Claude Nicolas Ledoux

Claude Nicolas Ledoux is a Architecte and Urbaniste French born with Dormans the March 21st 1736 and died with Paris the November 18th 1806.

It was one of the most active architects at the end of the Ancien Mode, but most of constructions which it built were destroyed at the 19th century. It was one of the principal creators of the neo-classic style .

Biography

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux was born in 1736 in Dormans, in the Marne, wire of a modest Champagne merchant. His/her mother, Francoise Domino, and its godmother, Francoise Piloy, initiated it with the drawing, as it brings it back itself. The protection of the abbot of Sassenage enabled him to obtain a purse and to study in Paris with the Collège of Beauvais (1749 - 1753), where he discovered the old literatures. It was then employed in an engraver and studied architecture under the direction of Jacques François Blondel, which held it in high regard.

It made a training course in the cabinet of Pierre Telling of Ivry, and also entered in connection with that of Jean-Michel Chevotet, two Masters who could get useful relations to him among their rich person customers: thanks to Telling of Ivry, Ledoux entered in connections with the baron Crozat de Thiers which entrusted to him the installation of an apartment in its hotel of the Place Vendôme while, among the customers of Chevotet, it became acquainted with president Hocquart and entered the good graces of the president and her sister, Mrs. de Montesquiou.

Telling and Chevotet incarnated a Style Louis XV in the process of pass from mode but, undoubtedly via Louis-François Trouard, which had returned from Rome in 1757, Ledoux discovered ancient architecture, in particular the temples of Paestum, which were to exert a great influence on its esthetics, and the work of Palladio.

Early works (1762-1770)

In 1762, the Ledoux young person created for the coffee Godeau, Rue Saint-Honore, attended by officers, époustouflant it decoration preserved since 1969 at the Musée Carnavalet: on the walls, it drew up, as a Pilastre S, of the beams of summoned spades of helmets, between which it made alternate mirrors with broad panels decorated with trophies of weapons, of an original and bold drawing.

The following year, the marquis Anne-Pierre de Montesquiou-Fézensac called Ledoux in his vast domain of Mauperthuis, in the Brie. The architect rebuilds the castle at the top of a hill, created dancing waters supplied with an aqueduct, an orangery, a pheasantry and vast dependences whose only some vestiges remain today.

For the president Hocquart, it builds in 1764 with the roadway of Antin a house of style palladien decorated, like the castle of Mauperthuis, of a colossal order, forms that Ledoux was to frequently decline, and that in theory the strict French tradition condemned, faithful to the principle of superposition of the orders.

July 26th 1764 with Saint-Eustace, Ledoux married Marie Bureau, girl of a musician of the King. A Champagne friend, Marine Joseph Masson de Courcelles, obtained to him a place of architect of National Forestry Commission to replace Claude-Louis Daviler. For the account of this administration, he worked, between 1764 and 1770, to repair or build dependences of the forest field such as churches, bridges, well, fountains, schools, in the Tonnerrois, the Sénonais and the Bassigny. Among preserved testimonys of this activity one can quote the bridge of Marac, the Prégibert bridge with Rolampont, the churches of Fouvent-le-Haut, Rock-and-Raucourt, Rolampont, Cruzy-le-Châtel (nave, collateral and first order of the gate), the chorus of Saint-Etienne of Auxerre.

In Paris, Ledoux was made known in 1766 with the hotel of Hallwyll , in the district of the Marsh. The silent partners, Franz-Joseph d' Hallwyll, colonel of Swiss and his wife, Marie-Therese Demidorge, took care of close with the expenditure. Ledoux had to re-use part of the existing buildings and imagined two Colonnade S doric S leading to a Nymphée decorated ballot boxes reversed to hold place of the garden which the exiguity of the piece did not make it possible to arrange. It made paint a colonnade misleads of it the eye on the blind wall of the close convent of Carmélites, on the other side of the Rue of Montmorency, in order to extend the prospect, astute process which struck the contemporaries.

This relatively modest building enabled him to obtain in 1767 the order much more important of the sumptuous hotel of Uzès , built for the duke of Uzès Rue Montmartre. There too, Ledoux preserved the structures of an older building. The woodworks of the living room of company, carved by Joseph Métivier and Jean-Baptiste Boiston, are preserved at the Musée Carnavalet: they constitute an early example of the neo-classic style.

The Castle of Bénouville, in the north of Caen (department of the Apple-brandy), was built in 1768 - 1769 for the marquis de Livry. With its massive volumes, its vast peristyle, it is most important of the early works of Ledoux. One particularly notices the superb main staircase under cupola leading on the first floor.

Ledoux went on a journey in England in the years 1769 - 1771 where it could be familiarized with the palladianism, and its figures obliged such as the Serlienne S, of which it will use. It built many houses of style palladien, volume generally cubic and decorated of a peristyle which gave pace even to constructions of small size. In this kind, it builds with the roadway of Antin the house of the Guimard, celebrates dancer, the house of Miss Saint-Germain, Rue Saint-Lazare, the house of Attilly to the Poissonnière suburb, the house of the poet Saint-Lambert with Eaubonne, and especially the house of music of M {{me}} of Barry to Louveciennes, inaugurated on September 2nd 1771.

Maturity

Its reputation continuing, Ledoux started to build buildings much more ambitious, like the hotel of Montmorency to the roadway of Antin, which comprised in frontage a Ionic order on a rustic base and a roof with Italian decorated statues of eight Connétable S. But, noting the relative impoverishment of the nobility, it sought to approach the mediums of finance, with the means much more considerable.

In same time, it followed closely the operations of the administrations and thought of being put at their service, not scorning work at the border between competences of the architect and those of the engineer. Thanks to the protection of Mrs. of Barry, Ledoux became police chief with the Saltworks of the East, whose modernization was committed following the construction of the Canal of Burgundy. It was then promoted, in 1771, inspector of the saltworks of the State in Franche-Comté.

The Royal saltworks of Arc-and-Senans (1774-1779)

The salt was, formerly, a all the more essential food product as it was used to preserve certain food like the meat or fish. Its consumption supported an extremely unpopular tax, the Gabelle, perceived by the general Ferme. In Franche-Comté, because of existence in the basement of layers of rock salt, one found wells salted from which one extracted salt by boiling in boilers heated by wood.

With Saline-the-Baths or Montmorot, one had built the boilers close to the wells and one brought the wood of the close forests. Close to the first of these sites, the farmer general decided to try out another method: to build a factory of extraction of salt near the forest of Lime, to the place say the Valley of Love, between the villages of Arc and Senans, and to bring salt water by a drain to it.

Built between 1774 and 1779, the Royal saltworks of Arc-and-Senans , whose plans were approved by Louis XV and Trudaine, is the masterpiece of Ledoux. One can reach it by a rectilinear road traced through the Lime forest. The entry, preceded by a Péristyle by Doric order, of which the massive proportions, of pace archaïsante, are copied of Paestum, is placed in a cave which gives the impression to penetrate in a salt mine. The alliance of the columns, archetypal reason of the Neoclassicism, and the cave decorated with concretions, which evokes creations of the Renaissance, mark opposition, but also the articulation, between the elementary forces of the nature and the organizing genius of the man, who translates the reflections of the 18th century - one thinks in particular of Jean-Jacques Rousseau - on the relationship between the technique and nature.

The entry gives on a vast semicircular space surrounded by ten buildings which are ordered on the semicircumference and its diameter. On the circular part one finds cooperage, the forging mill and the two buildings apartment for the workmen; on the rectilinear part the workshops of extraction of salt (or bernes ) alternate with administrative buildings of which, in the center, the house of the director, who contained in the beginning the direction and the vault.

The significance of this plan is ambivalent: the circle, appears perfect, evokes the harmony of the ideal City, place of the harmony in common work, but he points out also the contemporary theories of the organization and the monitoring, particularly the Panoptisme of Jeremy Bentham.

The saltworks pain to enter a phase of industrial production and profitable, because of the competition of the salt-water marshes. After some not very profitable tests, it must definitively stop because of the French revolution in 1790. The dream of completion of a manufacture, conceived at the same time as a royal residence and a new city, end.

The theater of Besancon

Making frequent stays in Franche-Comté because of its functions, Ledoux was selected to build the theater of Besancon. The public theaters were still very few in France.

Hitherto, the use was that the noble ones only had sat, the people remaining upright. But this irrefutable fact caused criticisms to which Ledoux, which designed the theater like a communion of all the spectators, with character quasi-monk, wished to answer. It found in the intendant of Franche-Comté, Charles André of Coré, an enlightened spirit which agree to follow it. Thus the theater of Besancon was it to be the first whose floor was furnished with armchairs intended for the subscribers. The officers settled with the first balcony, the nobility occupied the first cabins and the middle-class the seconds, while the people had seats in the amphitheater: thus the theater could it be at the same time the place of the communion and that of a strict hierarchy of the classes.

With the assistance of the machinist Dart of Bosco, Servandoni, Ledoux raises equipped the cage with scene, to which it gave a great volume, of all the improvements. It was the first to dissimulate the musicians in an orchestra pit.

The building was inaugurated in 1784 and accepted praises. Ledoux presented then a project for the theater of Marseilles but it was not retained. In 1784, one preferred to him Pierre-Adrien Pâris for the construction of the new town hall of Neuchâtel. If the spectacular project that it conceived for the law courts and the prison of Aix-en-Provence accepted, afterwards many difficulties, a beginning of execution in 1786, it was stopped by the French revolution whereas the walls did not exceed the height of the ground floor.

Initiated in the mystical Freemasonry, Ledoux took part, with his/her friend William Beckford, with mysterious ceremonies. The female cabin of Frankness met in the hotel which it had built, Rue of the Petites-Ecuries, for Mrs. d' Espinchal. It from now on was well introduced into the medium of finance. For the treasurer of the constabularies, Praudeau de Chemilly, it drew the park of Bourneville close to Ferté-Milon. For the widow of the Genevese banker Thélusson, former associate of Necker, it built with the roadway of Antin a hotel which any Paris visited: nested in the middle of a landscape garden, it opened on the Rue of Provence by an immense porch in the shape of triumphal arch to the flattened piles; the cars penetrated until the interior of the hotel in a circular passage and the central living room, also circular, had in its center a rock which a colonnade wrapped.

Street Saint-Georges, for the Creole Hosten, Ledoux also built a whole of rental buildings according to a constructive principle which could develop ad infinitum. Street Saint-Lazare, around a warehouse of trade, it drew the gardens of Zephyr and Flora, whose Hubert Robert fixed appearance.

The architect of the Firm general

In the continuation of its inhabitant of Franche-Comté work, Ledoux had become architect of the general Ferme. For this company, it built an attic with salt with Compiegne and undertook to draw up a vast seat Rue of Bouloi in Paris.

Charles Alexandre de Calonne being General inspector of finances, the Farm obtained, on an idea of the chemist and farmer general Lavoisier, to draw up a barrier around Paris to limit the Contrebande which caused an important escape from the town dues: it was the famous Mur of the Farmers general which was to have 6 miles of turn (24 kilometers) and to comprise 60 collecting offices. Ledoux was charged to draw up these buildings, which he baptized pompeusement “ Propylées of Paris ” and to which he wanted to give a character of solemnity and magnificence while into practice putting his ideas on the bonds necessary between the form and the function.

To cross short to the protests of the Parisian population, the operation was carried out beating drum: 50 barriers of granting were built between 1785 and 1788. The majority were destroyed at the 19th century; there remains about it very a small number, of which those of the Villette and Place Denfert-Rochereau are the only ones not to be denatured. In certain cases, the door was framed of two identical buildings; in others, it comprised one building. The forms were attached to some great types: the rotunda (Heap, Reuilly); the rotunda surmounting a Greek cross (the Villette, Grated); the cube with four peristyle (Picpus); the Greek temple (Gentilly, Courcelles); the column (the Throne). With Star, the houses, flanked columns making alternate the cubic and cylindrical elements, evoked the building of the direction of Arc-and-Senans; to the office of the Catches, an apse opened by a peristyle recalled the house of of Barry and the hotel of Guimard. The order employed was generally the doric Greek. Ledoux had also multiplied rustic embossings.

Criticisms of a political nature addressed to this daring construction doubled esthetic criticisms for the architect, shown to have taken excessive freedoms with the ancient guns by commentators such as Dulaure or Quatremère de Quincy. Bachaumont denounces a “ monument of slavery and despotism ”. In its Table of Paris (1788), Louis-Sebastien Mercier stigmatizes “ the caves with the tax department metamorphosed in palate with columns ”, and exclaims: “ Ah! Mr Ledoux, you are a terrible architect! ”. Ledoux, delivered grazes with the opinion, was revoked about it of its functions in 1787 while Necker, succeeding Calonne, repudiated the company.

Difficult times

At the same time, work of the law courts of Aix-en-Provence was suspended, marked Ledoux to push the Treasury with ill-considered expenditure. When the Revolution burst, its rich person customers took the way of the emigration or perishes under the guillotine. He saw his stopped career and his projects while at the same time the first blows of pickaxe baited themselves on the already obsolete enclosure of the farmers general: if, as of June 1790, the general Farm had been able to install its employees in the houses of Ledoux, the granting was removed as of May 1791, making the work useless. Symbol in spite of him of tax oppression, Ledoux, which had constituted a handsome fortune and carried out large train, was stopped and thrown to the Prison of the Force.

It still gave a project of school of agriculture for the Duc of Lasted, his companion of captivity. Perhaps the intervention of the painter David, son-in-law of the Pécoul contractor, considerably enriched in the construction industry by the grantings, avoided the guillotine to him. But it lost his preferred daughter while the other brought a lawsuit to him.

Ledoux, returned to freedom, ceased building and attempted to prepare the publication of its complete work. Since 1773, it had started to make engrave its constructions and its projects but, because of the evolution of its style, it did not cease improving its drawings and the engravers were constantly to remake their boards. Ledoux evolved to an architecture increasingly more detailed, colossal, with vast increasingly smooth walls, increasingly rare openings, etc

During its imprisonment, it had started to write a text to accompany engravings. Only the first volume appeared of alive sound, in 1804, under the title the Architecture considered under the report/ratio of art, manners and the legislation . It presents the theater of Besancon, the saltworks of Arc-and-Senans and the town of Lime.

He died in Paris in 1806.

The utopian

Around the royal saltworks, Ledoux formalized its innovating designs of a town planning and a Architecture intended to make the company better, of an ideal Cité in charge of symbols and significances. He is considered, with Etienne-Louis Boullée and his projects of Cénotaphe of Newton or basilica, like one of the precursors of the current utopian.

As of 1775, it had presented to Turgot the first drafts of the town of Lime, whose royal saltworks were to form the center. The project, constantly improved, was engraved starting from 1780.

Radical utopian of architecture, teaching with the royal School of the fine arts, it created an architectonic singular Order, a news column made of a cylindrical and cubic stone alternation superimposed on the plastic effect seizing. The time is then with the return to the antique, the distinction and the examination, the taste for the style " rustique".

Principal works

Constructions

  • Decoration of the military Coffee (or Coffee Godeau ), Street Saint-Honore, Paris, 1762 (Museum Carnavalet, Paris)
  • Castle of Mauperthuis (current Department of Seine-et-Marne), 1763 (destroyed)
  • Hotel of the president Hocquart , 66 Street of the Roadway of Antin, Paris, 1764 - 1765 (destroyed)
  • Hotel of Hallwyll , 28 Street Michel-the-Count and 15 Street of Montmorency, Paris, 1766: It is the only private construction of Ledoux which remained in the capital.
  • Hotel of Uzès , Street Montmartre, Paris, 1767 (destroyed about 1870): The woodworks of the living room of company are preserved since 1968 at the Carnavalet museum.
  • Castle of Bénouville , Bénouville, Apple-brandy (close to Caen), 1768 - 1769: Property of the general advice of the Apple-brandy, it shelters today the Regional court of the accounts.
  • Hotel of the president de Gourgues , 53 Street Saint-Dominique, Paris (rebuilt)
  • House of M {{lle}} Guimard , fitted of Antin, Paris (destroyed)
  • House of Miss Saint-Germain , Street Saint-Lazare, Paris, 1769 - 1770 (destroyed)
  • House Saint-Lambert , Eaubonne (destroyed)
  • House of Attilly , suburb Poissonnière, Paris, 1771 (destroyed)
  • House of music of M {{me}} of Barry , Louveciennes, 1770 - 1771 (remains, but rather largely denatured: it was moved and raised of a stage in the Thirties by Charles Mewès for the perfumer François Coty)
  • Hôtel of Montmorency , angle of the Rue of the roadway of Antin and current the Boulevard of the Nasturtiums, Paris, 1772 (destroyed): The woodworks of the circular living room are preserved at the Boston Museum off Fine Arts.
  • Royal saltworks of Arc-and-Senans (1774 - 1779) (classified under the historic buildings of France and with the world heritage of UNESCO in 1982)
  • Theater of Besancon , 1778 - 1784
  • Hotel Thélusson , Street of Provence, Paris, 1778 (destroyed in 1826 during the prolongation of the Street Laffitte)
  • Hotel of Mrs. d' Espinchal , Street of the Petites-Ecuries, Paris (destroyed)
  • Park of Bourneville , Ferté-Milon (Aisne)
  • Attic with salt of Compiegne (Oise)
  • Seat of the general Farm , Street of Bouloi, Paris
  • Houses and barriers of the Granting of Paris (see Pregnant Farmers general) (1785).

Projects

Among its other designs “visionaries”:

Publications

In 1804 is published an active volume including/understanding of works of 1768 with 1789: the Architecture considered under the report/ratio of art, manners and the legislation .

Gallery

Actually produced buildings

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