Writer: Martin Bressani

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

Time’s Witness. History in the Age of Romanticism (2021) – Review

Time’s Witness. History in the Age of Romanticism (2021) – Review

Martin Bressani

Anxious Objects At some point in the annals of Western scholarship it was judged that the past could be restituted not only from textual sources but also from objects, that the material of history was equally important as its written archive. This major shift in historical approach was largely brought… Read More

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

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