Review Essay

Abstract

The late twentieth century has both a profound distrust and a nostalgic fascination with totalizing systems and explanations of the world. It is perhaps for this reason that the French nineteenth-century architect and architectural theorist Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79), that great proponent of structural rationalism both as a mode of historical understanding and a doctrine for modern architecture, has enjoyed such a renaissance of interest in the nearly 20 years since the centennial of his death. At least three recent or current doctoral dissertations on both sides of the Atlantic have taken up the influence of nineteenth-century science on Viollet-le-Duc's theories, a reflection of a growing interest in nineteenthcentury studies to reexamine the thesis of the rift which opened in the nineteenth century between humanistic and scientific culture and modes of thought. At first glance nothing could seem more self-evident, since the great maitre-penseur of the French Gothic Revival has been alternatively critiqued and celebrated for his analyses of the consummate logic of medieval construction as enthusiasm for structural and functional determinism has waxed and waned in twentieth-century architectural practice. From the first scathing attack by Pol Abraham in r 934, Violletle-Duc et le rationalisme medieval, to the most recent accusations of Viollet-le-Duc as a ruthless systematizer in Jean-Michel Leniaud's Viollet-le-Duc ou les delires du systeme (1995), Viollet-le-Duc's scientism has been seen as something irreconcilable with either the complexity of culture or the richness, mystery and personality of the art of architecture.