LES SALINES ROYALES

On long summer afternoons in the South of France, we children had to ‘rest’ in our bedrooms; I would sneak into my father’s library to pore over his massive copies of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s 1804 L'Architecture, fascinated by the bird’s eye view, below, of the circular heart of his Cité Idéale de Chaux. I later discovered that part of it was actually built, 1774-79, and still there, so that driving from London to Italy, I stopped there, at Arc-et-Senans in the Franche-Comté, near Switzerland, staggered by the magnificence of the old Royal Saltworks, my childhood dream a reality. The entrance, above, with its massive portico, its side buildings (lock-up, guardhouse, bakery) with three tiny windows formed by sculpted, overturned urns dripping salt; below, the grotto-niche within the portico, where the disc over the door was once painted with the royal arms.

Above: the Director’s building, combining his residence, the offices, and a chapel for the 200 workers, imagined by Ledoux as happy and uplifted by the calm beauty and paternal embrace of his buildings, like the vast, flanking sheds in which they sweated over furnaces for salt extraction. Below, the semi-circle of buildings for workers’ accommodation, facing the Director in loyal submission. Ledoux worked for Mme du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress, other ancien régime luminaries, and the Ferme Générale, the private taxation body and his clients for both the saltworks and hated, new customs Barrières around Paris, one of many revolution-provoking gestures, built 1785-88. After a year imprisoned as a royalist, 1793-4, in the shadow of the guillotine, came ignominy, although his last 13 years, perfecting his architectural work for publication and posterity, improving old projects and inventing new, fantasy ones, secured him immortal fame.

Sun setting on the rusticated columns of the Director’s building, above, with the Jura mountains in the distance and, below, the small stables behind it, with a hayloft in the upper part of the arch. The complex has a small museum of Ledoux’s work, with beautifully crafted white models of designs built and unbuilt. Below right, one of two clerks' dwellings, this one now providing accommodation for wandering obsessives like me, overjoyed to wake in the morning and look out a bedroom window at this view, above right.