Spheres: Then and Now
Étienne-Louis Boullée’s proposed cenotaph for Isaac Newton. Hot air balloons. London’s time ball. Globes, poetic and terrestrial, in Milton and maritime history. Habermas’s idea of public vs private social space. Expansive and holistic by their very nature, spheres appeared across the long and deep eighteenth century. Both literal and physical, spheres and circles theorized material, philosophical, spatial, artistic, and social interactions in the period, containerizing concepts that we often take as given in the twenty-first century.
