Today we treat architecture. You may not yet appreciate its importance now. You are all so young … But, once in power, you will remember this lesson.

Please welcome Monsieur Étienne-Louis Boullée.

Young minds. It is a pleasure to find myself among you.

I have raised buildings that citizens enter as ants, ants unaware of the magnificent structure they are part of. But when they leave again, they will see the hill and appreciate the beauty of its encompassing dome.

My Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton. A perfect sphere, one hundred and fifty meters in diameter. Within, a single sarcophagus, modest, almost invisible.

When facing the universe even the geniuses become very small. But they belong. They belong to something even greater than themselves.

The shell of the sphere is pierced by small apertures, so calibrated that visitors, standing upon the floor of the interior, behold above them the firmament. The stars. The very heavens.

It is, I believe, the only edifice in Europe which contains, by design, the cosmos.

Where has it been erected?

In London. Where else?

A visitor's pass is just five quid.

We should visit it.

And Soho! So, ho!

Perhaps Monsieur Boullée might continue.

Thank you. Yes.

In the early 1780s I designed an entire metropolis. Forward-looking. Eternal. It's where they reign today.

Reign!

It is dominated by a sphere. What else really? The sphere is universe. It is the belly.

It is the belly of the architect. And it is the belly of the ruler. The sphere becomes the ruler and the ruler becomes the sphere.

The universe.

Is it in Paris?

Where else?

I couldn't find it.

(turning to the Instructor) Maybe you should teach them how to use Google Maps.

We must. But, please, continue.

The great principle which I beg you to retain is that architecture is not addressed to the inhabitant of the present. It is addressed to the imagination of the future. It is a proposition for those who stand before it.

Which proposition?

That they are small. That the State is vast. That there exists, above them and around them, a magnitude to which they must conform or be reduced to nothing. The dome speaks to them in the language of Reason and of Nature, and tells them gently what they are. A part.

A part.

My successors understood this. They learned from me. My dear friend Albert intended to construct the most colossal sphere of them all. A pity, that history denied him the occasion.

But we have the drawings.

He would have outdone even myself. The advancement in building materials might have made it possible.

With concrete I would have been able to surpass Newton. With concrete I would have been able to defy gravity.

I worry about the apertures.

How else could the entirety of the universe be seen?

I think he worries about the rain.

The reign?

The concrete.