It was a privilege to see Ledoux's Barrière St Martin before its restoration and reinvention as the Rotonde de la Villette. In its dirty and unused condition it was closer to its original appearance and feeling as a working building. The Barrière St Martin was originally part of a chain of walls and gates constructed in 1784 as a customs barrier to the city of Paris. The construction of the customs barrier, which raised the price of food and wine dramatically for citizens in Paris to the benefit of the Ferme Générale, a small group of tax officials, was one of the causes of the Revolution: the walls and gates were sacked and burned in 1789, 4 days before the fall of the Bastille.

Haussmann's new boulevards erased the sites of most of the barrières by building roads along the spaces left by the demolition of the wall. The Barrière St Martin survived probably because its surroundings changed. In 1808, just over 20 years after construction started, its siting changed from a gate to fields to the dramatic focal point of the Bassin de la Villette, an enormous canal basin commissioned by Napoleon as the termination of the Canal d'Ourcq. This was one of several urban improvements and embellishments instigated by Napoleon before his deposition and exile in 1815. In 2009 the building was cleaned and floodlit and the site cleared of car parking. The Rotonde de la Villette rightly appears as a great and treasured building of the Ancien Régime. It is now seen as a beautiful building - but was the Barrière St Martin beautiful?

The Barrière St Martin was seen by Ledoux and his circle of admirers and detractors not as beautiful but as sublime. The sublime was a reaction against the pursuit of beauty at the end of the 18th century. The English philosopher Edmund Burke, in the Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), identified the aesthetic response of the sublime as more powerful and direct than pleasure, which he believed, was derived largely from 'association', conventional ideas rather than direct experience. The adoption of these principles by architects, notably Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-99) and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), overturned the conception of a carefully modulated and hierarchical structure and the coherence of form and content in classical architecture.

In London at the same time the architect George Dance the Younger designed an iconic building of the sublime, admired even by Ledoux: Newgate Gaol, begun in 1770. Dance had studied in Rome during the 1760s, being admitted to the Accademia de San Luca, and becoming a friend of Piranesi. The emotions of horror aroused by the building were in keeping with the popular feeling that incarceration should be harrowing and degrading. Despite what should have been its popular appeal on these grounds it was sacked and burned during the Gordon Riots in 1780 and not completed until 1782. Conditions inside were notoriously terrible; it was rebuilt as a Victorian penitentiary in 1858, closed in 1902 and demolished in 1904. By a strange coincidence Dance also planned the West India Docks - only slightly larger than the Bassin de la Villette - and their warehouses in 1799, although the warehouses were actually built in a less advanced design by another architect. It would have been a vindication of the sublime to see almost a mile of warehouses under a smoky London sky by an architect of the stature of Dance.

The sublime was not limited to architecture, of course. It had famous literary equivalents such as Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley. Perhaps the most obvious transition from the beautiful to the sublime was in music.

Ledoux mixed what had been highly defined and regulated orders, or designs of columns, using square columns on the ground floor, stretched proportions to give a feeling of weight and power, and massive rustication, or heavy stonework, on the base. Paired columns were acceptable, in fact, Claude Perrault had used paired columns on the East Facade of the Louvre (1667), but their use in a drum was unusual and a solid drum without a dome over an arcade was unthinkable, especially compared to the domes of the illustrious Jules Hardouin-Mansart, such as Les Invalides, Paris (1676). Ledoux's freedom in composition recalls that of Vanbrugh, admired by Ledoux but anathema to French classical architects.

Following my visit to the Ledoux's Saline Royale, Ledoux's influences from Roman architecture have become much clearer. Ledoux apparently never visited Rome and so knew of Roman architecture only through publications. One obvious source of drawings of Roman architecture was Piranesi's Le Antichità Romane. Far from the influence of Late Antique architecture, such as the Mausoleum of Santa Constanza in Rome, as assumed by some historians, we can see Ledoux fascinated by funerary monuments such as the Mausoleum of Cecilia Matella from the 1st century BC. Ledoux' projects for the Canon Foundry and a woodcutter's house show him experimenting with forms like the so-called Pyramid of Cestius, another contemporary Roman mausoleum (shown in the illustration below). Santa Constanza, while bearing some resemblance to the Barrière St Martin, was converted into a church and Piranesi's illustration shows it as such, and in a very dilapidated state. On the other hand, the Imperial Roman mausolea were themselves removed from the conventions of Roman public building, and the sublime was an obvious and appropriate response. Louis Kahn, of course, followed Ledoux in his love of Imperial Roman architecture.

It is one of the ironies of history that the Barrière de la Villette, having beeen restored and beautified, became a not-particularly-up-market bistro. The drum, originally left as a void in a calculated reversal of classical ideals, has been roofed in, joining the many urban spaces now enclosed with iron (or steel) and glass. On the other hand, the square in front the Barrière, a car park when I visited, is now a fully functioning public space.

The barrières were intended to control and tax the entry of food and wine into Paris. They led to an upsurge in the popularity of guingettes, or informal dance halls, immediately outside the wall. Guingettes remained popular throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, often painted as scenes of 'modern life' by the Impressionists.

Thomas Deckker
London 2022