Born in Paris, France on January 27, 1814, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was a French architect and restorer, and is widely considered to be the foremost theorist of modern architecture. The son of the Sous-Contrôleur des Services for the Tuileries, grandson of a successful contractor, and nephew of a well-known artist and critic, Viollet-le-Duc, was, from an early age, exposed to the critical thinking and intellectual pursuits of the Parisian bourgeoisie. His parents, staunch royalists and rational classicists, held a Friday evening salon, while his uncle, Etienne Delécluze (1781-1863), a republican and romanticist, held gatherings on Sunday afternoons for figures such as the famous author Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870). Thus, Viollet-le-Duc was constantly surrounded by individuals who were deeply engaged with the construction and preservation of important sites, the promotion of a discourse on art and architecture, and, in a sense, the very shaping of the fabric of Parisian culture.
After receiving the baccalauréat at the age of sixteen from the Collège de Bourbon, Viollet-le-Duc announced his intent to pursue a career in architecture. Rejecting formal training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in favor of direct experience, he took up work in the office of Achille Leclère (1785-1853). Between 1831 and 1836, Viollet-le-Duc traveled extensively throughout France, visiting the major sites of medieval architecture, and enhancing both his knowledge of and interest in the Romanesque and Gothic styles. In 1834, at the age of twenty, he married and also accepted a position teaching drawing at the Ecole de Dessin de Paris, and, in 1836, he embarked upon an eighteen-month long trip to Italy, where he studied and drew buildings, representative of the history and trajectory of Western architecture.
Having returned to Paris in 1837, Viollet-le-Duc was appointed auditor to the Conseil des Bâtiments Civils, which was responsible for the construction and renovation of all state buildings. During this time, he continued to travel throughout France, visiting and recording Gothic and Romanesque sites. In 1840, Prosper Mérimée, then serving as Inspecteur Général des Monuments Historiques, selected Viollet-le-Duc to restore the abbey church of the Madeleine at Vézelay. Two years later, Mérimée appointed Viollet-le-Duc as second inspector of the restoration of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. During the course of the restoration work, Viollet-le-Duc became close with his colleague, the first inspector, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus (1807-1857), with whom he drafted a proposal for the restoration of Notre-Dame, Paris, and from whom he adopted the "rationalist interpretation of architecture in general and of Gothic architecture in particular" (Hearn, 4).
Already by 1844, when he had received the commission for the restoration of Notre-Dame, Viollet-le-Duc had developed his theoretical position and had begun to publish polemical writings on Gothic architecture. In these early essays he advanced his theories of the Gothic as a "logical structural system" (Hearn, 5). Viollet-le-Duc's studies of nineteenth-century iron structures greatly informed his emerging interpretation of the Gothic as a rational scheme of skeletal forms designed to bear the weight of the increasingly taller vaults. The simultaneous functionality and visibility of these skeletal elements, namely the ribs, arches, and vertical supports, was essential to his understanding of Gothic architecture. The visual reiteration of these particular forms, and, by extension, their utility within the overarching structure, was what provided the buildings with their aesthetic value. Even the decorative elements, such as blind arcades and bar tracery, derived their beauty from the visual evocation of their actual structural function.
Notre-Dame signals the first practical application of Viollet-le-Duc's theory of restoration with his series of creative and unprecedented modifications to both the structure and decoration of the cathedral. Viollet-le-Duc's restorations at Notre Dame have been the subject of much scrutiny, since they neither attempt to revive its original twelfth-century appearance, nor restore the building to its state at the end of the Middle Ages. Instead, they illuminate Viollet-le-Duc's personal desire to "reestablish it in a complete condition that may never have existed at any given moment" (Hearn, 6). His theory envisioned the restoration of buildings as a kind of re-imagination of the original, informed not only by the existing structure and its many layers, but also by an individual knowledge of history and form, coupled with a nineteenth-century understanding of the Middle Ages.
In 1854, Viollet-le-Duc published his ten-volume work entitled Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVI siècle (Dictionary of French Architecture from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Century). Drawing upon the studies and fine illustrations of sites Viollet-le-Duc had made during his various tours throughout France, this comprehensive text presented both his general understanding of Gothic architecture and his knowledge of particular buildings. Alphabetical entries detailed the specific elements of structure and decoration in individual monuments, and elucidated the more general topics of architectural forms and techniques. His interpretation of the Gothic relied upon an essentially cerebral view, in which the beauty of its architecture was founded upon a methodically rational approach to construction, rather than a concern for aesthetic or iconographical design. He claims that the impetus for Gothic architecture was the desire to build high vaults, and that the characteristically Gothic elements of a monument, both structural and decorative, developed out of functional necessity and the state of medieval building techniques and materials. In essence, form followed function.
During this time, Viollet-le-Duc also began to write a series of historical essays, which were compiled and published in the 1863 volume titled Entretiens sur l'architecture (Discourses on Architecture). In this work, he discusses three emergent models in the history of architecture: the Greek Doric temple, the complex structures of imperial Rome, and the Gothic cathedrals of medieval France. The Doric temple was conceived of as a purely rational approach to the organization of structure, in which each individual element was logically linked to its adjoining parts and to the overall structure, and in which the architecture itself was shaped by its method of construction instead of its general function as a building. In contrast, Roman architecture began with a set of functional necessities, which were solved through the arrangement of structural elements and spaces of varying size and shape, which were then overlaid with a "luxurious, but irrelevant veneer of Greek forms" (Hearn, 9). Viollet-le-Duc viewed Gothic architecture as a fusion of these two earlier models, and presented the Gothic cathedral as a wholly rational structure designed to fulfill a functional program, in this case, the liturgy. He also saw the French Renaissance chateau as carrying on this dual emphasis upon functionality and rational design, but vehemently opposed the neo-classical palaces and houses erected during the Baroque era, which he saw as appropriating symmetrical facades for purely aesthetic reasons, with little to no regard for the functional requirements and rationality of the structure. This emphasis upon function, rationality, and transparency in both structure and purpose, drawn from the medieval world, would ultimately serve as the basis for his conception of a modern architecture.
Renewed interest in preservation efforts has revived Viollet-le-Duc's theories of restoration and sparked a re-evaluation of his somewhat controversial modifications. Although his restorations have often been interpreted as arbitrary or unconventional, they were in fact guided by a strong desire to retain traces of both old and new, and to present the building as a site of change and adaptation, rather than as a static and immutable monument.
Sarah Ryan
FSU, MA student