In his neoclassic buildings the French architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) revived the forms of antiquity but in a highly imaginative and often fantastic way.

Claude Nicolas Ledoux was born at Dormans-sur-Marne on March 21, 1736. Little is known of his formative years except that he trained under Jacques François Blondel. By the 1760s Ledoux was receiving commissions for country residences and town houses, including the Hôtel d'Uzés (1767) in Paris and the château of Benouville (1768), the latter famed for its staircase designed in a thoroughly classical spirit. The Hôtel de Hallwyl (1764-1767) in Paris with its illusionistic garden already announces the flair for the theatrical and the dramatic that characterized so much of Ledoux's work. His early dwellings were often of simple square form, showing the influence of Ange Jacques Gabriel and his Petit Trianon. Among Ledoux's so-called cube houses...