Claude-Nicolas Ledoux endowed industry with a central role in his aesthetic imaginary and his vision of progress. Ledoux’s royal salt works at Chaux – both the first project built in 1778 and the subsequent unrealised ideal town (pictured above) – not only proposed to maximise industrial efficiency but to instill social harmony. Carefully study the plans and buildings of Ledoux’s original salt works and his later ideal town (a utopian plan). How does the specific placement of buildings organise both work and social life? How do certain kinds of geometries serve to relate labour and surveillance? What spatial, social, or indeed philosophical considerations either unite or differentiate the original salt works and the subsequent ideal town? The ideal town of Chaux was, as the architectural historian Barry Bergdoll puts it, “to be such a fine-tuned instrument, a city in nature, that it would call forth the highest capacities of human nature”. What does this mean in the context of Enlightenment thought? Try to contextualise Ledoux’s design in the spirit of late-eighteenth century social reform, technical innovation, and architectural invention. Draw where necessary on Ledoux’s treatise Architecture Considered in Relation to Art, Morals, and Legislation (1804). What were the aesthetic, cultural, political, or technological stakes of Ledoux’s plans given the realities of, say, the royal salt monopoly (the gabelle) under the ancien régime, the presumably liberating power of the early Industrial Revolution (especially in light of Ledoux’s avowed Anglophilia), or indeed the political hopes of the French Revolution and consequent calls to reinvent society?
