Analysis of Royal Library Design by Etienne Louis Boullée

Etienne Louis Boullée’s was commissioned to expand the Royal Library in 1780. Although his designs were never executed, his perspective drawing of the Royal Library makes a strong statement about Enlightenment ideals, the importance of regularity and effect of lighting in grandiose designs.

Boullée’s design for the reading room includes a vast, barrel-vaulted ceiling. Boullée promoted striking and original effects of light and shadows. This is portrayed in the library via an open portion of ceiling, allowing the light of day to penetrate the room giving life and movement. Likewise, Boullée suggests a modernized way of arranging by staking galleries of books over flat wall-cases. In his treatise, Boullée explains his intent, "immense basilica lighted by a skylight at the top of the vault. . . human chain of persons placed on various levels distributed so as to pass the books from hand to hand". Boullée promotes regularity, symmetry and variety in the reading room. He states that “…we find gentle volumes pleasant whereas those that are angular and hard we find repugnant”. Boullée demonstrated this by using the Greek and Roman orders to combine classical elements at a grandiose scale for a sublime dramatic effect. Advocating that proportion alone does not constitute beauty in architecture but rather regularity, symmetry and variety together resulted in proportion.

Boullée introduces the study of written words in the mid-ground area of his library’s interior. The group of men have opened up books and long scrolls around a tiny table. Under the ambient light permeating the rest of the room, scholarly texts were held together inside the balanced symmetry of a ‘simple volume’ that calls for reflection to their true origins in the geometry of nature. The Essai sur l’art which features the Royal Library was completed shortly after the events of the French Revolution, and its content certainly belongs to the enlightenment ideals and politics of the time. In the reading rooms utopian design, Boullée attempts to combine the basis of pure geometry, in order to create the foundation of an ideal city. This consists of large, exterior and interior public spaces and monumental buildings that express a symbolic, artistic, political and ethical content.

In the context of Boullée’s designs of pure architectural spaces and shapes, it is ascertained that perfect and regular geometrical figures, such as the basilica in the Royal Library, create the ideas of harmony, perfection and symmetry within the human mind, thus urging the soul to broaden its intuitions and embrace the whole cosmos. The task of Boullée was not merely to search out new forms but also and primarily to discover their artistic effect. Boullée made it possible to see further into what had once been, in hopes of helping others experience the “noble transports” and “sublime thought” that would inspire the unknown journey ahead.