Bressani Martin - Architecture and the historical imagination : Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814-1879

ARCHITECTURE AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION

Hailed as one of the key theoreticians of modernism, Eugne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc 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 raisonn de larchitecture franaise du XIe au XVIe sicle and Entretiens sur larchitecture, but also studies on warfare, geology and racial history. Martin Bressani expertly traces Viollet-le-Ducs 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.

Martin Bressani is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director at the School of Architecture, McGill University, Canada.

To my wife Claude Jean

Eugne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 18141879

Martin Bressani

ASHGATE

Martin Bressani 2014

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Martin Bressani has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Bressani, Martin.

Architecture and the historical imagination : Eugne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814-1879 / by Martin Bressani.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7546-3340-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-4088-4 (ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-4089-1 (epub)

1. Viollet-le-Duc, Eugne-Emmanuel, 1814-1879--Psychology. 2. Architecture and history. I. Title.

NA1053.V7B74 2014
720.92--dc23

2013037795

ISBN 9780754633402 (hbk)

ISBN 9781472440884 (ebk-PDF)

ISBN 9781472440891 (ebk-ePUB)

The majority of Viollet-le-Ducs published writings have never been translated, with the notable exception of some excerpts from the Dictionnaire raisonn de larchitecture, the two-volume Entretiens sur larchitecture, the Massif du Mont-Blanc and the group of five Histoires published by Jules Hetzel after 1871. Likewise, archival documents, letters, and other unpublished material remain untranslated. Thus, most of the translations in this book are my own, including all quotations from the Dictionnaire raisonn de larchitecture franaise du XIe au XVIe sicle and the Dictionnaire raisonn du mobilier franais de lpoque carolingienne la Renaissance. In the case of the Entretiens sur larchitecture, the Massif du Mont-Blanc and the above-mentioned Histoires, I have consulted existing translations, emending them wherever I felt it was necessary in order to render more accurately Viollet-le-Ducs original meaning.

If artists today work for the living, they must live with the dead.
Because only they can teach them.

Viollet-le-Duc, 1859

The history of modern European architecture has traditionally been envisaged as a progressive emancipation from historical models, first from the classical canon in the eighteenth century, and then from historical revivalism in the nineteenth. It is indeed inescapable that modern architecture be described as a turn against tradition, but it would be a mistake to pit architectures involvement with the past too squarely against its commitment to modernity. For one thing, the rise of modernity is the development and exacerbation of an historical consciousness; some form of historicism thus essentially inheres to it. To be modern, moreover, is not so much a matter of committing oneself to the new conditions from a realist point of view, as it is to engage in an act of separation: to move away from something, to cut oneself off, as Octavio Paz wrote in