Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans

Ledoux was asked for a salt factory and delivered a diagram of authority. The works are laid out as a half-circle: the director's house on the axis, the two great evaporation sheds flanking it, the workers' ranges bent round the arc so that every door faces the centre and nothing happens out of sight. The gatehouse is cut as an artificial grotto, petrified brine running down its jambs; the columns of the portico alternate square and cylindrical drums, a deliberate coarsening of the classical order to suit an industrial building. Only the half-circle was built. Ledoux kept redrawing the missing half as the ideal city of Chaux, adding a house for the river inspector shaped like a pipe and a cemetery buried under a sphere, and published the whole speculation in 1804. Production limped on until 1895; the site became a World Heritage Site in 1982.