Review: Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879, by Martin Bressani

Abstract

Martin Bressani. Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814–1879 Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2014, 624 pp., 86 color and 64 b/w illus. $114.95, ISBN 9780754633402 When the French architect, theorist, and ardent medievalist Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc taught at the Parisian Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he was met by the sneers of students, a reception that ultimately led him to resign after his seventh lecture on 18 March 1864. Scarcely four months earlier, he had been appointed to the newly minted chair of art history and aesthetics at France's stronghold of academic tradition. He had already published most of the volumes of his influential Dictionnaire raisonne de l'architecture francaise du XIe au XVIe siecle ( Dictionary of French Architecture from the Eleventh to the Sixteen Century ) and Entretiens sur l'architecture ( Lectures on Architecture ).1 He was also overseeing the restoration of a number of significant medieval monuments under the auspices of the French government's Commission des Monuments Historiques. At the height of his career, he had developed the modern conception of restoration and helped establish Gothic architecture as France's national style. But his hostile reception at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was scarcely surprising. He was unconventionally trained, having been mentored from a young age by his uncle, the art critic Etienne Delecluze, and had forgone formal architectural instruction. His short-lived appointment at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts was part of sweeping reforms to the school that the Second Empire government supported by imperial decree in an attempt to dislodge the institution's notorious insularity. To students and academicians, Viollet-le-Duc, whose medievalist focus challenged academic doctrine, may have appeared to be a pawn of the state. Nevertheless, this affair has attained a rather mythical status. John Summerson, for example, hailed Viollet-le-Duc's lectures as nothing less than an important touchstone in the development of modernist architecture.2 Summerson conceived of Viollet-le-Duc as a structural rationalist concerned above all else with the expressive logic of building materials and methods of construction, …