Underground of a Gothic House, from Civil Architecture

Six months before dying in poverty, the visionary French architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu (1757-1826), after failing to find a buyer, donated hundreds of his drawings to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. His detailed works describe all sorts of themes – imaginary architectures, animals, characters, erotism –, creating fantastic worlds and showing great skill and creativity. Inspired in the Classical age and the Enlightenment, Lequeu’s drawings reflect the opportunities and hardships of his time, and a vision of architecture that challenges academic frontiers, to the point of being compared with figures like Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux...
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