ABSTRACT
The employment of infrastructure on the Royal Saline at Arc-et-Senans built during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, near the forest of Chaux, and the plan for the Ideal City of Chaux described by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux in his treatise “Architecture Considered in Relation to Art, Mores, and Legislation” (1804), is the main input of this chapter. The Royal Saline at Arc-et-Senans designed by Ledoux for the French monarchy, with the purpose of standardizing the production of salt, incorporates industry as a mechanical process. His proposal includes not just the exploitation of resources, but also the wellbeing of society using infrastructure. In the Ideal City of Chaux, Ledoux draws and characterizes a city with the visionary thought of planning for an “economic utopia” at the end of the eighteenth century. In these projects, Ledoux shows us the use of infrastructure as a tool for the mediation between architecture and technology. Ledoux drew on the visual language of the picturesque in his descriptions and in his own drawings. His writings are a fusion of the physiocratic thinking, with the inclusion of the culture related to the woods, fields, and gardens, where the infrastructure plays an important role as a bond between them. Ledoux’s architecture and his contributions on social reform established a relation with nature through infrastructure. Ultimately, he considers nature as a “remedy to Modernity” within a context where industrialization seemed to be erasing the natural world.
