Architecture and the Historical Imagination

Notre-Dame in Paris, the walled city of Carcassone, the fortress at Pierrefonds, visionary projects using iron construction...Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's importance within modern architecture cannot be overstated. Hailed as one of the key theoreticians of modernism, he was also the most renowne [...]
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Notre-Dame in Paris, the walled city of Carcassone, the fortress at Pierrefonds, visionary projects using iron construction...Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's importance within modern architecture cannot be overstated. Hailed as one of the key theoreticians of modernism, he was also the most renowned restoration architect of his age, a celebrated medieval archaeologist and a fervent champion of Gothic revivalism. He published some of the most influential texts in the history of modern architecture such as the Dictionnaire raisonne de l'architecture francaise du XIe au XVIe siecle and Entretiens sur l'architecture, but also studies on warfare, geology and racial history. Martin Bressani expertly traces Viollet-le-Duc's complex intellectual development, mapping the attitudes he adopted toward the past, showing how restoration, in all its layered meaning, shaped his outlook. Through his life journey, we follow the route by which the technological subject was born out of nineteenth-century historicism.