When Immanuel Kant observed in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) that the view of the starry heavens provoked the sentiment of the sublime, he was gazing into the epicenter of the potential relationship of architecture to the sublime. Indeed, several years before, in 1784, the French architect Étienne-Louis Boullée had sought to honor Sir Isaac Newton for having discovered the single principle that regulated the workings of the universe – gravity – by burying him, or more properly speaking, his manes (spirit) “within his discovery,” that is, within an architectural rendition of the cosmos (Figure 15.1). Boullée wanted to place Newton’s sarcophagus at the bottom of a vast spherical cavity whose dome was to have been punctured with small holes so as to allow the sun to shine through in the guise of twinkling stars, such that the viewer would experience an artificial rendition of the most quintessential of sublime scenes in the presence of Newton’s manes.

Both Kant’s observation and Boullée’s project anticipate Charles Blanc’s later insight that would relate the sublime to infinity and the absolute: “Issuing from the depths of nature, emanating from the divine, the sublime is absolute, imperishable…. The sublime is like a sudden glimpse of infinity.” Blanc, in turn, was paraphrasing Longinus, who, in similar words, conveys another aspect of the sublime: the immediate and intense feeling that it produces or that characterizes it. The sublime, he writes, is a feeling in response to some stimulus: “That … is grand and lofty, which the more we consider, the greater Ideas we conceive of it; whose Force we cannot possibly withstand; which immediately sinks deep, and makes such Impressions on the Mind as cannot be easily worn out or effaced.” In the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), Kant repeatedly emphasizes that the sublime involves a feeling rather than an idea and that it resides not in the object but in a “disposition of the mind” (CJ 5:265).