Back to the Beginning - Trenton Bath House

"you just like this cause of the name. if it wasn't famous you wouldn't have come."

"no no.... i really think this is great."

i've been accused idol worship before. liking buildings because they were designed by famous architects. to a layperson, the crumbling concrete block walls and asphalt shingled roofs looked like a dump. surely this was not deserving of a 2 hour drive to visit. or was it?

                                         

i made a valiant attempt to defend Lou Kahn's honor. 

"This bathhouse plan looks like a simple 9 square plan, but look more closely and you’ll see it is underlaid with a tartan grid. see how the alternating 22-foot and 8-foot bands intersect to define large and small square spaces?"

I now started pointing around the various features of the building in a very excited manner.

“the narrow zones provide the square corner piers for entry storage and toilets and skylit rectangular servant zones for changing showering and washing. Kahn honors the hollow square cmu ‘columns’ by capping them with cast in place concrete slab lid like roofs and articulating vertical expansion joint lines at their edges. With the roofs springing from the corners Kahn highlights the inner square focal point of each structure. The roofs seem to hover mysteriously."

my passionate defense fell on deaf ears like a desperate used car salesman's pitch .

k and j were not buying it.

unfazed, I kept trying to proselytize the skeptics. “During the design of the bathhouse, Kahn was smitten with Palladian grids and how to integrate servant and served spaces. “The architect must find a way in which the serving areas of a space can be there, and still not destroy his spaces. He must find a new column, he must find a new way of making those things work, and still not lose his building on a podium,” he said. “Like the great Villa rotunda, where the servant spaces complement the central roof, here the Trenton bath house uses the same organizational and geometric logic."

palladian house grids

villa rotunda vs trenton bathhouse

J brutally cut through all my gesticulations and jargon down with his teenage take. "i can't believe we drove 2 hours to see a bathroom." at 13 years old, he has a concept of what kids normally do with their fathers. play baseball or board games, fix fences, go fly fishing, change motor oil. driving 90 minutes to see a bathroom in cornhole new jersey is not what he considers normal father son behavior.

i interrupted his  "why are we here?" grievances by dispatching him to the urinal, "you should probably go pee and try to develop a sensitivity to great architecture. hopefully one day, you’ll appreciate these experiences…”

it was sweltering. 95 degrees and humid. i never dress up, but here i was wearing a dress shirt. the night before, i worried that i wouldn't be able to take pictures or videos here since using cameras in bathrooms is kind of dicey with people in various states of deshabille and associated privacy issues.

if caught, i was thinking how awkward the interrogations would be.
"why are you video recording a changing room?"
"for the architecture, sir...” 

“Good to know you’re not just a pervert taking pictures of naked people…”

so i hatched a cockamamie plan. i put on a dress shirt with a front chest pocket. i slid my phone with lens poking out right above the brim and pressed video record. i walked around my apartment slow and steady to practice creating architecture video walkthroughs.

there have been times, where i've gone to sites that don't allow photos only to make secret bootleg videos as the security inevitably looks away. The videos sit in my hard drive like taxidermy shoulder mounts on a hunter's cabin wall. my most treasured kills have included forbidden scenes of the salk institute, frick museum, rockefellers’ estate, last supper, sistine chapel, massacio frescos, etc...

nothing was going to deter me from capturing the essence of the trenton bath house for my handful of dedicated blog readers.

anticipating "sir, no photography in the bathhouse. And absolutely no videotaping in the changing rooms." i pressed record and put my phone in my pocket with the camera peeping out. i walked around more deliberately and slowly so as to keep the lens level. There is nothing worse than going to a site, and not being able to take pictures.

to my disappointment, some middle-aged man was in the changing room putting his clothes on, marring my pristine video frames. i didn't want to look suspicious so i walked nonchalantly over to the urinal and started taking a piss. i left and circled the building for 10 minutes. Within the 9 square plan, the four corners and center are voids. You enter the central open air atrium from a corner. A reception desk fronts a square storage volume capped with a pyramidal roof. On either side of the atrium are the men's and women’s changing rooms which are also sheltered under pyramidal roofs. Opposite the reception in this bilaterally symmetrical arrangement is a ceremonial set of stairs leading up to the municipal pool. This set of stairs has a roof, but no walls. In this way kahn worked between solid and void.

                                        

                                     

                                                

When I returned to the locker room, I incredulously saw the same guy still in the process of putting on his shirt. my luck, i encounter a man in the changing room who fumbles buttons and can’t dress in a reasonably prompt manner.

he probably would've reported me to security if i started filming him overtly. every time i went in, i went to the urinal and peed a little more. i did this about 4 subsequent times at 5 minute intervals each. I have several outtakes on my hard drive of my trenton bath urinations as a result. on my last round, he finally left and i had the room to myself. i promptly took my camera out of my pocket and started filming the roof, and the iconic moments of sky over the showers and sinks. what a grand feeling of openness Kahn provided for those changing to go to the pool.

Despite being in the presence of great architecture I couldn’t stop thinking that the guy who I thought was the slowest dresser, probably thought i had the smallest bladder. and if i were endowed with faulkner's talent, i could write a novel ala 'as i lay dying' where the narrative perspective would stream of consciousness flip back and forth between him, the local slow dressing Trenton resident and me, the sweaty small bladdered  architecture enthusiast in dress shirt.

As I lay Waiting for Man to Finish Changing (Chapter 1)

"what's he doing here all dressed up?”
"great, he's the only one in here, i'll feign use of the facilities so as to not act suspicious"
"glad he's gone... I don’t like putting clothes in with other people around. Uh oh… now he's back again"
"shit he's still here, i'm going to force myself to go pee again"
"why is that dude walking around with a phone in his front pocket?"
"this guy literally takes 20 minutes to put on a stupid shirt"
"i feel sorry for this guy. he's sweating and peeing a lot"
and so on and so forth..

I was the perverted dude in dress shirt standing in bathhouse front-pocket filming on the sly. I rationalized to myself, in today's cancel culture. what i was doing was rather harmless.

kahn would've never survived trenton if it were built in today's cultural climate. Pritzker prize winner Richard meier was recently taken down by five women, four of whom were former employees. they came forward with accusations of sexual harassment that included Meier groping their underwear and exposing himself to them. this seems tame to kahn's philandering 50's. Whereas Meier had to renounce his role at his firm and retire ignominiously, during the Trenton project, kahn had a wife, lived with his parents-in-law, had a hustle, and then a side hustle. that is, while Lou kahn raised a daughter with his wife, he simultaneously collaborated with mistress Anne Tyng on the geometry of the Trenton bath house. While Tyng carried Lou’s love child to term in secret in Rome, Kahn engaged in a side hustle with Marie Kuo, an intern working out the bath house entry mural which was based on the baths of Caracalla mosaics. After Tyng returned, Kuo, who didn’t realize Tyng was fluent in Chinese and could understand Kuo’s phone conversations to her mom concerning contraception and was aware of all of Kahn’s transgressions.

within the chaos of his personal life where he juggled 3 children from 3 women and an intern mural designer, Kahn conceived the purest of crystal structures. ideal perfection harmonizing ancient proportions with the integration of servant and served spaces. he made his architecture extra logical, legible and clear to counterbalance the chaos of his personal life.

While all these relationships were consensual, Kahn probably wielded his position of power to gain access to these women. Without cancellation, Kahn went on to design some of the world’ greatest buildings: the kimbell arts museum, salk institute, exeter library, british arts center.... similar in depravity, frank lloyd wright went on to design the guggenheim, usonian houses, falling water, taliesin I and II after running off with a client's wife and being caught moonlighting in louis sullivan's firm. jefferson designed UVA and monticello after serially impregnating his deceased wife’s half sister and daughter’s teenage slave/companion Sally Hemmings. Philip Johnson supposedly burned all his nazi white supremacist papers in the chimney of the glass house, etc.. many great architects did amazing work with very questionable morals. That is, the history of great architecture is constituted by the stunning work of socially deviant architects who refuse to submit to societal norms. 

Having rationalized that my odd social deviant behavior of photographing changing rooms was relatively minor compared to Kahn’s dalliances, i  proceeded to meticulously document the shower stalls and toilets. i started noticing odd water stains and signs of impending trouble where the sloped roof was held back from the perimeter walls. according to anne tyng, Kahn intended the water to run over the masonry surfaces. unfortunately, in New Jersey, Kahn didn't consider the impact of freeze and thaw cycles. Within 7 years of its construction in 1952, the water shedding off the iconic pyramidal roofs on the walls caused mold, disintegration, and cracking. The owners were about to tear the structure down until the county bought the property. For decades, the bathhouse succumbed to crumbling cmu and heaving slabs which were only recently repaired in 2020.

Looking beyond kahn’s cavalier approach to waterproofing and dereliction in detailing, Kahn's bathhouse marks an important change in his design philosophy. If an architect's life is analogous to sporting event, where there are critical moments that impact the final outcome… the trenton bathhouse was the turning point of Louis Kahn’s career. At middle age, Louis Kahn was written off, losing by a wide margin to the Great Depression, with no substantive designs to his name. In the second half of his life, from 1952 to his death in 1974, Lou Kahn came back with a vengeance, unleashing a string of amazing buildings. Looking back at the Trenton Bathhouse project, Kahn remarked it was the “generative force which is recognizable in every building which I have done since.”

The importance of trenton is that it was Kahn’s beginning. And according to Kahn, he didn’t “know of anytime more important than that time of beginning. All the extensions that still recalls the beginning are certainly less than the beginning to think that something can happen when there’s no precedent. And something that forms a kind of an agreement in the mind which says “this is something that it must be”. When it was thought about it must be considered as being always there. It’s a confirmation which comes out of the I commonality of man which is tremendously important.” The beginning is where the ideas were sparked, the beginning is the creation of something fresh and new. Within the crumbling cmu blocks and economically shingled asphalt roofs there were beginnings of ideas that Kahn would work tirelessly on for the rest of his illustrious career. After Trenton, Kahn had clear direction and goals to achieve in architecture. 

Comparing Trenton to his last project, the Yale British arts center, one can see how kahn developed and evolved themes of servant-served, day light modulation, and building planning principles.

At Trenton, Kahn refined his approach to utilitarian spaces and articulated his notion of spaces serving and spaces served. Whereas each pyramidal asphalt shingled wood roof at Trenton rests on four hollow CMU column supports that serve as mechanical spaces or as circulation for changing room, in his British Arts Center, his blackened steel-clad columns and precast beam supports were hollow and served as mechanical spaces to convey air, electricity, and water. servant space is woven seamlessly into served space, articulated and harmonious.

At the BAC, Kahn continued the Trenton truncated pyramidal roof lighting motif but increased the aperture size and introduced louvers for a more diffuse filtered lighting suitable for artwork. Kahn figured out ways to control direct sun by adding layer of sunscreening devices.

finally, the trenton bathouse was supposed to be part of a larger complex never built that Kahn envisioned for a jewish community center that included a landscape of axial pathways on tree lined paths, and a day camp pavilion. Kahn developed notions of how buildings and space are organized in relation to each other. Spatially, at Trenton, each bathhouse room is conceived as an independent pavilion around a central atrium, which is open to the sky. In BAC, each gallery room is similarly conceived as a skylit gallery cell that surrounds a daylit central entry atrium, and double height picture gallery.

 

For the non architects and disgruntled teenagers, Trenton bathhouse is nothingburger meh, for the connoisseurs who seek enlightenment on the ideas of Lou Kahn, it’s an architectural provocation and a demonstration of what happens when architects find purpose in life. 

Hopper House

You ignore the sign that says private driveway. The narrow sandy road winds through the pine trees. The road seems longer when you know you’re trespassing. You see large houses set in the dark forests. You choose to come at night thinking it’d be easier to hide in the cloak of darkness. But in reality, the car lights make you more conspicuous at dusk. The trees start to thin out and you can see the evening clouds. On the left, a turn off for a car. You continue driving all the way to the end. You find the driveway is blocked by 2 wood rails forming an X. You park the car and step over the fence. It’s a slight slope down to a garage. The motion detectors trigger the lights and you just pray there are no security cameras.

At the end of the garage, a set of stairs emerge. You ascend and notice the stairs gradually get steeper towards the top till you reach the southeast corner of the building. There’s a strip of cobblestones at the semi exposed foundation wall. Another short flight of stairs to the left leads to an elevated entry perch on the left corner of the building. From this vantage point, a miraculous uninterrupted view of the bay opens up. Bayberry shrubs flow down to the beach and horizon.

Walking around the house you see a large deck. To the north, a really garish house. You recognize this blight on the landscape as the house that’s been covered in the newspapers. In fact, the way you found Hopper’s studio address was a news article concerning lawsuits filed against the neighbor. 15 years ago, a couple bought the Hopper property and built a 9000 sf monstrosity next door. It was so large it destroyed the view and landscape. All the surrounding neighbors wanted it demolished for violating various zoning statutes. For 6 years the house sat vacant pending lawsuits. The spouse died, the widow sold it to the current owners who promptly paid the town off $3 million to use the house plus an additional $500,000 to clear the legal fines.

There is no vegetation to hide behind. You are completely exposed on a hill. You notice the neighbor’s light is glowing bright and a car is parked in their driveway. You start thinking they are looking at you wondering what you’re doing on their property. Under the threat of surveillance you take pictures as fast as you can. A panoramic video to preserve the glimpse. You start making your way towards the entrance and walk briskly down the stair. You’re now on borrowed time.

You start to think if the neighbors call the police, how long would it take for the cops to drive down the roads and show up? With a single lane driveway, an incoming cop car would block your exit. You make a K turn on the dirt path. Your car is so long it overhangs the road and backs into bushes to turn out. On your drive out, you start mentally preparing a litany of ignorant excuses… “Sorry we didn’t know this was a private road... We got lost, we’re trying to find the beach…. Is this the way to Provincetown?” Nothing happens. Escaping without incident, you replay the scene in your mind.

You start thinking although Hopper’s house appeared to be a Cape Cod style house in volume it was very well designed. The house was kinked slightly non-parallel from the shore to create a dynamic tension between house and landscape. By running the stair diagonally to the side of the house for entry, you think Hopper is a genius for incorporating the sweeping views of the bay as part of the entry sequence. It’s a simple house that makes total logical sense. A double height painting studio that occupies over half the house's volume with large windows facing north, an entry through the kitchen on the southeast which receives morning light, a bedroom facing sunset on the south west and sculptural chimney at the center to tie all the elements together.

At home, you start reading random articles about the house to understand that which was not to be seen. You read about an artist who painted in Hopper’s cottage for 15 summers. He had befriended the owners that had bought one of his paintings in a local gallery. The most exciting thing the artist provides are photos of the inside of the house.

The wood flooring is striped in an alternating gray aged wood and dark stained pattern. Moldings on the doors are classical. Expansive views out of windows bring light to the entire house. A simple sculptural chimney forms the center and hearth of the house. The artist mentions in his writing the existence of an architectural model of Hopper’s house exhibited in Salisbury University, Maryland. He describes the model as painstakingly made. You find out the exhibition occurred sometime in 1993. Dejected, you think morbid thoughts like all the curators who put the show together are probably dead and you’ll never see the model. You start emailing random Hopper biographers who mention the model, but they don’t have the common courtesy to write you back. You enter stalker mode and start cold calling museums to see whether they have this model in their collection or not. One museum you call says they indeed have it in their collection and sends you some photos of it. Eureka you’ve struck gold.

The model is a valuable artifact. It’s like a fingerprint and a window into a designer’s soul. The model is a fossil record from the design process that reveals how the designer’s brain made decisions. Hopper’s model is no different. There are architects who paint like Corbusier, Steven Holl, and Zaha. But this is the first time you look at a painter who architected. Hopper’s model is made of painted cardboard. His loose pencil marks and notations are scribbled to indicate positions and appearances of doors. There are no cut outs for the windows in the walls of the model. Instead, all the windows are painted on the outside with a light blue color. On the interior, the attic floor, chimney, stair, furniture, painting supplies, and walls are detachable… allowing Hopper to insert interior elements into the house. The craftsmanship is crude. You imagine the 6’-6” tall Hopper hunched over a small model, cutting gluing and taping all these pieces of cardboard together. What’s as informative about the model is what is left out. Hopper didn’t model the site, the garage or the exterior stairs. These geometries and views which impressed you the most are not even documented. What’s important to Hopper is the placement of doors and walls. The sculptural chimney. For an artist who spent hours and hours meditating on buildings and painting them… when it came to designing his own house, these are the elements that he focused on in particular. Hopper’s design process regarding architecture is like his painting: hands-on, iterative, and tactile.

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Looking at the model, you start making connections between the model, photos of the house and his famous painting, Rooms by the Sea displayed in the Yale Art Gallery. Initially titled “Alias the Jumping Off Place", Edward Hopper's Rooms by the Sea was Hopper’s painted vision of his understanding of the world. Critic Clement Greenberg stated, "Hopper happens to be a bad painter. But if he were better, he would, most likely, not be so superior an artist".

Rooms by the Sea 1951

Sketch for the Painting

View of Room Painted

Model of the Room during design

The painting shows the corner of Hopper’s painting room opened to a view of water. In painting, Hopper took liberties to move the setting sun to the northwest, flip the door swing, remove the bayberry hill in the foreground. Hopper wasn’t concerned with painting reality, he was concerned with distilling the scene to the raw elements of light, color, water and architecture to provoke a feeling. Painted at 70 years old Hopper sketched the view prior to painting. Two decades prior, he had modeled the house before building it. In 1933, with his wife’s inheritance money, he designed the house they would summer in for the next 40 years of his life.  The Hoppers were frugal. Their walkup apartment overlooking Washington square park in NYC had no heat and featured a communal bathroom. The Hoppers allocated what little money they had on architecture and their summer retreat.

Camel Hump. Past view from Hopper's House

When the Hoppers arrived, Truro was completely denuded of trees. The land was a barren wasteland. For 12,000 years the Wamponoag Indians roamed the same Truro area in loincloth year round… living off fish and shellfish in old growth forests. Within 200 years of their arrival the settlers cut all the trees down for firewood and building materials leaving the hills to look like camel humps. Into this scene you can imagine Hopper, the tall solitary figure walking in desolation quite alienated like a figure in one of his paintings. Something in this wasteland touched his soul and inspired him to paint. “Maybe I am not very human - all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

Detour Ledoux - Saltworks

Antoine Lavoisier was completely brilliant. He discovered water was composed of hydrogen and oxygen, and oxygen was involved in combustion. His pièce de résistance was proving the law of conservation of mass in chemistry. For this, he carefully measured the mass of reactants and products in many different chemical reactions within sealed jars. Et voilà! in every case, the total mass of the jar and its contents was the same after the reaction as it was before the reaction took place.

To fund his laboratory experiments, he became involved with the hated Ferme Générale, a for-profit tax collection agency which reaped taxes for the monarchy in return for the right to collect the taxes. On behalf of the Ferme Générale, Lavoisier proposed a jar around Paris. He devised and commissioned the building of a wall around Paris so that customs duties could be extracted from those transporting goods into and out of the city at toll booth checkpoints. Unfortunately, for Lavoisier he failed to predict the combustible situation the jar would provoke. The people revolted, Bastille was stormed, and the bloodthirsty mob hungry for revolution was set loose and came after him.

When he was sentenced to the guillotine in the French Revolution for his role in tax collection efforts, Lavoisier decided his death would be his last experiment. Lavoisier wondered how long a head could retain consciousness after being severed from the body. He had heard of stories of severed heads looking around, saying prayers, or expressing unequivocal indignation when their faces were slapped etc…. He told his friend, “Watch my eyes after the blade comes down. I will continue blinking as long as I retain consciousness.” Lavoisier blinked for 15 seconds.

Claude Ledoux, the architect who designed the 55 toll collection booths for the wall around Paris, met a fate slightly better than Lavoisier’s. His head was spared, but his career was axed. With all his rich clients exiled to other countries, imprisoned, or decapitated, Ledoux never got the opportunity to build another building. Clientless and restless at the height of his career, Ledoux shifted his focus to designing a utopian city with futuristic visions of communal life and industrial urbanism.

Like Piranesi, Ledoux had started his professional life as an engraver before entering architecture, so working on architectural renderings was a return to his previous life before architecture. Two years before his death in 1804, Ledoux published Architecture Considérée Sous le Rapport de l’art, de Moeurs et de la Legislation which translates into the catchy English title “Architecture Considered in Relation to Art, Customs and Legislation”. 

A more accurate title of the book should’ve been “The Ideal City of Chaux: Where Fantasy Meets Reality.”  Fifteen years before the revolution, Ledoux had designed and built the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans near the forests of Chaux.  The complex of Saltworks buildings would become the starting point for the project of a Utopian city.

Before proceeding with insightful architectural analysis of Ledoux’s Saltworks, for those readers unfamiliar with 18^th century salt production practices within the pre-revolutionary French political economy, I’ll try to sum it up in a 4 short paragraphs.

To make salt, the French found and collected underground saline water sources, cut down trees to make fires and boiled off the water in boiling pans in 18 day shifts. It took teams of men to manage the boiling pans. For 8-9 boiling pans, a brigade of 100 people was needed: shifts of 2 people to skim the pot, 4 people to fire the stoves, 4 people to supply the wood, 4 workers to fire the stove. Over the course of an 18 day shift, the fire had to be maintained at a continuous temperature, otherwise the quality of the salt would  be compromised. Barrel makers were employed to create containers to store salt. Blacksmiths and carpenters were constantly on call fixing and adjusting equipment. Salt making was a precise work.

If the salt extraction process sounds tedious, consider all the nauseating layers of control the French imposed on production: (1) tax collecting agencies for salt commerce (2) controllers of the extraction process (3) porters to register entry and exit and control the gates (4) controller of salt stocks (5) receiver to distribute the salt from each factory (6) director of salines (7) inspectors of wood (8) inspectors of work and maintenance (9) architecture inspectors (10) inspector general of the water pumps and wells (11) head of commerce of the Lorraine region and the (11) the King who used the tax money to fund his lavish lifestyle.

It's not surprising the etymological origins of the words ‘bureaucracy’ and ‘revolution’ are both derived from French. Bureau means "desk with drawers for papers, writing desk," in French and '-cracy' is the French form of the Greek root word ‘-kratia’ which means "power, might; rule, sway; power over; a power, authority. Revolution originally entered the French vocabulary in the 13th century to describe the ‘rotation of celestial bodies about the earth’ and was derived from the Latin word ‘ revolutio’ which means "a turn around". By the 18th century ‘revolution’s meaning in French evolved into ‘the fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due to perceived oppression (political, social, economic) or political incompetence.

That is, in 1700’s France, people got pissed off and ready for revolution when they tried to make salt and had to endure 11 layers of annoying governmental bureaucracy and various taxations to sprinkle it on their food. 

Now, back to the purpose of this blog, useless guillotine trivia architectural scholarship… in 1771, Ledoux was appointed inspector of Saltworks at the Arc de Senans in eastern France. Up to that point, the town’s salt factory was in the mountains near the source of underground saline water. When wood used to fuel the saline water burning pans became scarce, Ledoux started working on a Utopian vision with no particular site in mind.

Untethered to reality, he proposed constructing a 20 km canal of wooden pipes from the saline source to the edge of a nearby forest where wood was abundant. He reasoned it would be easier to bring the salt water to the boiling pan rather than wood to the fire.  Semicircular in plan, and crystalline in geometry, the Saltworks “as pure as that described by the sun along its transit” would be planted like a seed next to the forest. The industrial production and hierarchical organization of the Saltworks would then sprout and sponsor the growth of an Ideal City.

Ledoux presented his Saltworks visions to King Louis XV in 1773. The King personally approved Ledoux’s plan and the Saltworks became built reality in 1779. Within 10 years, however, the Saltworks was abandoned after the French Revolution erupted in 1789. Unfortunately, since the complex was funded by the monarchy, Ledoux’s work was perceived as a symbol of the “Ancien Régime” and the Ideal City he envisioned was never built. Over the centuries, the Saltworks were used as a military barracks, camp for Spanish refugees and as a Nazi concentration camp for gypsies.

Today, one can visit the site and experience how distinctive Ledoux’s vision was. The central entry to the walled site is a Doric column portico. Compared to the typical ornate baroque bullshit architecture of his time, this was quite unusual and sober in the 1790s. Doric is archaic and rough. Ledoux then transitions the Doric columns into an artificial primordial stone grotto cave opening that funnels visitors through a neo-classical guardhouse opening onto a semicircular lawn on axis with the director’s pavilion which has bizarre columns composed of alternating round and square stones... Upon this entry sequence into the Saltworks, Ledoux has transported you into some sort of alternate reality.

The round window in the pediment of the looming director’s pavilion looks like a giant eye - nothing within this Saltworks compound escapes surveyance. “Don’t even think of pilfering salt from the premises.” Along the arc, communal housing is arranged for the salt worker brigades. Flanking the director’s pavilion symmetrically are workshop factories and pavilions for tax clerks. Ascend the monumental stairs within the director’s pavilion and you find yourself at the foot of a priest in a chapel bathed in mysterious light who recites a prayer in a creepy French accent. “Je crois en Sel, le Pere tout-puissant, créateur du ciel et de la terre. Amen.”

The 1800s didn’t understand or appreciate Ledoux’s Classicism nor his modernity but 20^th century architects rediscovered Ledoux and recognized his clairvoyance. 140 years before 1920’s Bauhaus buildings and Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, Ledoux was designing for industrialization in the new age of mass production. Whereas a traditional Baroque solution to the Saltworks would have been one large ornate complex housing all the activities of production (i.e., Versailles), in the Saltworks, functions were zoned separated into 11 discrete buildings: 4 communal housing, 1 gate, 1 director, 1 stable, 2 tax clerks, and 2 workshops.

Look beyond the surface of classical porticos and stone material, and you’ll notice each of Ledoux’s buildings are treated in quite a modern fashion in that they are specialized, articulated, and differentiated in terms of their height, floor to floor clearances, façade treatments, roof, fenestration. The housing featured shared double height centralized communal dining and kitchen spaces to economize on wood for the hearths and foster social interaction. Behind the housing, gardens were allocated to the residents for private use. Connections between buildings were minimized to minimize the risks to fire, and to break the scale of buildings down within the campus.

The salt workshop facilities had vents disguised as dormer windows. Landscaped area behind workshops were dedicated to storing wood for fuel. Large long span timber roof construction housed the boiling pan assemblies below. Internal layouts were repeated, to optimize salt production and processing. To reinforce efficient administration, the director’s building was centrally positioned to oversee all workers on site. Circulation routes cut through all administration buildings to ensure direct flows of salt.

To create a cohesive plan, Ledoux recognized the importance of tying all Saltworks buildings together with ornamentation, recognizable building typologies, and strong geometries. Stone ornamentation on buildings depict salt flowing from urns, thereby indicating the principal function of the buildings within. Entries to facades along the semicircular central court area are rusticated and emphasized to mark their significance. The simple geometries of the landscape and buildings are in harmony. Ledoux’s goal was to use architecture to shape a society and create a collective spirit, while emphasizing work as the ultimate value at the center of human activity.

At the back of the director’s pavilion, the stables open onto a small back gate. It was through this passage that Ledoux imagined the connection to the rest of his Ideal City of Chaux which would’ve mirrored the semicircular Saltworks in plan to form a complete circle. In the barren field, one can contemplate the complete world of what could have been, replete with all the unbuilt designs for a bridge, market place, graveyard, artillery building, school building, and housing types for coopers, blacksmiths, and lumberjacks, Temple of Memory, and even a brothel that Ledoux was allowed to dream in the last years of his life but not build.