Architecture or revolution? Revolution can be avoided.—Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, 1922

The French were slow to fall in love with Newton, who had overturned the physical worldview of Descartes, but when they fell, they fell hard. Voltaire’s mistress Emilie du Châtelet produced a comprehensible — and many said superior — edition of his great work, Principia Mathematica; the physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace proclaimed himself the “French Newton”; and in 1787, two years before the French Revolution, the future champion of the sans-culottes Jean-Paul Marat published a translation of Newton’s Opticks.

But perhaps none was more enamoured of the English scientist than the architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, who in 1784 conceived the idea of a cenotaph for the great man (notwithstanding that he had been buried in 1727 in Westminster Abbey). His monument would be a vast, hollow sphere, taller than the Pyramids, and belted by cypresses. The interior would contain Newton’s tomb and . . . space. Nothing more. Light would be its only ornament.

In his Essai on architecture, Boullée addresses himself to his hero thus: “Sublime mind! Prodigious and profound genius! Divine Being! Newton! Deign to accept the homage of my feeble talents! Ah, if I dare to make it public, it is because I am convinced I have surpassed myself in the work of which I shall speak.” He continues on in similar fashion, his tone approaching even greater heights: “O Newton! If by the reach of your light and the sublimity of your Genius, you have determined the shape of the earth, then I have conceived the idea of enveloping you in your discovery.”¹

The visionary monument was never built, of course. But Boullée stands, nevertheless, as the architect who best embodies the eighteenth century’s revolutionary ideal. In him, the scientific revolution unleashed by Newton’s many discoveries converged with the political revolution that would consume the ancien régime, both finding expression in an uncompromising new architecture of pure form and light.

Although the French Revolution was not to leave many monuments, life and building went on, requiring architects of a less fanciful nature than Boullée. Chief among them was Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, who likewise favoured clean geometric forms over the decorated classical style of architecture that had come before, but who fared better commercially, and left a more substantial built legacy.

The two men shared certain things: both came from relatively modest bourgeois backgrounds, both had begun by wishing to be painters, both studied under the same influential architectural master. Yet the paths they were to pick through the turbulent years before and after the French Revolution would be quite different, and — the one man practical, the other idealistic — perhaps not the ones you would expect for each of them.

Étienne-Louis Boullée was born in 1728 in Paris, where he was to spend his entire life, except for one short period during the French Revolution when he retreated to the country, pleading ill health. He studied painting until his architect father steered him in the direction of his own profession. He then studied under Jacques-François Blondel, the leading French classical architect, who was already leading a trend away from the excesses of the Rococo style. Boullée soon proved an excellent teacher of architecture himself, but received only modest commissions that gave him little scope to display his talent, and he has left almost no surviving works. At his death in 1799, he bequeathed his drawings to the Bibliothèque nationale, while his treatise on architecture was not published until the mid-twentieth century.

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux was born in 1736 in a village close to Reims in the Marne valley. He attended a reputed Paris college where the writers Charles Perrault and Cyrano de Bergerac were among the alumni. He spent five years apprenticed as an engraver before enrolling at Blondel’s school of architecture. In 1764, he married the daughter of a court musician, and was appointed as the architect of waterways and forests for the city of Sens, which enabled him to realize many practical buildings in the plain style he favoured. He was able to use this position to win many private commissions, until in 1773 he was taken on by Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, and appointed as the architect for the royal tax-collecting agency, the Ferme générale. He always cherished his royal patronage, although it would cost him dear during the Revolution.

Old Regimes, New Forms

The turn to solid geometry in eighteenth-century architecture was a moral signal. The adoption of undisguised Platonic forms represented a rejection of frivolous excess and an attempt to revive a classical ideal. These forms were believed to stem ultimately from nature, and as such to possess a unique mystical power. The question of the age was: in whose name would that power be exercised?

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville remarks that “Men living in democratic ages do not readily comprehend the utility of forms.” He is referring to the social conventions that prevent our instant gratification, but, as the architecture critic Colin Rowe has pointed out, pure geometric form is also bundled into this statement. “In aristocracies”, Tocqueville adds, “the observance of forms was superstitious: among us they ought to be kept up with a deliberate and enlightened deference.”² This then was the challenge for any architect working — or seeking work — during revolutionary times. How to make the swerve from aristocratic architectural forms, which we read as expressive of inherited power, to forms for the citizen, which must proclaim the power of the people?

That Boullée and Ledoux pulled off the trick is perhaps evidenced by their rehabilitation in the twentieth century. They have been held up by some critics as forerunners of modernism (for their use of unadorned abstract form), and noted by others as inspiration for the opposing camp of postmodernists (for their belief that architecture should signpost its purpose).³ Their work seems to resonate in this period characterized by wild mood swings between democracy and totalitarianism. Or perhaps it is appreciated because it rises above such temporal matters. In 1968, the Estonia-born modernist Louis Kahn, considered by many as America’s leading architect at the time, wrote this verse for an exhibition of Boullée’s and Ledoux’s work:

Spirit in will to express
can make the great sun seem small.
The sun is
Thus the Universe.
Did we need Bach
Bach is
Thus Music is.
Did we need Boullée
Did we need Ledoux
Boullée is
Ledoux is
Thus Architecture is.

The two men differed sharply in approach to their shared profession. Boullée was troubled by self-doubt and ultimately preferred to preserve his ideal visions on paper rather than submit to the compromises of the building process. Ledoux, too, believed that architectural ideas were best conveyed in drawings, but he was able to charm his clients, and was happier to put these ideas into practice. Unlike the diffident Boullée, Ledoux was boastful and ambitious to leave a built legacy, and many of his buildings survive today.

From Blondel, Boullée and Ledoux absorbed an aversion to ornament and to the Vitruvian rule that architecture should be scaled according to the proportions of the human body, believing instead that buildings should exhibit a natural simplicity based on geometry and express the purpose for which they were built. But both architects pushed this approach to new extremes. Ledoux even managed to upset Blondel, who, in comments that read like a school report on a once-favoured pupil, criticized the “young architect not lacking in genius”, who “allows himself be swept along in a torrent and therefore ignores the majority of followers, propriety, proportions and formal style.”⁴

Where the Baroque and Rococo styles employed a complex system of curves and spirals to unify any architectural conception — devices that Ledoux reviled as “those cornices wriggling and crawling like serpents in the desert” — these architects promoted a formal language based on elementary geometric solids. They turned to the sphere, the cube, and the pyramid, taking inspiration from classical sources such as Hadrian’s Villa and the temple at Paestum as well as the villas of Palladio, although it is not known that either architect visited Italy.⁵ Combining these ideal elements, they drew an analogy with the notes of the musical scale which could be arranged in different ways to produce an infinity of melodies. Jean-Claude Lemagny, the curator of the 1968 exhibition of their work, suggests a further parallel with the contemporary discovery of new chemical elements by Antoine Lavoisier, who demonstrated that the supposedly fundamental elements of antiquity — earth, air, fire and water — were in fact comprised of simpler substances in different combinations. Through a recombinatory science of their own, Boullée and Ledoux recognized the sheer force of pure geometry emphasized by scale, symmetry, sharp lines, and bare surfaces. For the former architect, sublime geometry culminated in an epic monument to Isaac Newton.

Boullée’s Sublime Cenotaph

Sheer immensity was for Boullée the most important aspect of the Newton cenotaph: “it is by this that our spirit is raised to the contemplation of the Creator and that we experience intimations of celestial sensations.”⁶ He took issue with admirers of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome who believed its beauty was achieved because its architects succeeded in disguising its huge scale. “The impression of greatness has such a grip on our senses that, rather than finding it horrible, it always excites in us a sense of admiration. A volcano vomiting flames and death is a horribly beautiful image!”⁷

Boullée laid particular claim to the striking effect produced by these bold forms in sunlight. “The architecture of shadows is an artistic discovery which belongs to me and which I offer to those who will succeed me in the life of the arts”, he wrote.⁸ It has its origin in nature, he explained, describing a time when he was walking alongside a wood in the moonlight, observing his own shadow on the ground as it passed through the pattern of light and dark made by the trees. “I noticed then all that is most sombre in nature. What did I see? The mass of objects detached in black on an extremely pale light. Nature seemed to be offering itself up, in mourning, to my glance. . . . I concerned myself, from this moment, with applying this particularly to architecture.”⁹

Finding justification in nature was important for both Boullée and Ledoux because it added a metaphysical depth to the symbolism of the forms they employed. This echoes “natural philosophy’s search for truths of universal validity” in this period, according to the architectural historian Alberto Pérez-Gómez.¹⁰ Boullée’s cenotaph for Newton exemplifies these principles. Indeed, to critics who might find nothing new in it, Boullée issued a gnomic appeal: “If anyone would assume I’m offering nothing new, I would point out that before Newton, people saw apples fall; and I would ask what came of it, before that divine spirit?”¹¹

The spherical shell of the cenotaph was to be pierced with holes in the pattern of the constellations, allowing shafts of light to enter, creating for daytime visitors the impression of communing with the tomb under a starry night sky. The sphere was supreme for Boullée, bringing together symmetry, regularity, and a suggestion of wholeness and of the infinite. It gave variety too, in the shifting fall of light on its surface, which he clearly regarded in a mathematical sense as a regular polyhedron with infinitely many faces. Whatever one’s viewpoint, he noted, “no optical effect can ever alter the magnificent beauty of its form.”¹²

Though it was to remain conceptual, the cenotaph was a creation deeply immersed in the culture of its time. Boullée conceived of it after witnessing the first manned balloon flight over Paris in 1783. Some years earlier, Denis Diderot had issued a salon challenge to artists. Referring to the ability of music to conjure whole worlds for the listener, he challenged “the bravest among them to suspend the sun or the moon in the middle of his composition. . . . I defy him to choose his sky as it is in nature, strewn with brilliant stars.”¹³ It was Diderot, too, whose French translation of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful appeared around the same time. Burkean aspects of the sublime, including vastness in proportion, massiveness, the sense of the infinite, the contrast of light and dark, and the cumulative effect of repetition, all abound in the work of both Boullée and Ledoux. According to the architectural historian Anthony Vidler: “Boullée’s drawn projects display no direct political affiliations with any of the reigning doctrines or parties; rather they espoused a belief in scientific progress symbolised in monumental forms, a generalised Rousseauism derived from the Social Contract, a dedication to celebrate the grandeur of the ‘nation’, and, more often than not, a meditation on the sublime sobriety of death.”¹⁴

Visitors to Newton’s cenotaph would feel themselves pinned to the inside of the sphere gazing at the tomb in the centre as if held by a mysterious centrifugal force. They were then to be transported somehow through the space and through clouds to commune with Newton’s spirit. If daytime illumination of the enormous cenotaph was to be provided paradoxically by “stars”, then nighttime illumination would have to come from some mighty artificial central sun of the kind that Diderot had requested, although there was no way to do this using the technology at the time.

Boullée expands on his philosophy in papers finally gathered and published in 1953. His Essai begins with an appeal “to men who cultivate the arts”: “How little, really, has anyone applied themselves up until today to the poetry of architecture, a sure way to multiply men’s pleasures and to give artists just celebrity.”¹⁵ Architecture is not merely the art of building, as the Roman Vitruvius would have it (he “speaks like a labourer, not an Artist”, Boullée sniffed). Boullée insists — and maybe this is the frustrated painter in him — that an artistic conception must precede practicalities. With this approach, even public buildings can be poems.

Boullée received few royal or public commissions, however, despite many ambitious schemes. His monumentalism was ill-suited to the times: before the Revolution it was Versailles alone where this kind of thing was sanctioned, and a 1780 proposal of his to remodel part of that palace was rejected; after the Revolution there was little money or inclination for works on this scale. His realized designs, including the one or two modest surviving houses, he regarded as “sterile” in comparison with his paper architecture. These unrealized works can be glimpsed in the hundred or so magnificent drawings left to the Bibliothèque nationale, which comprise, as Vidler has observed, the elements of an ideal city: basilica, coliseum, museum, palace, theatre, library, funerary monument, bridge. They remain as some of the finest architectural visions ever recorded.

Ledoux’s All-Encompassing Saline

The ideal city was in Ledoux’s mind, too, as he embarked on his most ambitious realized project. In 1771, Ledoux was appointed as the royal inspector of saltworks of Lorraine and Franche-Comté, and put in charge of building a new works at Chaux, between the villages of Arc and Senans. For him, the commission was like a dream in which thousands of people came together in a perfect alignment of government and architecture. After the Revolution, he fondly recalled that time when the “monarchy gave out charity for useful public arts and monuments. O! veritable golden age . . . you leave the time in which we live the hope for heritage.”¹⁶

Ledoux had visited a nearby saline and was appalled by the haphazard arrangement of buildings that had accrued as it expanded. Starting from scratch at Chaux, he envisioned a highly symmetric masterplan with the central works surrounded by workers’ buildings and the many ancillary stables and storerooms. In his ecstatic vision, he saw “immortal stone” being raised into position by “an industrious community in the most beautiful place in the world.”¹⁷

Salt was a vital commodity, needed not only for flavouring but as a food preservative and for chemical preparations. The salt at Chaux came from springs running from beds under the Jura and Alps, but the site at Arc-et-Senans had been chosen for its proximity to the forest, it being easier to pipe water than to transport timber for fuel. It took forty-eight hours to evaporate the water, with impurities manually skimmed off at intervals. The dried salt was then moulded into cakes which were sold subject to the gabelle or salt tax, an important source of revenue for the government.

This labour-intensive business required the services of numerous trades. It was common practice within industries under royal or noble patronage that worker accommodation was provided, and it was this requirement that gave Ledoux his vision of a small city. His first plan was fairly conventional, based on a square courtyard, but this soon evolved into a design based around a vast semicircle with the director’s house at the centre, giving a sense, if not the actuality, of panoptic surveillance. Along the 234-metre diameter of the semicircle lay the long evaporation buildings, while dotted along the circumference were five imposing workers’ accommodation blocks, each containing six apartments ranged on either side of a communal hearth space. “It is in these charming spaces that . . . man is still surrounded by his innocence”, wrote Ledoux in a reverie of Rousseau.¹⁸

Ledoux was careful to ensure that his designs were suited to their purpose not only functionally but also symbolically, communicating their royal authority. Even the stables had bold classical lines, their pediments pierced by oculi and supported on Venetian arches with heavily rusticated columns. However, when the king saw the drawings, it appeared Ledoux had gone too far for what was just a factory complex. In Ledoux’s account, Louis XV “said, as he caressed the idol of the day [Madame du Barry]: one cannot disagree that ‘these views are grand’; but why ‘so many columns, they are suitable only for temples and palaces.’”¹⁹

Louis XV died in 1774, while work on Arc-et-Senans was in progress. Ledoux lost his royal patronage although he continued to work on public architecture and to enjoy the support of Madame du Barry and her aristocrat friends. He applied the same ambitious thinking seen at Chaux to the estates of rich clients, blending grandeur with an odd sort of philanthropic idealism directed toward rural trades. In 1780, for example, Ledoux stretched the commission for the chateau of the Marquis de Montesquiou at Maupertuis to include all outbuildings, making a small city, far beyond its budget. One especially striking edifice would have been an absolutely spherical groundsman’s house.

Meanwhile, his theoretical vision for the saline kept expanding. The original semicircle begged for completion as a full circle. Anticipating Chaux’s expanding population, he designed buildings for ever more ancillary functions with increasingly explicit symbolism. The cemetery, for example, was to be a vast, dark, many-chambered sphere, half buried like an ancient tumulus. A building called the Oikema was to be the “house of pleasure” or brothel. No amount of scholarly reference to the worship practices of ancient cults could disguise that the plan view was a diagrammatic cock and balls. (The phrase “architecture parlante” was coined during their lifetime as a derogatory term for Boullée’s and Ledoux’s forthright style of architecture; this was architecture speaking the language of toilet graffiti!)

Ledoux and the Gates of Paris

Soon enough, however, Ledoux-the-practical-architect was offered a new opportunity to show what he could do. The Ferme générale imposed a duty on all goods coming into Paris, but a report commissioned from Antoine Lavoisier — who, in addition to his chemical pursuits, was a long-time shareholder with executive responsibilities in the Ferme générale — revealed that much of the owed revenue was not being collected. To solve the problem, he recommended a barrier be built around the city with a tollhouse at every point of entry. King Louis XVI gave the go-ahead for the construction of seventeen large and thirty small tollhouses along fifteen miles of wall in January 1785.

Ledoux saw greater potential in the project: to furnish Paris with the city gates it lacked (figures such as Voltaire and Rousseau had noted the shabby, unceremonial approaches to the capital); and to unite all Parisians and “devillagize a populace of eight hundred thousand.”²⁰ This, too, was a utopian idea in its way: where Arc-et-Senans was the seed of an ideal city that would grow outward, perhaps this belt of barrières enclosing Paris could redefine an already existent city as ideal. Additionally, in Ledoux’s view, an important purpose of architecture generally was to educate the public. Here, the task was to explain the merit of the tax they were being asked to pay, and “to compensate the public in some way for an imposition that they seemed to dislike.”²¹

It was not to play out like that. Work began “in secrecy and haste” on the barrières, but it soon became apparent that costs would soar. The public objected to the extravagance of works that were only there to make them poorer. “Le mur, murant Paris, rend Paris murmurant”, as this tongue-twisting epigram of 1785 had it. (“The wall walling Paris has Paris wailing.”) What should have been the peak of his career quickly became for Ledoux “the cause of his downfall and subsequent reputation as an architecte maudit.”²²

Economies were made, new project architects appointed, and, in the end, fifty-five new tollhouses rose around Paris. According to Ledoux’s original conception, each one was different, drawing on a restricted palette of architectural elements, such as Venetian windows, Doric columns, and rusticated facades, and plans based on the square, circle, or Greek cross. Handled in different ways, these elements came together to make each building an individual response to its site as well as one of a family. Ledoux saw this variety as “a public duty” as well as, no doubt, an opportunity to realize ideas that had remained on paper from earlier in his career; a single repeated design would have been “boring” for all concerned.²³

But the public was not in the mood for architectural games. Demonstrations flared up at the barrières over four days from July 10, 1789, days immediately before the storming of the Bastille. Most were looted or set ablaze. In the aftermath, the new government decided that the buildings should be turned into monuments of the Revolution, but by 1798 they were once again collecting taxes. Most were demolished during the nineteenth century; only four remain today.

Ledoux did try to adapt to changed times. A project for a bleak prison and a palais de justice in Aix-en-Provence that was in progress when the Revolution broke out was not cancelled — the symbolism of the architecture here equally valid to royal or republican government. The same might be said of plans for a cannon foundry with vast pyramidal furnaces spouting fire like volcanoes at each corner of a huge square courtyard building.

A new departure was represented by a complex of apartments, Maisons Hosten, in 1792. Jean-Baptiste Hosten was a plantation owner from Saint Domingue (now Haiti) and a Paris property speculator. The multi-use project comprised a house for himself with fourteen more apartments for rental, and, in the middle of all, an “English garden”. The monolithic nature of the main block is broken up by a facade of alternating porticos and recessed arcades that might have been captured from one of Palladio’s grimmer villas. Their repetition emphasizes the play of light and shadow, which takes the place of any ornamentation. In this design, according to his biographer Daniel Rabreau, “he invents a very progressive form of social housing . . . a true architecture of revolution.”²⁴

A more characterful side of the architect is seen in a small project that remained on the drawing board. This was the House of the Surveyors of the Loue River, not far from Chaux. The proposed dwelling boldly straddles the river’s source, with water gushing through a central oval arch, richly symbolic of the element’s importance. The design demonstrates that bold solid geometry need not be employed at colossal scale to have its effect; the little building has a pagan power as a temple to the river gods. Of it, and of the life force to which it acts as both conduit and guardian, Ledoux wrote: “True and transparent mirror of the Creator! My weak voice should learn to sing your marvels! You bring life to vulgar darkness . . . giving brilliance to mountains and trees, and evoking the happiness of the world.”²⁵

A “Revolutionary” Architecture?

Paradoxically or not, it was the more visionary of the two architects who had the better Revolution. Politically, Boullée was a reformist rather than a revolutionary. His modesty and quiet manners puzzled the firebrands, who saw him as dishonest, and he criticized Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety as “perverse beings, tigers lusting for blood”, who wanted to destroy the “arts, sciences, and everything that honours the human spirit.”²⁶ Nevertheless his idealistic projects found some favour. Their large scale could be seen as expressive of “civic and collective relationships, rather than the individualism of the rising bourgeois classes.”²⁷ Thus, he still dared to present a project for a “palace for the sovereign”, because the design predated “the question of revolution in France” and because “the views of an Artist must be presented to all those to whom they may be agreeable.”²⁸

His design for a national assembly building called for the words “Droits de l’homme” and the texts of the national law to be inscribed along its facade, echoing the practice seen on temporary erections during revolutionary pageants. Still bolder was his proposal for the national library. “If there is one subject to please an architect and at the same time kindle his creativity, it is the project for a public library”, he wrote.²⁹ He took inspiration from Raphael’s School of Athens, although where the Italian’s canvas is thronged with lounging philosophers, the engraving of Boullée’s interior shows antlike figures scurrying amid tiers of shelves under colonnades capped by a huge coffered barrel vault. The scale here was practical as much as anything, the vault providing the greatest space for the least cost, “a vast amphitheatre of books”.

None of these projects was realized. But matters were worse for the more bourgeois Ledoux. Although he tried to argue for progress through architecture, he found that work dried up and wealthy friends disappeared. Ledoux and Boullée were among a number of architects denounced as Royalist sympathizers, and in November 1793 Ledoux was arrested for his links to the nobility and the hated Ferme générale. He claimed it was a case of mistaken identity, but it was not; he had been found to be in the pay of “the last tyrant”, Louis XVI, who had been guillotined earlier in the year. Although he just managed to escape the guillotine himself — unlike Madame du Barry and Lavoisier — he was incarcerated for over a year in the Grande Force debtors’ prison (where, ironically, Boullée had earlier contributed to the design).

In prison, Ledoux asked that he might have his drawings brought to him. He pointed out “Republican” projects and others “infused with liberty and humanitarian views” to his captors, and offered his designs for public monuments as gifts to the Revolution.³⁰ But they were unimpressed. He resigned himself instead to submitting proposals to the new architectural juries and rustling up potential clients among his fellow inmates. Upon his release in January 1795, he offered his services in vain to Napoleon. But the fashion had changed as well as the times. A new artistic faction slammed Boullée for the “ruinous extent of his projects” and Ledoux for “the multitude of his designs.”³¹ Theoretically minded or practical, it seemed you couldn’t win under the new regime.

After his release, Ledoux’s self-criticism seemed almost performative. Of Palladio’s villas outside Venice, he complained: “Those palaces that reproduce themselves in the clear waters of the Brenta . . . what have they done for the masses?”³² As for his own designs, he continued the work he had begun in prison towards a complete edition of his architecture, redrawing most of his early commissions to bring them closer to the ideal he had imagined for them. The edition was published in 1804, and he died two years later. It was here — fifteen years after the Revolution — that Ledoux recorded the hope that his “architecture parlante” might talk people into happily paying their taxes. Some hope.

Should we call this architecture revolutionary? Well, perhaps only in the sense that we would also call Antoine Lavoisier’s creation of modern chemistry, during the same years of chaos, a chemical revolution. It was a revolution, but the political revolution was neither concomitant nor necessary for its accomplishment. (Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh earlier changed English architecture by playing similar games with the rules of classicism, amid no equivalent British revolution.)

As early as 1800, though, reactionary theorists began to claim a link between Boullée’s and Ledoux’s “revolutionary” architecture and the French Revolution.³³ Their designs were vilified, but nevertheless their influence was felt by the new generation in France. Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, who had studied with Boullée, developed the use of geometric elements with a new modular economy. Jean-Jacques Lequeu went in the opposite direction, taking the precepts of “architecture parlante” to a parodic new level in projects such as a byre in the shape of a cow. Further afield, Benjamin Latrobe, who designed the United States Capitol building, and John Soane, who designed the Bank of England, drew on the Frenchmen’s precedent.

In the early twentieth century, the Swede Gunnar Asplund used classical form stripped to its geometric essentials combining square and rotunda to great effect in his Stockholm Public Library. Hannes Meyer, the communist second director of the Bauhaus, acclaimed Ledoux as the forerunner of the social architect, while not long after Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, took the grandiose scale of Boullée’s designs to new extremes in his plan to remodel Berlin as the Nazi “world capital”, Germania. In the latter part of the century, a fondness for overpowering pure geometry can be seen in the work not only of Louis Kahn but also Mario Botta, Michael Graves, Aldo Rossi, Ricardo Bofill and others. The circular Apple headquarters building — half again as large as Arc-et-Senans — and the pyramidal Palace of Peace and Reconciliation in Astana, Kazakhstan, both by Norman Foster, suggest the tendency shows no sign of waning in the twenty-first century.