SOCKS

An online magazine of Art, Architecture, Media, Culture, Sounds, Territories, Technology)

  • Media
  • Art
  • Architecture
  • Culture
  • Sounds
  • Territories
  • Visual Atlas

Jean-Jacques Lequeu: a Visionary at the Age of Reason

March 23, 2014 by Mariabruna Fabrizi 1 Comment

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"  Lequeu

The “Temple de la Terre”

 

 

 

The "Temple consacré à l'Egalité" Laqueu

The “Temple consacré à l’Egalité” is composed of a globe emerging from a circular portico. In the huge empty interior, on the base, there is only a much smaller globe topped by a statue, a small sculptural composition in contrast to the immense void. This design was devised in the year II of the Revolution to glorify a revolutionary ideal.

The "Monument to the exercise of the sovereignty of the people" Lequeu

The “Monument to the exercise of the sovereignty of the people”

 

 

Lequeu-03

 

 

Lequeu-04

 

 

 

Lequeu-05

 

 

Lequeu-06

 

Most of his drawings, including his erotic series can be found today at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Images via Pruned 

Related Posts

  • Why Start an Architecture Journal in an Age That is Disgusted with (Most of Them), by Françoise Fromonot

    Françoise Fromonot is an architect, teacher and critic. She is professor at the ENSA Paris-Belleville,…

  • Les Immatériaux (an exhibition by Jean François Lyotard at the Centre Pompidou, 1985)

    30 years are passed since a historic exhibition took place at the Centre Pompidou (specifically…

  • The Funambulist Papers Vol.1 and a crowdfunding campaign for the Archipelago project

    Our friend Léopold Lambert, author of the Funambulist blog and a writer who's often/quoted/here/at/Socks, just…

  • People in Order

    By Lenka Clayton and James Price (Part of www.portablefilmfestival.com). People in Order's Age is part…

  • Review: The Draftery Fig. 02 – Narrative Exhortations

    It is now clear that after some years of normative drawings and shiny renderings like…

Trackbacks

  1. Fantastically Hypothetical Buildings on Paper, Drawn by Two Soviet Architects – Slate Magazine (blog) | Architecture says:
    September 16, 2015 at 11:19 pm

    […] 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 […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr

Socks is a non-linear journey through distant territories of human imagination.

About | Visual Atlas | Topics

We are Mariabruna Fabrizi and Fosco Lucarelli from Microcities. Ask us anything

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr


SOCKS is a project by Fosco Lucarelli and Mariabruna Fabrizi of MICROCITIES, Architecture Cityscape, Landscape.
Except where otherwise noted, the content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Whenever possible we try to attribute content (images, videos, and quotes) to their creators and original sources. Please feel free to write us if you notice misattributions or wish something to be removed.
SOCKS is powered by WordPress.