Preliminary Study for the 'Maison d'un Cosmopolite'

This drawing, inscribed: 'Maggio 1782' is part of a series of projects from the 1780s and 1790s that try to think about the sphere as a built volume. The most famous is Boullée's Newton Cenotaph but it is one among many. It is not only the sphere that is fashionable at the time, but any kind of simple geometrical form: the square and the cube - also the pyramid, but the pyramid is associated with death.