Jean-Jacques Lequeu (Architect, 1757-1825) worked in France at the same time of Etienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799) and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) and shared with them his faith in science and similar visionary approach, but not an equal fame. His research was even more unorthodox and imaginative, if possible, as his eccentric designs combined completely reinvented elements from several different styles and epochs.
Lequeu began his career as an architect designing buildings inspired by the antiquity for rich families, but after the Revolution he had to give up the free profession and became a civil servant working as a surveyor and a cartographer until his retirement in 1815. His design skills were then directed to what we might call today “paper architecture“, as he produced several utterly imaginative and extravagant projects that were never realized (and that weren’t even destined to be). Apart from his eccentric creations and “erotic” drawings, he also drew interesting new types for “revolutionary architecture”, along the line of more famous examples by Boullée.
The “Temple de la Terre”
The “Monument to the exercise of the sovereignty of the people”
Most of his drawings, including his erotic series can be found today at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Images via Pruned
[…] draftsman Giovanni Battista Piranesi; French visionary architects Étienne-Louis Boullée and Jean-Jacques Lequeu; and Englishman John Soane, that shared Brodsky and Utkin’s fascination along with the […]