Review: Viollet-le-Duc: Les visions d’un architecte

Abstract

Viollet-le-Duc: Les visions d’un architecte Cite de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Palais de Chaillot, Paris 20 November 2014–9 March 2015 Organized to mark the bicentennial of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc’s birth as well as to showcase an important archival donation, Viollet-le-Duc: Les visions d’un architecte challenged received notions of the rationalist practitioner rooted in positivist thought and natural science. An enormous assembly of drawings, objects, personal writings, and ephemera returned Viollet to his romantic roots and centered his oeuvre on a lifelong series of hallucinatory visions. While reflective of a recent romantic turn in Viollet studies, the show failed to represent the full complexity of that scholarship. For instance, Martin Bressani’s Architecture and the Historical Imagination (2014) deploys a psychoanalytic reading of early personal loss to position Viollet within larger historical processes and events.1 Although this exhibition similarly delved into biography to reframe the prolific and polyvalent nature of Viollet’s practice, its consistent recourse to a reductive literary romanticism ultimately occluded his implication in the full breadth of nineteenth-century intellectual and social development. The exhibition best promoted the “visionary” in its treatment of Viollet’s decisive encounter with Prosper Merimee and his series of youthful voyages in pursuit of the sublime and folkloric. However, when presented beside his companions’ travel albums, the obsessive detail of Viollet’s drawings—whether focused on architecture, local costume, or geological formation—suggested a …