“What’s in a Name? Etienne-Louis Boullée’s Redesign of the Bibliothèque du Roi, 1780-88” in Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 75, No. 2: Building Stories. 2021.

In the years 1780-88 French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée produced several iterations of a redesign of Louis XVI’s royal library, the Bibliothèque du Roi. While plans to construct Boullée’s building never materialized, the project was exhibited publicly in 1790 where, shedding its association with the recently toppled ancien régime, it forged a new alliance with the emergent Bibliothèque Nationale. Working from archival research with the architect’s extant drawings, this essay presents a case study in which architectural form and content came to tell a different story than the one according to which it had been initially conceived.