Factory, Utopia
The Works of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
In Arc-et-Senans, France, lies the gates to the underworld, a semicircular fragment of a parallel reality, an alchemical symbol, a tinderbox of revolution, a pastoral factory, a time crystal, a prescient example of an artist defining an aesthetics of work. It can equally be said to be a lost relic of a fallen kingdom as a glimpse of an Edenic future. This is the saline royale d’Arc-et-Senans, the royal saltworks, which would in time develop in its master’s imagination into the seed of a utopian city. A jumble of geometric solids would litter the countryside in the shape of a phallic pleasure garden, cubes of justice and memory, a cross between a cemetery and a planetarium, a perfectly spherical sheep pen, and a series of hallucinogenic country estates, all forming a ring around the original salt factory.