In this book, Claude Nicolas Ledoux's influential buildings and designs are presented and interpreted both aesthetically and historically, reflecting their complex character between emblem and instrument, spectacle and shelter, ideal and utopia. His most well-known projects - the Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans, the tollgates of Paris, the ideal city of Chaux - reveal the architect's allegiance to the twin principles of classicism and utopianism. Throughout his lifetime, Ledoux was marked by his position as a self-made man, achieving a fully-fledged and ambitious vision of the role of the modern architect.

The author Antony Vidler, Dean of the Cooper Union architecture school in New York, is one of the leading architectural historians and theorists and an eminent authority of French revolutionary and enlightment architecture and the life and work of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.

In this book, Claude Nicolas Ledoux's influential buildings and designs are presented and interpreted both aesthetically and historically, reflecting their complex character between emblem and instrument, spectacle and shelter, ideal and utopia. His most well-known projects - the Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans, the tollgates of Paris, the ideal city of Chaux - reveal the architect's allegiance to the twin principles of classicism and utopianism. Throughout his lifetime, Ledoux was marked by his position as a self-made man, achieving a fully-fledged and ambitious vision of the role of the modern architect.

The author Antony Vidler, Dean of the Cooper Union architecture school in New York, is one of the leading architectural historians and theorists and an eminent authority of French revolutionary and enlightment architecture and the life and work of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux.