F Rhetoric
Transformation and the Causa Sui: Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's Cannon Foundry
Excerpt from a larger research proposal under Dr. Martin Bressani in Montreal, QC.
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Ledoux's perspectival etching for his 'Cannon Foundry' articulates a struggle for an essential relationship between geometrical, analogical, and rhetorical devices. The foundry's bulbous smoke is analagous to the trees below while the pyramidal stacks themselves echo the mounains beyond; the cross plan extends itself into the landscape but is reigned in so as to preserve the geometrical figure of the whole. The site appears, in its sublimity, born from the ground and ancient, ritualistic practices: its pyramids carved by the production cycle, its grid a latent and ideal form of organization merely culled from the earth. A familiar monument in the pyramid becomes a symbol of agrarian reform; a typological cross-plan becomes the unfolding of mechanical production, mythical allegory, and a moralizing sociability.
It is here where Ledoux's work can be understood as a complete transformation, a totalizing reconception, of social life through architectural representation. Ledoux writes, 'You will see that the only means allowed by the economy of art will lead you to the sublime' (Ledoux, 204). The poetic character of the sublime, visible in much of Ledoux's work, is the result of an alchemical experiment performed of the disciplinary rhetoric of a profession that found itself dismantled after the fall of ancien regime. Ledoux found his task as a constructor, a material mater, and positioned himself between the universe's aether and a universal ethos.
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