Memory as Construction in Viollet-le-Duc's Architectural Imagination

Abstract

Memory as Construction in Viollet-le-Duc's Architectural Imagination Aron S. Vinegar The nineteenth-century architect and made a lasting impact on France's memory numerous Gothic Not surprisingly, theorist of its architectural past Eugene Viollet-le-Duc and its imagination of an architecture of the future — through his restorations of structures for France's state-run Monuments Historiques. he had a sophisticated conceptual, methodological, and practical understanding of the role of memory and is imagination in historical in scholarly investigation. This understanding is never explicitly discussed it commentary on Viollet-le-Duc, and practice of architectural In his Entretiens sur yet fundamental for his entire theory restoration. l' Architecture, a series of lectures published in two volumes beginning cal inquiry.' in 1863, Viollet-le-Duc offers a meta-methodologi- cal explanation of the roles memory and imagination first play in epistemologi- Viollet-le-Duc was directly inspired by D'Alembert's Pre- liminary Discourse to the volume of the Encyclopedic and Voltaire's discussion of Passive and Active Imagination in his Philosophical Dictio- nary.^ Included in cal tree of D'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse was a genealogi- knowledge the famous Systdme figure des connaissances humaines. The Syst^me figure was divided into three faculties which gave rise to three major divisions of knowledge: Memory, which produced his- tory; Reason, which resulted in philosophy and science; and Imagination, which created poetry and the fine arts. These faculties differed from each other according to how they processed sensations: memory received them, In the Pre- reason reflected upon them, and imagination combined them. liminary Discourse, D'Alembert provides a detailed commentary on each of the three faculties, their interaction, and order of operation within the mind, a formula which Viollet-le-Duc followed closely.' Viollet-le-Duc insists throughout the Entretiens that in architecture there is no invention ex-nihilo, we must necessarily have recourse to the past in order to originate in the present (Lecture VI, 173). ulty to Memory, the first fac- be exercised, involved recalling sensations or ideas passively received by the mind. Viollet-le-Duc like Voltaire and D'Alembert — uses the term memory and it passive imagination for this process rather than the word believed that although passive imagination alone could not create, the fundamental basis of creative imagination. was the Active imagination it is next faculty to come into play. According to Viollet-le-Duc was nothing