kind of architectural remix of the first pyramid:


And even that wasn't the end. Boullée designed a tomb for Hercules; a tomb for Sparta; several funerary monuments; and a chapel of the dead that seems to have set the architectural temperature for the bunker-like, uninspired, and potentially even anti-Christian churches you now find all over today's middle America:


Well, actually, it looks an awful lot like the house Robert Venturi built for his mother –


– which I suppose says something about Robert Venturi.

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Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wow. I had never seen the cone version before. Cone totally beats sphere. No contest really.

October 10, 2005 1:54 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Bollox. The spherical form is perfect - embodiment of a pure platonic solid. Cone is pure folly...

January 31, 2006 4:50 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I needed to find something over 100 years older than the venturi house to compare and contrast for my arch. class... looks like I won't have much to contrast.

November 16, 2006 5:05 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It is a triangle, it can look like my dogs house or even the set square that i will use to design it. There are other things that should be compaired between the two.

September 02, 2008 11:05 PM  
Blogger ty.ro said...

Boullee's Architecture, Essay on Art, is really fantastic. He has a small section on cenotaphs and funerary monuments that discusses his approach and concepts for this type of architecture. Its worth reading.

His work is truly awe-inspiring.

June 24, 2009 9:31 AM  
Blogger aesacus said...

To the second poster (anonymous):

The sphere is not a platonic solid.

March 10, 2010 11:45 PM  
Blogger Dinther said...

Nonsense, Cone and Sphere are vain. Nothing beats the pure mathematical lines of a cube.

Cubes that are particularly appealing with topped by an isosceles triangle. ;-)

March 23, 2010 3:12 PM  
Anonymous Schwi said...

Did you really link Venturi to "psycho"!!!?
Common' he deserve better than that.

February 27, 2012 12:23 PM  

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