'Visionary' architecture is far to be the best thing France offered to the world...
Not sure I had ever heard of that Mr Boullée though, thanks to enlarge my French culture, I prefer XIXth century French architects of the Baltard kind which brought the industrial architecture into all kinds of buildings...
A
lot of French
marchés couverts have been built on this model in France.
Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris by Henri Labrouste is an other big example:
But French love big intellectual theories (at least they used to...) that could rule the world, such as Le Corbusier (1st pic) practiced, that Mr Boullée seem to fall in that, terrible lack of pragmatism, but I can understand the appeal (I'm French
), it might have openned some intellectual ways...