What do you know about Jean-Jacques Lequeu? I’d be surprised if you know anything because he’s quite obscure. A rare find. He was French architect who lived through the Revolution only to die in poverty having never found fame. Almost nothing he drew was ever made but by bequeathing 800 drawings to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, he ensured his ideas would not be forgotten. And I’m glad they haven’t been.
Lequeu doesnt’ seem to have been bound by reality, which is an unusual trait for an architect. He plotted grand designs as if in the knowledge they would never be made. Take ‘The Island of Love and Fisherman’s Rest’ for example: – who designs an island?! Bond villains not included. Yet there it is, in Lequeu’s unerringly precise pencil work and ink, neat and crisp, as if actually it does exist somewhere and he is merely replicating it.
Do you know how many different kinds of animals Lequeu imagined living there? Quite a few, according to an online Morgan Library & Museum tour. There were to be lions, tigers, leopards, lynxes, foxes, otters, sable, tamarins, armadillos – even god damn unicorns. We know this because of the copious amounts of notes on the picture – another feature of his architectural work. It’s as though he couldn’t leave the exact functions or stories of the designs to chance. The purpose of the floating island? To give people a place for quiet repose from the two large military encampments either side of it (although quite how much peace they’d get with all those animals running around, I don’t know).
Painstakingly perfect and utterly peculiar – the drawings of Jean-Jacques Lequeuhttps://t.co/vnlEAQIOsvhttps://t.co/LybCj5j9c7#art #artist #JeanJacquesLequeu
— Bracco (@Brraczyy_) February 19, 2019
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Or consider the secret masonic initiation base Lequeu designed. It has an entrance hidden behind a statue (Bond villains again!) and great subterranean chambers themed around air, water and fire elements. These chambers would house trials which would push initiates close to death. Some even had complex mechanisms which could produce peals of thunder. Whichever of the initiates could survive the dark and emerge into the light would be welcomed into the Society of Sages and Most Courageous Men.