Claude-Nicolas Ledoux

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux was the most radical French architect of the eighteenth century, and the tax barriers he built helped make him hated enough to be imprisoned. Born in Dormans in Champagne in 1736 to a modest family, he won a scholarship to Paris, trained under Jacques-François Blondel, and worked initially on engravings and small commissions. He built a fashionable practice in the 1760s and 1770s — hôtels for the aristocracy, the Château de Bénouville, and a theatre at Besançon whose steeply raked semicircular auditorium abolished the boxes that separated the classes and gave every seat a clear view, which was a social argument as much as an acoustic one. His style stripped classical architecture to elementary solids: cubes, cylinders, unfluted columns, bare wall surfaces and dramatic voids, with ornament almost entirely removed. It is usually grouped with Boullée's as architecture parlante, buildings whose form declares their purpose. From 1775 he designed the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, a semicircular industrial complex laid out so that the director's house commanded a view of every workshop and the workers' housing — a planned community intended as the first phase of an ideal city, Chaux, which he elaborated in drawings for decades and never built. Between 1785 and 1789 he built the barrières, some fifty toll gates in the wall around Paris where the hated octroi duty on goods entering the city was collected. They were monumental, expensive and universally resented, and several were attacked in July 1789. He was imprisoned during the Terror, released in 1795, and published his designs in 1804. He died in 1806.

• Lived: 1736 CE – 1806 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: architect