The Architectural Project
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux conceived his project as a complete package. It includes eleven buildings, five workshops and housing workers' homes, arranged in a huge semicircle, centered around the House of the Director. It is a stunning example of enlightenment architecture applied to a monument to industrial use. Much later, when Ledoux was imprisoned during the Revolution, he imagined, to expand the Saline into the "cité idéale de Chaux", but this remained a project. The buildings arranged in a semicircle are at the heart of Ledoux's idea to create a perfect structure for a new industrial and social era. The harmony of the surroundings and the symbolic found in the composition of the ensemble was aimed to shape a society that elevates the soul of its people, creating virtue and collective happiness, while maintaining work as the ultimate value at the centre.