Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas (1736–1806)

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LEDOUX, CLAUDE-NICOLAS (1736–1806)

LEDOUX, CLAUDE-NICOLAS (1736–1806), French architect. Ledoux was among the most prominent architects of the final decades of the ancien régime. Although few of his buildings are extant, engravings of them and of his unrealized projects continue to draw the attention of architects and theorists interested in their inventive forms, symbolic expression, and social vision.

Ledoux's career exemplifies the increased social and professional mobility of architects in the second half of the eighteenth century. Born into a merchant family of modest means in a provincial town, Dormans (Marne), Ledoux received a classical education in Paris as a scholarship student at the Collège de Dormans-Beauvais from 1749 to 1753. He subsequently apprenticed as an engraver and studied architecture at the private École des Arts, directed by the eminent architectural educator, Jacques-François Blondel (1705–1774). He reportedly completed his professional training in the atelier of Louis-François Trouard (1729–1794). Ledoux deftly established his career through contacts among alumni of the collège, the architects and amateurs affiliated with Blondel's school, and a circle of musicians and artists at Versailles that opened to him in 1764 when he married Marie Bureau, the daughter of an oboist in the court orchestra. From the 1760s, these overlapping networks led to a wide range of challenging and profitable private and public commissions as well as his appointment to the royal academy of architecture in 1773. His royalist associations, however, led to his professional ruin and imprisonment (1793–1795) during the French Revolution.

Ledoux began his practice as neoclassicism was emerging as the preferred style among trend-setting designers and clients, and he made a place for himself among them. In 1771–1773, he achieved fame with two commissions, a pavilion at Louveciennes for Madame du Barry (1743–1793), who had recently become Louis XV's mistress, and a house and private theater in Paris for Marie-Madeleine Guimard (1743–1816), a prominent dancer at the Opéra. Both women sought to use patronage of architecture and art to legitimize their place in society, and Ledoux responded to their ambition with buildings attesting to their (and his) discriminating and adventuresome taste. He shared the interest in Greco-Roman architecture that constitutes a defining attribute of neoclassicism, but his formal sources and theoretical intentions went beyond the revival of antiquity. His teacher, Blondel, instilled an enduring appreciation for the grandeur and compositional logic in the buildings of François Mansart (1598–1666) and a conviction that architects must infuse their designs with an expressive character appropriate to their purpose. Ledoux pursued this attitude by exploring typology and the ways by which architecture can convey meaning. His investigations into the fundamental characteristics of building types paralleled the classificatory efforts of scientists, such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–1788). His study of meaning engaged him with contemporary theories of perception, including Edmund Burke's (1729–1797) writings on the sublime. Ledoux's formal language was informed by a lifelong interest in three-dimensional geometry and also by the compositional vocabulary of Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), which he learned through study of Palladio's Four Books on Architecture (1570) and English neo-Palladian architecture.

Public commissions were an important part of Ledoux's practice from the beginning of his career. In 1764, he obtained a position in the royal department of water and forests (Département des Eaux et Forêts) for which he designed churches, fountains, and bridges. This experience sparked an interest in the economics, social organization, and architecture of rural life and brought him into contact with physiocratic reformers. In 1771, his patron, Madame du Barry, facilitated his appointment as architect-engineer for the saltworks (salines) in eastern France administered by the corporation of tax farmers (Fermiers Généraux). From 1775 to 1780, Ledoux realized a new saltworks, the Saline de Chaux, at Arc-et-Senans (Doubs). His master plan and architectural designs systematically addressed the technical, social, and symbolic dimensions of this important industry. Subsequently, he expanded the project into a visionary scheme for urban and rural development, which he presented in his treatise, published in 1804. Ledoux's work for the Fermiers Généraux included projects in Paris; notably, one of the first commissions for a large office building (begun 1783, never completed) and the master plan and buildings for a wall around the city (begun 1784) intended to regulate the collection of customs duties. Four of his toll stations (barrières) remain today. Among his commissions for public buildings outside Paris were the municipal theater in Besançon (1771–1784), an unrealized project for the city hall of Neuchâtel, Switzerland (1783), and the Palais de Justice and prisons for Aix-en-Provence (designed 1779–1786), begun in 1787 but completed to the designs of others.

See also Architecture ; Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc ; City Planning ; France, Architecture in ; Mansart, François ; Neoclassicism ; Palladio, Andrea, and Palladianism .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Gallet, Michel, ed. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Unpublished Projects. Berlin, 1992. Translation of Architecture de Ledoux: inédits pour un tome iii (1991).

Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas. L'architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des moeurs, et de la législation. Paris, 1804. Reprint edited by Daniel Ramée, Princeton, 1984.