Etienne-Louis Boullée, 1728-1799: Theoretician of Revolutionary Architecture

First printing. Translation by James Emmons of "Étienne-Louis Boullée, 1728-1799, de l'architecture classique à l'architecture révolutionnaire" (Arts et métiers graphiques, 1969). Softcover volume, measuring approximately 6.75" x 9.75", shows moderate wear, with very mildly bumped outside corners. Binding is sound. Pages are clean and bright. This work contains 120 b&w illustrations, as well as endnotes, glossary, chronology of the life of Boullée, selected bibliography, and an index. Price of $3.95 appears in upper outside corner of front cover. 128 pages.

"Boullée's work provides, as a matter of fact, some particularly illuminating insights into that permanent revolution, that great movement of ideas, that violent uprush of imagination which marked the history of the arts in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It helps us to understand how the backward-looking aesthetic of the champions of a return to antiquity was transformed into a forward-looking asethetic which is not unrelated to that of the twentieth century.
Boullée played a definite part in the anti-rococo movement which, arising in France in the 1760s, answered the desire for a return to classical equilibrium -- in other words, to the national tradition so expressed by the French artist of the seventeenth century.
In the 1770s, when antiquizing classicism was at its height in Europe, Boullée designed some remarkable examples of a return to the grandeur of antique architecture. But he was not the initiator of this style.
He was, however, the principal theorist of one of the most progressive forms of neoclassical art -- the revolutionary architecture which appeared toward 1785. For it was Boullée's later designs which, by their rediscovery of the natural sources of architecture, gave new meaning to the exploration of antiquity." (Introduction)