Etienne Louis Boullée was an 18th-century French architect who became famous for his designs that were never built, but were of such a vast scale that they would have been impossible to build in real life. Boullée developed a distinctive style of abstract geometric forms and produced a series of designs illustrating his ideas, making up an almost encyclopedic representation of the necessary institutions for an ideal State. While only one of his designs, the Hotel Alexandre, still exists, his visionary nature has earned him his place in history and still inspires architects today.

Boullée was a reluctant architect who originally dreamed of becoming a painter but turned to architecture at his father's insistence. It was rather as a theorist and a teacher that he achieved lasting influence, and he worked as a professor for over 50 years of his life. Boullée's call was to create buildings that would instinctively make us feel in a way that corresponded to their nature or purpose and that would shape moral values in the public. His designs often had little or no precedent in the past, and he sought to discover the properties of volumes and their precise emotional effects on humans. Boullée wrote down his theories in a book called "Essay on the Art of Architecture," in which he explained his various designs.