Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

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Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (January 27 1814 – September 17, 1879) was a French architect and theorist, famous for his restorations of medieval buildings. Born in Paris, he was as central a figure in the Gothic Revival in France as he was in the public discourse on "honesty" in architecture, which eventually transcended all revival styles, to inform the moving spirit of Modernism. Sir John Summerson considered that "there have been two supremely eminent theorists in the history of European architecture—Leon Battista Alberti and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc" (Summerson 1948).

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Early years

Viollet-le-Duc's father was a civil servant in Paris who collected books and his mother's Friday salons drew Stendal and Sainte-Beuve. Her brother, Eugène Délécluze, "a painter in the mornings, a scholar in the evenings" (Summerson), was largely in charge of the young man's education. Viollet-le-Duc showed a lively intellect: republican, anti-clerical, rebellious, who built barricade in the July Revolution of 1830 and refused to enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

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As an Architectural Restorer

In the early 1830s, the beginnings of a movement for the restoration of medieval buildings appeared in France. Viollet-le-Duc, returning in 1835 from a study trip to Italy, was ordered by Prosper Merimée to restore the Romanesque abbey of Vezelay. This work marked the beginning of a long series of restorations; Viollet-le-Duc's restorations at Notre Dame de Paris brought him into national attention.

Viollet-le-Duc applied the lessons he had derived from Gothic architecture, seeing beneath the atmospheric allure that drew his British contemporaries to especially what he conceived of its rational structural systems, to modern building materials such as cast iron. He practiced as archaeologically precise (for his time) a style of restoration as he could manage, but his own designs were remarkably innovative. His approach to both medieval and modern architecture was severely rational, in keeping with his own unsentimental appreciation of the Gothic achievement.

At the same time, in the cultural atmosphere of the Second Empire theory necessarily became diluted in practice, and messages were mixed: Viollet-le-Duc provided a Gothic reliquary for the relic of the Crown of Thorns at Notre-Dame in 1862, and yet Napoleon III also commissioned designs for a luxuriously appointed railway carriage from Viollet-le-Duc, in 14th-century Gothic style (Exhibition 1965) Image:Dictionnaire Raisonné de Architecture pequeño.png Among his restorations were:


Restoration of the Château of Pierrefonds, reinterpreted by Viollet-le-Duc for Napoleon III, was interrupted by the departure of the Emperor in 1870. He died in Lausanne in 1879

An exhibition, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc 1814-1879 was presented in Paris, 1965.

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Legacy

Some of his restorations, such as that of the castle of Pierrefonds, were highly controversial because they did not aim so much at accurately recreating a historical situation as much as at creating a "perfect building" of medieval style. Modern conservation practice finds Viollet-le-Duc's restorations too free, too personal, too interpretive, but many of the monuments he restored would have otherwise been lost.

The famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí was strongly influenced by the Gothic architecture revival of Viollet-le-Duc.

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Publications

Throughout his career Viollet-le-Duc made notes and drawings, not only for the buildings he was working on, but also on Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance buildings that were to be soon demolished. His notes were helpful in his published works. His study of medieval and Renaissance periods was not limited to architecture, but extended to furniture, clothing, musical instruments, armament and so forth.

All this work was published, first in serial, and then as full-scale books, as:

  • Dictionary of French Architecture from 11th to 16th Century (1854-1868) (Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVe siècle)
  • Dictionary of French Furnishings (1858-1870) (Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier français de l'époque Carolingienne à la Renaissance.)
  • Entretiens sur l'architecture (in 2 volumes, 1858-72), in which Viollet-le-Duc systematized his approach to architecture and architectural education, in a system radically opposed to that of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, which he had avoided in his youth and despised. In Henry Van Brunt's translation, the "Discourses on Architecture" was published in 1875, making it available to an American audience little more than a decade after its initial publication in France.
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Reference

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