Юген Виолле-ле-Дюк: Францияның орта ғасырлық ескерткіштерін қайта жаңғыртушы және архитектураға әсері

French architect and author

Eugène Emmanuel Viollet le Duc (øʒɛn vjɔlɛ lə dyk; 27 January 181417 September 1879) was a French architect and author, famous for his restoration of the most prominent medieval landmarks in France. His major restoration projects included Notre Dame de Paris, the Basilica of Saint Denis, Mont Saint Michel, Sainte Chapelle, the medieval walls of the city of Carcassonne, and Roquetaillade castle in the Bordeaux region. His writings on decoration and on the relationship between form and function in architecture had a fundamental influence on a whole new generation of architects, including all the major Art Nouveau artists: Antoni Gaudí, Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, Henry van de Velde, Henri Sauvage and the École de Nancy, Paul Hankar, Otto Wagner, Eugène Grasset, Émile Gallé, and Hendrik Petrus Berlage. He also influenced the first modern architects, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Auguste Perret, Louis Sullivan, and Le Corbusier, who considered Viollet le Duc as the father of modern architecture. The English architect William Burges admitted in his late life "We all cribbed on Viollet le Duc even though no one could read French". His writings also influenced John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement.

Viollet le Duc was born in Paris in 1814. His grandfather was an architect, and his father was a high ranking civil servant, who in 1816 became the overseer of the royal residences of Louis XVIII. His uncle Étienne Jean Delécluze was a painter, a former student of Jacques Louis David, an art critic and hosted a literary salon, which was attended by Stendhal and Sainte Beuve. His mother hosted her own salon, which women could attend as well as men. There, in 1822 or 1823, Eugène met Prosper Mérimée, a writer who would play a decisive role in his career. With the money from the sale of his drawings and paintings, Viollet le Duc set off on a long tour of the monuments of Italy, visiting Rome, Venice, Florence and other sites, drawing and painting. In 1838, he presented several of his drawings at the Paris Salon, and began making a travel book, Picturesque and romantic images of the old France, for which, between 1838 and 1844, he made nearly three hundred engravings.

In October 1838, with the recommendation of Achille Leclère, the architect with whom he had trained, he was named deputy inspector of the enlargement of the Hôtel Soubise, the new home of the French National Archives. His uncle, Delécluze, then recommended him to the new Commission of Historic Monuments of France, led by Prosper Mérimée, who had just published a book on medieval French monuments. Though he was just twenty four years old and had no degree in architecture, he was asked to go to Narbonne to propose a plan for the completion of the cathedral there. The project was rejected by the local authorities as too ambitious and too expensive. His first real project was a restoration of the Vézelay Abbey, which many considered as impossible. The church had been sacked by the Huguenots in 1569, and during the French Revolution, the facade and statuary on the facade were destroyed. The vaults of the roof were weakened, and many of the stones had been carried off for other projects. When Mérimée visited to inspect the structure he heard stones falling around him. In February 1840 he gave Viollet le Duc the mission of restoring and reconstructing the church so it would not collapse, while "respecting exactly in his project of restoration all the ancient dispositions of the church". The task was all the more difficult because up until that time no scientific studies had been made of medieval building techniques, and there were no schools of restoration. He had no plans for the original building to work from. Viollet le Duc had to discover the flaws of construction that had caused the building to start to collapse in the first place and to construct a more solid and stable structure. He lightened the roof and built new arches to stabilize the structure, and slightly changed the shape of the vaults and arches. He was criticized for these modifications in the 1960s, though, as his defenders pointed out, without them the roof would have collapsed under its own weight. Mérimée's deputy, Lenormant, inspected the construction and reported to Mérimée: "The young Leduc seems entirely worthy of your confidence. He needed a magnificent audacity to take charge of such a desperate enterprise; it's certain that he arrived just in time, and if we had waited only ten years the church would have been a pile of stones." This restoration work lasted 19 years.

Viollet le Duc's success at Vezelay led to a large series of projects. In 1840, in collaboration with his friend the architect Jean Baptiste Lassus he began the restoration of Sainte Chapelle in Paris, which had been turned into a storage depot after the Revolution. In February 1843, King Louis Philippe sent him to the Château of Amboise, to restore the stained glass windows in the chapel holding the tomb of Leonardo da Vinci. The windows were unfortunately destroyed in 1940 during World War II. In 1843, Mérimée took Viollet le Duc with him to Burgundy and the south of France, on one of his long inspection tours of monuments. Viollet le Duc made drawings of the buildings and wrote detailed accounts of each site, illustrated with his drawing, which were published in architectural journals. With his experience he became the most prominent academic scholar on French medieval architecture and his medieval dictionnary, with over 4000 drawings, contains the largest iconography on the subject to this day.

In 1844, with the backing of Mérimée, Viollet le Duc, just thirty years old, and Lassus, then thirty seven, won a competition for the restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral which lasted twenty five years. Their project involved primarily the facade, where many of the statues over the portals had been beheaded or smashed during the Revolution. They proposed two major changes to the interior: rebuilding two of the bays to their original medieval height of four storeys, and removing the marble neoclassical structures and decoration which had been added to the choir during the reign of Louis XIV. Mérimée warned them to be careful: "In such a project, one cannot act with too much prudence or discretion A restoration may be more disastrous for a monument than the ravages of centuries." The Commission on Historical Monuments approved most of Viollet le Duc's plans, but rejected his proposal to remove the choir built under Louis XIV. Viollet le Duc himself turned down a proposal to add two new spires atop the towers, arguing that such a monument "would be remarkable but would not be Notre Dame de Paris". Instead, he proposed to rebuild the original medieval spire and bell tower over the transept, which had been removed in 1786 because it was unstable in the wind. He also designed a new treasury in the Gothic style to serve as the museum of the cathedral, replacing the residence of the Archbishop, which had been destroyed in a riot in 1831. The bells in the two towers had been taken out in 1791 and melted down to make cannons. Viollet le Duc had new bells cast for the north tower and a new structure built inside to support them. Viollet le Duc and Lassus also rebuilt the sacristy, on the south side of the church, which had been built in 1756, but had been burned by rioters during the July Revolution of 1830. The new spire was completed, taller and more strongly built to withstand the weather; it was decorated with statues of the apostles, and the face of Saint Thomas, patron saint of architects, bore a noticeable resemblance to Viollet le Duc. Carcassonne became the best example of medieval military architecture in France, and also an important tourist attraction. Napoleon III provided additional funding for the continued restoration of Notre Dame. Viollet le Duc was also to replace the great bestiary of mythical beasts and animals which had decorated the cathedral in the 18th century. In 1856, using examples from other medieval churches and debris from Notre Dame as his model, his workshop produced dragons, chimeras, grotesques, and gargoyles, as well as an assortment of picturesque pinnacles and fleurons. He engaged in a new project for restoration of the Cathedral of Clermont Ferrand, a project which continued for ten years. He also undertook an unusual project for Napoleon III; the design and construction of six railway coaches with neo Gothic interior décor for the Emperor and his entourage. Two of the cars still exist; the salon of honour car, with a fresco on the ceiling, is at the Château de Compiègne, and the dining car, with a massive golden eagle as the centrepiece of the décor, is at the Railroad Museum of Mulhouse. Napoleon III asked Viollet le Duc if he could restore a medieval chateau for the Emperor's own use near Compiègne, where the Emperor traditionally passed September and October. Viollet le Duc first studied a restoration of the Château de Coucy, which had the highest medieval tower in France. When this proved too complicated, he settled upon Château de Pierrefonds, a castle begun by Louis of Orleans in 1396, then dismantled in 1617 after several sieges by Louis XIII of France. Napoleon bought the ruin for 5000 francs in 1812, and Mérimée declared it an historic monument in 1848. In 1857 Viollet le Duc began designing an entirely new chateau on the ruins. This structure was not designed to recreate anything exactly that had existed, but a castle which recaptured the spirit of the Gothic, with lavish neo Gothic decoration and 19th century comforts. Pierrefonds and its inside decorations would not only influence William Burges and his Cardiff and Coch castles but also the castles of Ludwig II of Bavaria (Neuschwanstein Castle) and the Haut Kœnigsbourg of the Emperor Wilhelm II. While most of his attention was devoted to restorations, Viollet le Duc designed and built a number of private residences and new buildings in Paris. He also participated in the most important competition of the period, for the new Paris Opera. There were one hundred seventy one projects proposed in the original competition, presented the 1855 Paris Universal Exposition. A jury of noted architects narrowed it down to five, including projects from Viollet le Duc and Charles Garnier, age thirty five. Viollet le Duc was finally eliminated and this put an end to Viollet le Duc's wish to construct public buildings. Napoleon III also called upon Viollet le Duc for a wide variety of archeological and architectural tasks. When he wished to put up a monument to mark the Battle of Alesia, where Julius Caesar defeated the Gauls, a siege whose actual site was disputed by historians, he asked Viollet le Duc to locate the exact battlefield. Viollet le Duc conducted excavations at various purported sites, and finally found vestiges of the walls built at the time. He also designed the metal frame for the six metre high statue of the Gallic chief Vercingétorix that would be placed on the site. He later designed a similar frame for a much larger statue, the Statue of Liberty, but died before that statue was finished.

In 1863, Viollet le Duc was named a professor at the École des Beaux Arts, the school where he had refused to become a student. In the fortress of neoclassical Beaux Arts architecture there was much resistance against him, but he attracted two hundred students to his course, who applauded his lecture at the end. But while he had many supporters, the faculty professors and certain students campaigned against him. His critics complained that, aside from having little formal architectural training himself, he had only built a handful of new buildings. He tired of the confrontations and resigned on 16 May 1863, and continued his writing and teaching outside the Beaux Arts. In response to the Beaux Arts he initiated the creation of the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris in 1865. In the beginning of 1864, he celebrated the conclusion of his most important project, the restoration of Notre Dame. In January of the same year he completed the first phase of the restoration of the Cathedral of Saint Sernin in Toulouse, one of the landmarks of French Romanesque architecture. Napoleon III invited Viollet le Duc to study possible restorations overseas, including in Algeria, Corsica, and in Mexico, where Napoleon had installed a new Emperor, Maximilian, under French sponsorship. He also saw the consecration of the third church that he had designed, the neo Gothic church of Saint Denis de l'Estree, in the Paris suburb of Saint Denis. Between 1866 and 1870, his major project was the ongoing transformation of Pierrefonds from a ruin into a royal residence. His plans for the metal framework he had designed for Pierrefonds were displayed at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867. He also began a new area of study, researching the geology and geography of the region around Mont Blanc in the Alps. While on his mapping excursion in the Alps in July 1870, he learned that war had been declared between Prussia and France. As the Franco Prussian War commenced, Viollet le Duc hurried back to Paris, and offered his services as a military engineer; he was put into service as a colonel of engineers, preparing the defenses of Paris. In September, the Emperor was captured at the Battle of Sedan, a new Republican government took power, and the Empress Eugénie fled into exile, as Germans marched as far as Paris and put it under siege. At the same time, on September 23, Viollet le Duc's primary patron and supporter, Prosper Mérimée, died peacefully in the south of France. Viollet le Duc supervised the construction of new defensive works outside Paris. The war was a disaster as he wrote in his journal on the 14th December 1870: "Disorganization is everywhere. The officers have no confidence in the troops, and the troops have no confidence in the officers. Each day, new orders and new projects which contravene those of the day before." He fought with the French army against the Germans at Buzenval on 24 January 1871. The battle was lost, and the French capitulated on 28 January. Viollet le Duc wrote to his wife on February 28, "I don't know what will become of me, but I do not want to return any more to administration. I am disgusted by it forever, and want nothing more than to pass the years that remain to me in study and in the most modest possible life." Always the scholar, he wrote a detailed study of the effectiveness and deficiencies of the fortifications of Paris during the siege, which was to be used for the 1917 defense of Verdun and the construction of the Maginot line in 1938. In May 1871 he left his home in Paris just before national guardsmen arrived to draft him into the armed force of the Paris Commune who subsequently condemned him to death. He escaped to Pierrefonds, where he had a small apartment before going in exile in Lausanne, where he engage in his passion for mountains, making detailed maps and a series of thirty two drawings of the alpine scenery. While in Lausanne he was also asked to undertake the restoration of the cathedral. He returned later to Paris after the Commune had been suppressed and saw the ruins of most of the public buildings of the city, burned by the Commune in its last days. He received his only commission from the new government of the French Third Republic; Jules Simon, the new Minister of Culture and Public Instruction, asked him to design a plaque to be placed before Notre Dame to honor the hostages killed by the Paris Commune in its final days. The new government of the French Third Republic made little use of his expertise in the restoration of the major government buildings which had been burned by the Paris Commune, including the Tuileries Palace, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, the Palais Royal, the library of the Louvre, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Finance. The only reconstruction on which he was consulted was that of the Hotel de Ville. The writer Edmond de Goncourt called for leaving the ruin of the Hotel de Ville exactly as it was, "a ruin of a magical palace, A marvel of the picturesque. The country should not condemn it without appeal to restoration by Viollet le Duc." The government asked Viollet le Duc to organize a competition. He presented two options; to either restore the building to its original state, with its historic interior; or to demolish it and build a new city hall. In July 1872 the government decided to preserve the Renaissance facade, but otherwise to completely demolish and rebuild the building.

Throughout his life Viollet le Duc wrote over 100 publications on architecture, decoration, history, archeology etc some of which would become international best sellers: Dictionary of French Architecture from 11th to 16th Century (1854–1868), Entretiens sur l'architecture (1863–1872), L'histoire d'une Maison (1873) and Histoire d'un Dessinateur: Comment on Apprend à Dessiner (1879). In his Entretiens sur l'architecture he concentrated in particular on the use of iron and other new materials, and the importance of designing buildings whose architecture was adapted to their function, rather than to a particular style. The book was translated into English in 1881 and won a large following in the United States. The Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, one of the inventors of the skyscraper, often invoked the phrase, "Form follows function." Lausanne Cathedral was his final major restoration project; it was rebuilt following his plans between 1873 and 1876. Work continued after his death. His reconstruction of the bell tower was later criticized; he eliminated the original octagonal base and added a new spire, which rested on the walls, and not on the vaulting, like the original spire. He also added new decoration, crowning the spire at mid height with gables, another original element, and removing the original tiles. He was also criticized for the materials and ornaments he added to the towers, including gargoyles. His structural design was preserved, but in 1925 his gargoyles and original ornamentation were removed, and the spire was recovered with tiles. His reputation had reached outside of France. The spire and roof of Strasbourg Cathedral had been damaged by German artillery during the Franco Prussian War, and the city was now part of Germany. The German government invited Viollet le Duc to comment on their plans for the restoration, which involved a more grandiose Romanesque tower. Viollet le Duc informed the German architect that the planned new tower was completely out of character with the original facade and style of the cathedral. His advice was accepted, and the church was restored to its original form. In 1872 Viollet le Duc was engaged in the reconstruction of the Château d'Amboise, owned by the descendants of the former King, Louis Philippe. The chateau had been confiscated by Napoleon III in 1848 but was returned to the family in 1872. It was a massive project to turn it into a residence, involving at times three hundred workers. Viollet le Duc designed all the work to the finest details, including the floor tiles, the gas lights in the salons, the ovens in the kitchen, and the electric bells for summoning servants. In 1874 Viollet le Duc resigned as diocesan architect of Paris and was succeeded by his contemporary, Paul Abadie. In his final years, he continued to supervise the restoration projects that were underway for the Commission of Historical Monuments. He engaged in polemics about architecture in the press, and was elected to the Paris municipal council.

While planning the design and construction of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World) sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi interested Viollet le Duc, his friend and mentor, in the project. As chief engineer,

During the entire career of Viollet le Duc, he was engaged in a dispute with the doctrines of the École des Beaux Arts, the leading architectural school of France, which he refused to attend as a student, and where he taught briefly as a professor, before being pressured to depart. In 1846 he engaged in a fervent exchange in print with Quatremère de Quincy, the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy, on the question, "Is it suitable, in the 19th century, to build churches in the Gothic style?" De Quincy and his followers denounced the Gothic style as incoherent, disorderly, unintelligent, decadent and without taste. Viollet le Duc responded, "What we want, messieurs, is the return of an art which was born in our country Leave to Rome what belongs to Rome, and to Athens what belongs to Athens. Rome didn't want our Gothic (and was perhaps the only one in Europe to reject it) and they were right, because when one has the good fortune to possess a national architecture, the best thing is to keep it." "If you study for a moment a church of the 13th century", he wrote, "you see that all of the construction is carried out according to an invariable system. All the forces and the weights are thrust out to the exterior, a disposition which gives the interior the greatest open space possible. The flying buttresses and contreforts alone support the entire structure, and always have an aspect of resistance, of force and stability which reassures the eye and the spirit; The vaults, built with materials that are easy to mount and to place at a great height, are combined in a easy that places the totality of their weight on the piles; that the most simple means are always employed and that all the parts of these constructions, independent of each other, even as they rely on each other, present an elasticity and a lightness needed in a building of such great dimensions. We can still see (and this is only found in Gothic architecture) that human proportions are the one fixed rule."

Viollet le Duc is considered by many to be the first theorist of modern architecture. Sir John Summerson wrote that "there have been two supremely eminent theorists in the history of European architecture – Leon Battista Alberti and Eugène Viollet le Duc." His architectural theory was largely based on finding the ideal forms for specific materials and using these forms to create buildings. His writings centered on the idea that materials should be used "honestly". He believed that the outward appearance of a building should reflect the rational construction of the building. In Entretiens sur l'architecture, Viollet le Duc praised the Greek temple for its rational representation of its construction. For him, "Greek architecture served as a model for the correspondence of structure and appearance." Another component in Viollet le Duc's theory was how the design of a building should start from its program and the plan, and end with its decorations. If this resulted in an asymmetrical exterior, so be it. He dismissed the symmetry of classicist buildings as vain, caring too much about appearances at the expense of practicality and convenience for the inhabitants of the house. In several unbuilt projects for new buildings, Viollet le Duc applied the lessons he had derived from Gothic architecture, applying its rational structural systems to modern building materials such as cast iron. For inspiration, he also examined organic structures, such as leaves and animal skeletons. He was especially interested in the wings of bats, an influence represented by his Assembly Hall project. Viollet le Duc's drawings of iron trusswork were innovative for the time. Many of his designs emphasizing iron would later influence the Art Nouveau movement, most noticeably in the work of Hector Guimard, Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudí and Hendrik Petrus Berlage. His writings inspired several American architects, including Frank Furness, John Wellborn Root, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. An exhibition, Eugène Viollet le Duc 1814–1879 was presented in Paris in 1965, and there was a larger, centennial exhibition in 1980. Viollet le Duc was the subject of a Google Doodle on January 27, 2014.