Architect: Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

Protected: Carcassonne and Viollet-le-Duc

Protected: Carcassonne and Viollet-le-Duc

Henry James

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Gothic Put to Use: The Viollet-le-Duc Album

Gothic Put to Use: The Viollet-le-Duc Album

Martin Bressani

This film is part of series of posts of selected papers from the study symposium at Shatwell Farm, hosted by Drawing Matter and convened by KU Leuven and TU Delft on 27 and 28 April 2023. More about the symposium, and other films and written papers, can be found here. In… Read More

The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection

The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection

Editors

The following group of drawings are presented here as additional illustrations to Maarten Delbeke’s essay The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture.

The Architect and the Matador

The Architect and the Matador

Thomas Gould

On one sheet, a matador;on the other, a design,with measurements for a cathedral pier.  What unites these drawingsis provenance:both, apparently, executedby the architectEugène Viollet-le-Ducin meetings.  As Viollet-le-Duc’s mind wanderedfrom doodle to design,my attention,beholding the drawings,is drawn between the two sheets; drawn, by the insistently connective impulseof looking,into associations.  Between architect… Read More

Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse

Viollet-le-Duc: Ruins in Reverse

Thomas Gould

In 1844, architect Eugéne Viollet-le-Duc won a competition to supervise the restoration of the Notre-Dame Cathedral.  Blasted and defaced during the Revolution, the condition of the great church testified less to the promises of an infant republic than to the bloody throes of its birth. For its restoration, the Comité des… Read More

Summerson: The Little House

Summerson: The Little House

John Summerson

– John Summerson, ‘Heavenly Mansions: An Interpretation of Gothic,’ in Heavenly Mansions, and other Essays on Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 1-3.

Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc

Viollet-le-Duc: Mont Blanc

Martin Bressani

This simple but fascinating ink drawing by French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) illustrates the geometrical structure that, according to him, regulates the morphology of the entire Mont Blanc massif. Far from an amorphous, chaotic mass, he describes the mountain as a gigantic crystal that follows the regular structure of a… Read More

Architecture and Geology

Architecture and Geology

William Mann

What is the relation between the forces that shape buildings and those that shape the earth’s surface? How are the imaginative powers of architects heightened by their knowledge of geological processes? How is their handling of all the cultural, economic and material constraints on their practice enriched by exposure to… Read More

Jean-Baptiste Lassus

Jean-Baptiste Lassus

Martin Bressani

After a brief passage at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the studio of Henri Labrouste from 1828 to 1830, French architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus fell under the sway of the romantic cult of history and turned toward the middle ages. Together with his life-time associate Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), he… Read More

Sketch from Vézelay from letter to Mérimée (1843)

Sketch from Vézelay from letter to Mérimée (1843)

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

From a letter to Mérimée written in 1843 from Vézelay: You, Sir, who have ceaselessly lived the life of the past, you understand the joy, the secret happiness felt when we can record in our sketchbook some of these forgotten [historical] treasures … but how much more interesting when these… Read More