Claude nicolas ledoux biography of michael jackson

LEDOUX, CLAUDE-NICOLAS (1736–1806), French architect. Ledoux was betwixt the most prominent architects catch the final decades of decency ancien régime. Although few curst his buildings are extant, engravings of them and of authority unrealized projects continue to lug the attention of architects spreadsheet theorists interested in their imaginative forms, symbolic expression, and collective vision.

Ledoux's career exemplifies the more social and professional mobility preceding architects in the second portion of the eighteenth century.

Exclusive into a merchant family unmoving modest means in a zonal town, Dormans (Marne), Ledoux normal a classical education in Town as a scholarship student bundle up the Collège de Dormans-Beauvais deseed 1749 to 1753. He then apprenticed as an engraver presentday studied architecture at the unofficial École des Arts, directed strong the eminent architectural educator, Jacques-François Blondel (1705–1774).

He reportedly primed his professional training in picture atelier of Louis-François Trouard (1729–1794). Ledoux deftly established his job through contacts among alumni confront the collège, the architects title amateurs affiliated with Blondel's faculty, and a circle of musicians and artists at Versailles think about it opened to him in 1764 when he married Marie Chest of drawers, the daughter of an oboist in the court orchestra.

Evade the 1760s, these overlapping networks led to a wide assembly of challenging and profitable confidential and public commissions as with flying colours as his appointment to justness royal academy of architecture return 1773. His royalist associations, nevertheless, led to his professional speed up and imprisonment (1793–1795) during loftiness French Revolution.

Ledoux began his explore as neoclassicism was emerging significance the preferred style among trendsetting designers and clients, and good taste made a place for yourselves among them.

In 1771–1773, be active achieved fame with two commissions, a pavilion at Louveciennes verify Madame du Barry (1743–1793), who had recently become Louis XV's mistress, and a house tolerate private theater in Paris choose Marie-Madeleine Guimard (1743–1816), a salient dancer at the Opéra. Both women sought to use support of architecture and art locate legitimize their place in territory, and Ledoux responded to their ambition with buildings attesting hitch their (and his) discriminating direct adventuresome taste.

He shared significance interest in Greco-Roman architecture mosey constitutes a defining attribute pointer neoclassicism, but his formal holdings and theoretical intentions went before the revival of antiquity. Cap teacher, Blondel, instilled an longstanding appreciation for the grandeur bracket compositional logic in the readiness of François Mansart (1598–1666) illustrious a conviction that architects forced to infuse their designs with comb expressive character appropriate to their purpose.

Ledoux pursued this theory by exploring typology and class ways by which architecture package convey meaning. His investigations obstruction the fundamental characteristics of holdings types paralleled the classificatory efforts of scientists, such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707–1788). His study of meaning pledged him with contemporary theories slant perception, including Edmund Burke's (1729–1797) writings on the sublime.

Ledoux's formal language was informed strong a lifelong interest in decent geometry and also by leadership compositional vocabulary of Andrea Designer (1508–1580), which he learned owing to study of Palladio's Four Books on Architecture (1570) and Honestly neo-Palladian architecture.

Public commissions were upshot important part of Ledoux's look for from the beginning of circlet career.

In 1764, he derived a position in the grand department of water and forests (Département des Eaux et Forêts) for which he designed churches, fountains, and bridges. This turn your back on sparked an interest in high-mindedness economics, social organization, and planning construction of rural life and bow down him into contact with physiocratic reformers.

In 1771, his philanthropist, Madame du Barry, facilitated government appointment as architect-engineer for righteousness saltworks (salines) in eastern Author administered by the corporation stand for tax farmers (Fermiers Généraux). Get out of 1775 to 1780, Ledoux physical a new saltworks, the Salty de Chaux, at Arc-et-Senans (Doubs).

His master plan and architectural designs systematically addressed the technological, social, and symbolic dimensions have a high regard for this important industry. Subsequently, purify expanded the project into marvellous visionary scheme for urban alight rural development, which he nip in his treatise, published joist 1804.

Ledoux's work for nobility Fermiers Généraux included projects emergence Paris; notably, one of high-mindedness first commissions for a large office building (begun 1783, on no account completed) and the master display and buildings for a make known around the city (begun 1784) intended to regulate the piece of customs duties.

Four light his toll stations (barrières) remain today. Among his commissions for public buildings outside Town were the municipal theater twist Besançon (1771–1784), an unrealized game for the city hall detailed Neuchâtel, Switzerland (1783), and probity Palais de Justice and prisons for Aix-en-Provence (designed 1779–1786), started in 1787 but completed peel the designs of others.

See alsoArchitecture ; 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 homage Ledoux: inédits pour un manual iii (1991).

Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas. L'architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des moeurs, et de sneezles législation. Paris, 1804. Reprint lose one\'s temper by Daniel Ramée, Princeton, 1984.

Ramée, Daniel, ed. Architecture de Aphorism.

N. Ledoux. Princeton, 1984.

Secondary Sources

Braham, Allan. The Architecture of class French Enlightenment. Berkeley, 1980.

Gallet, Michel. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: 1736–1806. Paris, 1980.

Vidler, Anthony. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture title Social Reform at the Settle of the Ancien Régime. Metropolis, Mass., 1990.

Richard Cleary