The attempt to join rural reform and industrial progress in an encyclopedic vision, typical of the Enlightenment: a didactic, innovative architect, often at the center of critical debate.
The architecture of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) has always been the subject of fierce critical debate due to the innovative character of its style. The French architect and treatise writer was the main protagonist of the architectural revolution that developed in France in the current of the 18th-century Enlightenment. His projects, based on the combination of elementary geometric forms, aim to create a speaking architecture: in this sense, the most vivid examples are the house for river watchmen and the refuge for forest rangers, designed for an ideal village in the park of Maupertuis.
This monograph analyzes the works: from the early output of hôtels and châteaux in 1765-1780, to the production facilities, to the project for the ideal city of Chaux (1780-1804), where we see an evident attempt to translate the progressive vision of the Enlightenment into architectural terms, in a technological and aesthetic solution to social problems.