“Soufflot’s principal aim in the church, he claimed, was to unite ‘the structural lightness of Gothic churches with the purity and magnificence of Greek architecture.’ The extreme structural economy of the building and its French rationalist bias for columnar structure is apparent in the plan. Built on a Greek-cross scheme of Renaissance roots, its five domes—schematically not unlike S. Marco in Venice or St. Front in Périgueux—are supported by ranks of widely spaced, slender columns and light, triangular crossing piers. The interior reveals the Classical ‘magnificence’ of form that Soufflot preferred in the shape of an elegant Corinthian order, fully detailed yet extremely crisp and pure, that supports slender arches. Much of the vaulting is cut away in late Baroque manner, although in their near-skeletal lightness, these upper parts were also inspired by the Gothic. The complex transitional position of Soufflot is clearly evidenced in the exterior of the Panthéon, which is so much more massive and austere than the interior that one would not naturally link them as two aspects of a single building. Even in its original state, when opened by triads of large, now-walled-up windows (which made the interior still more buoyant), the exterior approximated the nascent Neoclassical ideal of discrete, austere, geometric blocks.”

— Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p409.

Details

Adress: Place du Pantheon, 75001 Paris, France.Telephone, 43.54.34.51.

Originally a church, now a tomb for people including Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola.