Étienne-Louis Boullée

It’s meaningful that most of the tallest and/or largest buildings on earth now are finance or manufacturing related in some way. The only standouts in the top 10 of either category are an indoor water park in Germany in a former airship plant, the 02 Arena in London, and a clock tower in Mecca, Saudi Arabia surrounded by hotels. This captures the defining modern belief (or perhaps necessity) that the point of making something beautiful is to sell it, and betrays some of the retractions in our grand aesthetics. Almost everything is either tall and skinny or short and wide, as if we are terrified that future archeologists might find our ruins and think we weren’t serious about hustling up business stuff, and this mirrors much of the modern personal metaphysics wherein we will pay or say anything to ensure that we can become another hammer in a world full of nails.

I say that not because I think it’s all doom and gloom moving forward, but because I find a lot of it boring and am ready to move on. And because one of the things I think we need is more people like Étienne-Louis Boullée, which is to say people who dream of unbuildable things in an age when our constructive abilities are about to go through the proverbial roof. I asked some friends yesterday at brunch what house they would build if they could have anything, citing ICON’s 3D house printer as an example of how it’d be made. Some had very specific answers, others understandably had no idea because the possibility of owning a home felt so financially impossible it wasn’t worth their energy to think about, but it nevertheless raised a follow-up thought for me on my drive home about a world where we could create our own space exactly as we want it.

If dimensions didn’t matter, mine would be this library design by Boullée. I’ve realized recently that one of a handful of my dream jobs would be working in archiving and the idea of living in the midst of a codex like this would be incredible. But more importantly, I hope to see us move back into making more things that share the same sort of absurd joy found in Boullée’s take on Neoclassicalism. Grand and ornate undertakings for the sake of themselves, while also functional and complete. Less of making a product out of every living thing and more of building spaces where our shared creativity and strangeness can breathe.