Crafting Shadow: Étienne-Louis Boullée's Poetics of Melancholy​

 

Negar Goljan

James Madison University & Virginia Tech, USA

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Enlightenment discourse on architectural affect suggests that 18th C. theorists approached  building design as a language of higher emotions. In his unbuilt works, Étienne-Louis Boullée  employed architectural drawing and its techniques of light, shadow, shape, and texture as a  conduit for mood, sensation, and feeling. 

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Boullée’s Cenotaph to Newton, as an explicit monument to one of the key figures in the  European scientific age of Enlightenment, seeks to show humanity’s marginal, tenuous position  within the universe through its use of scale, shadow, and celestial geometry. Since Copernicus  and Newton, humanity had found itself dis-located from its presumptive centrality in a geocentric  model of the cosmos. This dis-location instead situated the planet as an isolated rock in space,  orbiting one of many stars. Since the Biblical ‘fall’, there had not been so significant a  disillusionment with the human state as the one proposed, and proven, by Enlightenment science.  This distancing, this cosmic loneliness and meaninglessness, not to mention godlessness, was a  source of great melancholy for theistic believers.  

 

Boullée explores the tensions in the dichotomy between shadow and light in many of his  works, none so evocative of humanity’s displacement as the Cenotaph to Newton. A vast, perfect  hollow sphere, it juxtaposes the darkness of human ignorance with the light of scientific progress,  becoming a literal model of the heavens.  

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The viewer, isolated and dwarfed by this macroscopic scale, feels awestruck - a terror brought  about by the sublime. However, this ‘sublime’ is not one created by a towering mountain range,  but by an expression of the limits of human knowledge itself. The construction pushes us towards  an epistemological frontier, where we are forced to confront not only our miniscule nature and  importance within an unimaginably large cosmos, but also our own intellectual darkness,  ignorance, and shadow. 

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Boullée does not leave us in total darkness, however. He provides points of light - a central  brazier at night, the distant stars by day - to illustrate our epistemic predicament. Ironically, by  casting more light out into the universe, we only become more aware of our own ignorance, of  how little we know.  

Boullée is seemingly aware of the paradox he is faced with. Architecture parlante explicitly  seeks to make buildings ‘readable’ and therefore comprehensible in terms of their symbolism. Yet  his designs - aiming to create an overwhelming edifice of visual poetry - rely heavily on techniques  evoking the sublime, and its powerful incomprehensibility for emotive effect. 

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This dramatic chiaroscuro (chiaro meaning light, and scuro meaning dark) in his ink-washes gives  birth to a powerful, personified atmosphere, which is evocatively experienced as light and shadow 

perceived through the visible, characterized air, as well as the invisible. Employing different  ranges of feelings from terror to calmness, the air itself is characterized by extremes in his  imaginative/conceptual projects. 

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These extremes of contrast denote an architecture before which we might tremble, awed  by the sheer inhuman scale of the edifice, with its deep shadows and bright points of light. This  paper seeks to demonstrate how a journey within Boullée’s construction is heavily mediated by  skiá, pushing us towards the light, and making us either face our fear of the shadows, however  impenetrable, or else lapse into melancholy.