Dome

Detail view of drum; From 1784 to 1789 Ledoux was engaged by Calonne and the Ferme to build a new tax-wall around Paris, together with attendant boulevards and toll-gates or barrières. These latter buildings Ledoux conceived as monumental entries to the city, for which he adopted simplified geometric forms and manipulated scale and classical elements to produce bold, imaginative designs; 40 were proposed, in many variations of a few prototypes, and they were built very rapidly--almost all being completed in the four years before the Revolution--amid heated controversy and despite Ledoux's own dismissal from the work in 1789. The barrières, long a target of press criticism for their monumental scale and distorted motifs, were not unexpectedly the first recipients of that violence against monuments later called vandalism, and only four survived the 19th century: the Barrière d'Enfer, Barrière du Trône, Rotonde de la Villette and Rotonde de Monceau. Source: Grove Art Online; http://www.groveart.com/ (accessed 12/2/2007)