Abstract
In architectural writings from about 1830 to the present a great many buildings are consistently described as divided between structures that represent one period style and ornament another. Why are Romantic historicists, early twentieth-century formalists, and contemporary contextualists all in agreement about the binary nature of these buildings? An examination of the literature on one such monument, St-Eustache in Paris, considers the covert, problematic function of “structure/ornament” as a spatially conceived narrative device; its relationship to “transitional” architecture; its (often unacknowledged) figurative significations; and its status in contemporary discourse as a discovery rather than a historically contingent invention.
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