Had Ledoux’s ideas been known only from his executed work, he would probably not have been especially influential; certainly he would not have attained with posterity the very high reputation that is his today. Inactive at building after the Revolution—he was even imprisoned for a while in the nineties—he concentrated on the publication of his designs both executed and projected. His book _L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation_ appeared in 1804, and a second edition was published by Daniel Ramée (1806-87) in 1846-7. This book has a long and fascinating text which is sociological as much as it is architectural; but it is in its plates, both of executed work and projects, that Ledoux’s originality can best be appreciated. By no means all of his ideas, known before the Revolution to his pupils and undoubtedly to many others as well, passed into the general repertory of Romantic Classicism; some of the most extreme are hardly buildable. The ‘House for Rural Guards’ is a free-standing sphere, a form that he utilized as space rather than mass in the interior of a project for a Columbarium. For the ‘Coopery’, the coopers’ products dictated the target-like shape (Plate 2B). The ‘House for the Directors of the Loue River’ is also a cylinder set horizontally, but a much more massive one, through which the whole flood of the river was to pour to the thorough discomfort, one would imagine, of the inhabitants. Even where the forms are more conventional, as in the project for the church of his ‘Ville Idéale’ of Chaux—a purified version of Soufflot’s Panthéon: cruciform, temple-porticoed, and with a Roman saucer dome—or for the bank there—a peristylar rectangle with high, plain attic, flanked at the corners by detached cubic lodges—the clarity and originality of his formal thinking is very evident, and was apparently influential well before his book actually appeared in 1804. Masses are of simple geometrical shapes, discrete and boldly juxtaposed; walls are flat and as little broken as possible, the few necessary openings mere rectangular holes. Minor features are repeated without variation of rhythm in regular reiterative patterns; the top surfaces of the masses, whether flat, sloping, or rounded, are considered as bounding planes, not modelled plastically in the Baroque way.[15]