Royal Saltworks of Arc-et-Senans

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux built the Saline Royale between 1775 and 1779 to boil brine piped twenty-one kilometres by wooden conduit from Salins-les-Bains, and he arranged the buildings in a half circle with the director's house at the centre, so that everything and everyone could be watched from one point. He intended it as the first half of a complete ideal city, Chaux, which was never built; his drawings for it survive and are displayed. The works never made money and closed in 1895 after a lawsuit over polluted wells; lightning burned its chapel in 1918. The site is UNESCO listed and now runs exhibitions, a garden festival and a large landscape park in the unbuilt half of the circle.

History

By the 18th century the old saltworks of Franche-Comté, such as Salins-les-Bains, were running short of wood as the forests around them were stripped, and their brine was getting weaker, so the tax farmers of the ferme générale decided to build a new works by the forest of Chaux and bring the brine to it. Louis XV had appointed Claude-Nicolas Ledoux commissioner of the saltworks of Lorraine and Franche-Comté on 20 September 1771, and in April 1774 Ledoux showed the king a first design, a great square of buildings linked by porticoes with 144 Doric columns, which was rejected as too grand for a factory. The complex he built under Louis XVI, fed by a 21-kilometre pipeline of brine from Salins and fuelled by wood from Chaux, is counted the first major work of industrial architecture to apply the ideals of the Enlightenment, and it has been a World Heritage Site since 1982 (Wikipedia, Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans).

Highlights

• The half circle - eleven buildings in a semicircular industrial plan.
• The director's house - the columned centre from which all was overseen.
• The Ledoux museum - models and drawings of the unbuilt ideal city.
• The garden festival - contemporary plots in the open half of the circle.

When to go

April to October for the gardens and full opening; the site opens year-round with shorter winter hours. Concerts and exhibitions run through the summer.

Practical notes

The salt-making equipment is long gone, so the interest is architectural and conceptual rather than industrial. The buildings are large and empty. The gardens carry much of a summer visit.

Nearby

Salins-les-Bains, the brine source, lies southeast; Besancon is northeast.

Key facts