Liang Shui’s thesis interprets Étienne-Louis Boullée’s architecture as an Enlightenment attempt to reconcile infinite nature with finite human perception through a rigorous architectural language of composition, sentiment and contemplation. Rather than treating nature as scenery or ornament, Boullée understands it as the “book of books”, the universal source from which architectural ideas, affects and formal principles derive. The thesis situates this vision within eighteenth-century French debates over natural aesthetics, contrasting the ordered authority of the French garden with the disinterested, affective naturalism of the English garden, then showing how Boullée synthesises both through regular geometry, monumental scale and atmospheric experience. His drawings, especially those of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Le Fort, the Madeleine Church and the Newton Cenotaph, are read not as technical illustrations but as tableaux: self-sufficient visual structures where mass, horizon, darkness, light and human figures produce architectural meaning. The case study of the Newton Cenotaph crystallises the argument, since Boullée converts celestial nature into a contemplative interior cosmos, allowing architecture to stage the sublime relation between mortality, reason and universal order. The figures reproduced throughout the thesis, particularly the panoramic Cirque, the austere Le Fort, and the nocturnal Newton drawings, visually confirm that Boullée’s architecture is less a built programme than a philosophical theatre of nature. Ultimately, Shui presents Boullée as an architect of metaphysical mediation: one who makes nature intelligible, emotional and inhabitable through form.
URBANISM MEETS ART