Death's pyramids and Boullée's domes

While BLDGBLOG just explored Etienne-Louis Boullée's Cenotaph for Newton – of which some better images appear here –


– complete with an internal view of the dome's constellational ceiling –


– Boullée also designed another, if substantially less well-known, cenotaph (complete, again, with monumentally over-sized dome and somewhat ridiculous, almost elephantiasis-stricken, pyramidal shell), revealed here in both elevation and section –


– as well as yet another tomb – or cénotaphe – here a kind of architectural remix of the first pyramid:


And even that wasn't the end. Boullée designed a tomb for Hercules; a tomb for Sparta; several funerary monuments; and a chapel of the dead that seems to have set the architectural temperature for the bunker-like, uninspired, and potentially even anti-Christian churches you now find all over today's middle America:


Well, actually, it looks an awful lot like the house Robert Venturi built for his mother –


– which I suppose says something about Robert Venturi.