Panthéon

The Panthéon in Paris carries a massive, unadorned neoclassical dome that rises above the skyline of the Latin Quarter. King Louis the Fifteenth ordered its construction in seventeen fifty-seven to fulfill a vow he made while deathly ill, promising to replace a ruined abbey with a church dedicated to Saint Genevieve. The architect, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, designed the building to combine the scale of a cathedral with the clean lines of Roman temples, leaving the massive stone structure with almost no external decoration.