Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (French: [øʒɛn vjɔlɛ lə dyk]; 27 January 1814 – 17 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 Château de Roquetaillade 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. English architect William Burges claimed that "We all crib from Viollet-le-Duc, although probably not one buyer in ten reads the text".

His writings also influenced John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Arts and Crafts movement. At the International Exhibition of 1862 in London, the aesthetic works of Edward Burne-Jones, Christina Rossetti, Philip Webb, William Morris, Simeon Solomon, and Edward Poynter were directly influenced from drawings in Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary.

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.

In 1825 he began his education at the Pension Moran, in Fontenay-aux-Roses. He returned to Paris in 1829 as a student at the college de Bourbon (now the Lycée Condorcet). He passed his baccalaureate examination in 1830. His uncle urged him to enter the École des Beaux-Arts, which had been created in 1806, but the École had an extremely rigid system, based entirely on copying classical models, and Eugène was not interested. Instead he decided to get practical experience in the architectural offices of Jacques-Marie Huvé and Achille Leclère, while devoting much of his time to drawing medieval churches and monuments around Paris.

At sixteen he participated in the July 1830 revolution which overthrew Charles X, building a barricade. Following the revolution, which brought Louis Philippe I to power, his father became chief of the bureau of royal residences. The new government created, for the first time, the position of Inspector General of Historic Monuments. Eugène's uncle Delécluze agreed to take Eugène on a long tour of France to see monuments. They travelled from July to October 1831 throughout the south of France, and he returned with a large collection of detailed paintings and watercolours of churches and monuments.

On his return to Paris, he moved with his family into the Tuileries Palace, where his father was now governor of royal residences. His family again urged him to attend the École des Beaux-Arts, but he still refused. He wrote in his journal in December 1831, "the École is just a mould for architects. they all come out practically identical." He was a talented and meticulous artist; he travelled around France to visit monuments, cathedrals, and other medieval architecture, made detailed drawings and watercolours. In 1834, at the age of twenty, he married Élisabeth Templier, and in the same year he was named an associate professor of ornamental decoration at the Royal School of Decorative Arts, which gave him a more regular income. His first pupils there included Léon Gaucherel.

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.