Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, (born March 21, 1736, Dormans-sur-Marne, Fr.—died Nov. 19, 1806, Paris), French architect who developed an eclectic and visionary structure linked with nascent pre-Revolutionary social beliefs.
Ledoux studied beneath J.-F. Blondel and L.-F. Trouard. His imaginative woodwork at a café introduced him to the discover of society, and he quickly grew to become a modern architect. In the 1760s and early ’70s he designed many non-public homes in an revolutionary Neoclassical type for the upper social circles in France. Among such few surviving works are the Pavilion Hocquart (1764–70), the Château de Bénouville, Normandy (1770), and the well-known chateau for Madame du Barry at Louveciennes (1771–73).
In the mid-1770s Ledoux took on the planning for a brand new saltworks and its surrounding city on the Salines de Chaux, at Arc-et-Senans. He devised a radial concentric plan for the settlement, with rings of staff’ dwellings enclosing a central salt-extraction manufacturing facility. Less than half of the mission was accomplished, however the remaining buildings present Ledoux’s hanging simplifications of cubes and cylinders to create squat, large, boldly rusticated (rough-hewn) variations of classical constructing varieties. His structure of the city to each facilitate financial manufacturing and guarantee wholesome and joyful circumstances for the employees anticipated related planning efforts by Robert Owen and different Nineteenth-century Utopian socialists.
Ledoux’s Theatre of Besançon (1771–73) was a revolutionary design in its provision of seats for the atypical public in addition to for the higher lessons. The non-public homes he designed within the 1780s had brilliantly eccentric options, together with odd layouts, discontinuous elevations, and a hanging use of Doric architectural parts. Ledoux’s most essential public mission within the final section of his profession was to design 60 tollhouses located on the metropolis gates of Paris. He turned what may need been modest customs places of work right into a collection of monumental gates and different buildings known as the Portes de Paris. Of the 50 such tollhouses, or barrières, truly constructed (1785–89) within the 4 years previous the French Revolution, solely 4, together with the well-known Barrière de la Villette, nonetheless survive. In the barrières Ledoux took his curiosity in squat, colossal geometric kinds to its furthest extent, fashioning rotundas, Greek temples, porticoes, and vaulted apses with rusticated masonry and Doric columns. The price of those buildings proved ruinous to the general public treasury, nonetheless, and he was dismissed from his mission in 1789. Many of the barrières had been subsequently torn down by mobs of resentful taxpayers through the Revolution. Ledoux himself was arrested through the Terror, and this occasion and the deaths of a number of members of his household ended his energetic profession as an architect. After his launch he spent his final years writing and compiling L’structure considérée sous le rapport de l’artwork, des moeurs et de la législation (1804; “Architecture Considered with Respect to Art, Customs, and Legislation”), which accommodates his personal engravings of his works.
Ledoux was probably the most prolific, productive, and authentic architect of late 18th-century France. The highly effective and brilliantly simplified geometry of his buildings held little enchantment for the next generations, nonetheless, and wholesale demolitions and vandalism through the Nineteenth century left solely a handful of his works nonetheless standing. Among them is his saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, which UNESCO designated a World Heritage website in 1982.