though they might have been of imperfections in the world which they occupied were only rarely able to enlist the services of their architectural contemporaries
For these reasons in the project by Ledoux of 1776 (Figure 3-5) which we might envisage as typifying the Utopian conditions that the Enlightenment conceived the circular from seems largely to survive as an intelligible convention It cannot be wholly sacrificedd. Nor can it be wholly convincing For though the rather deistic turn of mind exhibited by Ledoux might very well be able to accept a circular disposition for cities for churches and even for strange cemetery-catacombs even though a Boulee could find it the supremely appropriate configuration for the Cenotaph for Newton (Figure 3-6) the concept is no longer quite so "natural" as it once had been and though a Renaissance idea of "nature" might still provide the mold for revolutionary from it could no longer wholly absorb the sympathies of that new kind of "natural" man which the impending revolution itself was to evoke Romantic individualism and the concept of Utopia were scarcely to be fused;and,as a result, in the nineteenth century the Utopian idea was able to draw on no first-class architectural talent It persisted and even proliferated but it persisted as regards ar chitecture chiefly as a subterranean tradition Neither the average nor the exceptional nineteenth century architect were ever to be much seduced by Benthamite principles of utility or Positivistic schemes of social reform so that in default of the architect 's