[MUSIC PLAYING]
ERIKA NAGINSKI: One of the central themes of architectural history is the way in which architecture relates
to its own representation, whether this is through visual material; its conventions:
orthography, perspective; or whether it is through language.
I want to focus today on a period in the late 18th century, and on a group of architects
called the visionary architects.
Visionary, because not only did they rethink architecture's relationship to representation,
to words and to images, but also because they began to invent utopia.
We're going to look at the works of Ledoux, and, especially, of Étienne-Louis Boullée and
what eventually was called "architecture parlante," or "speaking architecture."
So I want to begin here with one of these visionary architects by the name of
Claude Nicolas Ledoux.
He is someone who is probably best known today for having built the first modern factory.
And this factory was conceived as a place to manufacture salt in the late 18th century.
And I want to start there because I want to make a point about one of the more curious
aspects of 18th-century architecture.
Today, when we think of the architectural process, an architect has an idea, they set
it down on paper, they will build a model.
They move through a sequence of highly conventionalized representations:
the plan, the section, the elevation.
Sometimes they will come up with images that are more perspectival, that evoke somehow
a real through the image.
And, lastly, if they're lucky, the building gets built.
One of the strange things about the late 18th century is that you'll see architects reverse
the process.
They will go through the commission.
They will build a building.
And from the real, they will imagine a fictional architecture.
So, for example, if we take the Saltworks, which today actually received the status of
a World Heritage Monument through UNESCO.
It exists.
It was built.
It functioned as a factory in the late 18th and into the 19th century.
But what Claude-Nicolas did is that he took that factory and he imagined an ideal city.
He imagined a utopia that he called the Ideal City of Chaux.
So I want to grapple with this idea in the late Enlightenment.
But I want to do so by going back in time and looking at a broad range of examples.
And in fact, the tradition of the ideal city.
So let's begin by looking at another book, a book that Ledoux published in 1804, towards
the end of his life, as a kind of opus to his own work.
He entitled it "Architecture Considered in Relation to the Arts, to Social Mores, and
to Legislation."
And, in this book, you will find a map and a perspectival view of the Ideal City of Chaux
that he extrapolated from his saltworks factory.
Now these are two different visual strategies.
A map is topographic.
The second is really a bird's eye perspective, as if we were flying over the town and seeing
it unfold into the countryside.
But if we compare them, there are other differences that strike us.
So when you look at the map, what you see is a highly geometric configuration.
It's strongly felt in this cartographic setting.
And the theater of production-- of the production of salt-- is sitting right in the middle here
in a fully enclosed, heavily circumscribed oval.
It's as if the town were actually fortified.
And in fact, it is.
The ramparts are indicated in the plan, and even in the legend.
We see that the saltworks are identified at the heart of it all.
We learn from the list on the right-- the insert here-- that a parish church appears
on the right.
To the left, there is a hall of justice.
The oval shape is so circumscribed that it actually casts a shadow on the landscape.
It's a highly paranoid configuration, as though to get into the city is an act of enclosure.
So, we have only two roads to get in and out of town.
And the sense that these roads are highly sort of a diagrammatic.
We have one road running north to south from the forest to the river.
And then another running east to west.
These are the only points of access into the city of Chaux.
However, if you look at the perspectival view, the "Vue perspective de la ville de Chaux,"
you're going to see an entirely different kind of experience.
Here, the topography unveils and reveals mountains in the background.
You'll see that there's a far more open sense.
The ramparts are, in fact, gone.
And kind of integration of the landscape with the town.
So the kind of stifling geometric character of the map is replaced by a far more open
feel.
The semicircle, just like the map, is sort of fully elaborated into its elliptical form.
But there's a far more seamless movement between the center-- the focal point, the saltworks--
and the farms that dot the countryside.
Now what's clear in the view and less clear in the map is that Ledoux is actually working
out a design for public space, for "res publica,"
and trying to depict a harmonious living environment.
So we see troops gathering onto the esplanade.
We see the factory smoke rising out of the chimneys to sort of indicate that production
is happening.
In a sense, activities unfold here and emphasize that life thrives as a result of this ideal
city.
And, as a result, also, of the proper exploitation of nature's resources.
So when we look here, it's the buildings that speak, not the legend.
You have two large public squares, semi-circular.
You see that there's a church to the west, a market to the east.
If you look to the north, you will see on the one hand, public baths and a stock exchange.
And if you look below the church, there is a structure with a kind of semicircular auditorium.
This is actually part of the university that he is imagining here.
It's an auditorium for a medical school.
The other thing that's clear as you move out to the countryside, is that he's mixing old
and new structures, kind of Neo-Palladian villas and old farms, old churches.
What's happening here is that the saltworks-- the real saltworks-- have generated a vision
of an ideal society.
It's a utopian gesture.
Representation comes after the built structure to generate a perfect social world.
And here, the geometry is what's capturing us.
All of its variations-- the semicircle, the oval, the ellipse-- all of this becomes a
kind of formal metaphor for the harmony of human existence with nature.
You can even evoke the elliptical course of the planets, or think about the economic metaphor
of the circle of production.
This is utopia in Ledoux's terms.
And so let's just wrap this up by quoting Ledoux himself, and understanding the reason
for which he looks at the circular model to generate society.
This is Ledoux.
"Everything is circular in nature;
The stone that falls into the water propagates infinite circles;
centripetal force is incessantly countered by a rotary motion;
the air and the seas move in perpetual circles...
so the town of Chaux is an immense circle with a form as pure as that described by the sun...
The line intersecting the diameter of the salt works crosses the Loue river, immense
plains, the town, the forest, the Geneva canal, the Swiss pastures;
to the left lie [the great rivers], the port of Antwerp, and the North Seas carry the first
and much desired fruits of our labor, commerce and arts, to the very deserts of Siberia."
It's an extraordinary quote.
And what I find most moving in this is the dream of the global reach of this tiny little
utopia in the countryside, which is generated by a saltworks factory.
And in this language is this insistence on geometric forms, on nature, and on the rewriting
of society.
So what I am going to do now is discuss the repercussions of all of this.
But also its sources.
So I want to think about the roots of Ledoux's imagined society by actually turning back
the clock quite a bit, going back to the Renaissance, where we see the visual tradition of utopia
emerging in geometric terms, and also in literature.
And then I'll sit on the drawings of one of Ledoux's great contemporaries, the visionary
architect Étienne-Louis Boullée, who is most often used to represent architecture's relationship
to language.
In other words, what we call, "architecture parlante," or "speaking architecture."