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shafts are braided like wickerwork and radiate like a succession of tangents
from the same central ring. These are positioned on two superimposed
planes whose lines are connected with the rooms’ perimeter, in one
direction and the opposite direction respectively. This results in a torsion
effect, almost helical, and confirms the apparatus’s spatial dynamics. The
ensemble stands out from the polychromic background decorated by
Georges Meurant. The fine orthogonality of the pictorial composition
ornamenting the ceiling’s surface is visually animated via those metallic lines
rotating in the alternate direction round the drum. Those exo-structures’
sectional profile emphasises the plane elliptical outlines. The volume thus
created and the way it is set in the midst of rooms produce all signs and
expressions of constructive details. Taken jointly, drawings, assemblage
syntax and superimposition of the various structure levels, coatings and
completions create architectural effects properly speaking, as lifted from the
conception plan into real space.

The elliptical plan of the rooms generates a body of spatial qualities
combined with a whole network of potential meanings. Again, this
ambiguous shape generates the architectural value of this venue where
rulers meet. As always, this function cannot dry up the shape’s meaning;
shapes cannot be explained by their sole purpose. In architecture, functional
explanation and meaning are at best joined together but cannot be reduced
to one another. Hence, letting all effects caused by shapes into a spatial
act is a necessary thing, according to logical and aesthetical potentialities
alternately belonging to sensitive perception, to typology (which unites
figures to meanings, at least virtual ones), to constructive poetics and to
axiology. Ellipses were already used in Ancient Rome (the Colosseum) and
some of their finest architectural expressions are to be found in the baroque
era (Borromini in Rome, Puget in Marseille, Balthasar Neuman in Wurtzbourg
and in Vierzehheilingen, Dominikus Zimmerman in Steinhausen and in Wies).
They were extensively used for plane and vault drawings too, each time joint
effects of stretching and apparent enlargement were sought within very
constrained measures: perspective unfolds into space pleats and folds, along
lines both visually uninterrupted and interrupted by mutual penetration
between adjoining rooms. It could be said that ellipses seek to reach circular
perfection but at the cost of distorting or stretching perspective.

Ellipses allow for various understandings of their geometry. A historical
understanding acknowledges a cosmological expression in it (Kepler’s
planetary course and laws and Newton’s celestial mechanics and
gravitational theory) as well as a topological family (conical sections) and a
graphic construction (the curve generated from its double centre according
to a so-called gardener’s drawing). A whole register of mathematical,