The Relations between Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc or the Longevity of the Taken-for-Granted Ideas/ Frangoise CHOAY

Thematic File

text: Françoise CHOAY
translation: Kázmér KOVÁCS

"We shall not have an architecture until the day when we are willing [...] to appreciate the works of the past at their relative value" (Viollet-le-Duc, "Dixième Entretien": Entretiens,1863).

Françoise Choay's article is a deconstruction of the long-established cliché according to which Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc embody the irreducible opposition between traditionalists and progressives.
(Kázmér Kovács)

The title of my lecture aims at the conviction, supported by numerous facts and documents, of a radical opposition between the two authors. An often invoked opposition between Ruskin's traditionalism and Viollet's progressivism, the sentimentalism of the former and the rationalism of the latter, the religiosity of the one and the atheism of the other... not to mention the difference between the amateur art theorist and the practicing architect.
It is an opposition that can be emblematized by their (respective) apparently irreducible conceptions of monuments. Ruskin: 'Neither the public nor those who are charged with the maintenance of public monuments understand the true meaning of the word restoration. It means destruction in the highest degree that an edifice can suffer: a destruction after which no remains can be recovered; a destruction accompanied by a misrepresentation of the thing destroyed. Let us not be deceived on this important point; it is as impossible, as impossible as raising the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture.... So let's not talk about restoration. The enterprise is a lie from end to end"^2. Viollet-le-Duc: "To restore an edifice does not mean to maintain, repair or rebuild it, but to restore it to a complete state which perhaps never existed at one time"^3. In lieu of any comment, I will recall how Ruskin's condemnation without appeal is pronounced by Ruskin as early as the first page of the preface to the first edition of the Seven Lamps in ¹⁸⁴⁹⁴.
And yet... A long letter of Ruskin's, preserved in the RIBA ^archives5 and available online, invites us to reflect first of all on the meaning of these oppositions, the reality of which conceals the fundamental proximity of the two authors. Here is what Ruskin wrote in 1887, eight years after Viollet's death:
"Brantwood, 2nd March 87
My dear boy

There is only one book of architecture of any value and that contains every thing, rightly, Monsieur Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary. Every architect must learn French, for all the best architecture is in France - and the French workmen are in the highest degree skillful. For the rest, you must trust your own feeling and observations only. My books are historical or sentimental and very well in their way. But you must learn from the things themselves.
Yours ^faithfully6"
The addressee of the letter was identified in 1998 as the future Arts and Crafts architect Percy Morley-Horder (1870-1944), then aged 17. On the other hand, five years earlier, in this Bible d'Amiens, bizarrely "translated" by ^Proust7, Ruskin had made numerous laudatory references to Viollet's Dictionary. For the sake of anecdote, here is what Ruskin's private diary of October 12, 1882, records: "Restless sleep. In my dream I was trying to introduce myself to Mr. Viollet-le-Duc, and he had nothing to say to me.
Of course, both authors, especially Ruskin, started their careers very ^young8. So they evolved, and depending on the contexts in which they expressed themselves, both one and the other could sometimes seem to contradict each other. But the reader remains, in both cases, impressed by the permanence and coherence of their first ^intuitions9. That is why, despite the schematism that time limits impose on me, I would like to show:
That the two works are marked alike by the identically claimed awareness of belonging to Western European culture: a culture whose diversity of ^ethnic10 or national manifestations is recognized by Viollet and Ruskin and known through direct experience; a culture whose unity and identity are, in their view, in no way altered by these ethnic or national differences which they assume as a richness. Which, paren parenthetically, the European Commission, dedicated to ^{normalization11}, regrettably fails to recognize today;
that such an awareness is provoked and reinforced, in the same way for both authors, by the cultural upheaval that followed the industrial revolution, which, in their eyes, was a pressing threat to the destiny and identity of European societies;
that architecture, both as a heritage and as a practice, is (equally) situated by Ruskin and Viollet at the heart of the problems of their respective modernity. Both of them being visionaries, reading them today can help to clarify the problems of our own modernity: without the terminology in use today in our so-called human sciences, they give us, in particular, the anthropological and anthropogenetic dimension of architecture and spatial planning in general.
Of course, the three themes defined in this way are interrelated, linked by the same transversal and omnipresent questioning of what we today call "built heritage". This is why the order of my exposition will necessarily be arbitrary, and its content sometimes repetitive and always reductive, for the analysis of the links between Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc would need a book rather than this scheme.

I. THE CLAIM TO EUROPEAN IDENTITY

Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc are both heirs of the antiquarians, those scholars without frontiers who, in the current of the great cultural revolution of the Quattrocento and especially from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards, studied the vestiges of everything that had been built on the soil of Europe, lived as a common belonging. It is significant that, in his first work on ^{architecture12}, Ruskin dealt head-on with the traditions of three countries, England, Switzerland and Italy. On Gothic architecture, he is indebted to the tradition of English antiquarians, whose primacy over their French counterparts Viollet always recognized. Thus, in the article "Restoration" in his ^Dictionary13, he cites the testimonies of Arcisse de Caumont and Ludovic Vitet on the subject.
In their approach to the Gothic, however, Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc benefited above all from the progress of history, which had become a discipline in its own ^right14, but also from that of art history, both of them being at pains to emphasize the part that art history owed to the natural sciences and their techniques of ^{observation15}. Both are now in a position to specify not only national but also local and territorial particularities of national monuments and thus to place them in precise chronologies and geographies, which not only confirms the anteriority of French Gothic in the north, but also enables them to appreciate with the same enthusiasm "the three great centuries (11th, 12th and 13th⁾¹⁶of Western European religious architecture, both agreeing on its decline in the 16th century.
The similarity of the two approaches becomes clearer by comparing the series of articles published by Viollet between 1852 and 1853 in the fascicles containing the analyses of the Amiens Bible in the Revue générale de l'architecture (vol. X and vol. XI), under the title "Essays on the origins and development of the art of building in France from the fall of the Roman Empire to the 6th century". Let us recall that the second chapter of this work divides the history of European Christianity since the birth of Christ into four periods of five centuries each, corresponding to cultural transformations which "affect at the same time the knowledge, techniques and ethics of men"¹⁷; let us also recall that, after dating in the third chapter "the true birth of Europe.... [determining] our history for ever", traces, on the basis of ethnic groups, its geographical contours, then divides the Gothic countries into four groups (Brittany, Gaul, Germania and Dacia), and in Chapter IV describes the anteriority and singular character of the Frankish heritage, symbolized in the 13th century by Nôtre Dame of Amiens.
It is fascinating to discover in the two texts the same admiration, the same nuances of sensibility and the same words to express them. In 1884 Ruskin had certainly read Viollet-le-Duc, whom he quotes on several ^occasions18. But he did not wait for the Frenchman to take an interest in Amiens or in other great religious edifices in France. This familiarity, which could, in this case, pass for French, is based on a thorough knowledge of our language, often used directly, without ^translation,19 on conscientious and systematic consultation of local scholarship and, above all, on personal observation, which he had gained from repeated visits to the monument.
Against this backdrop of experiences and references so well shared, how (from now on) to explain the violence of Ruskin's attacks on restoration abuses? We will begin by noting that in the context of the British Gothic Revival, the question of restoration and its various ^modalities20 was the subject of a national polemic even in the mainstream press: thus, in Ruskin's eyes, the architect Gilbert ^Scott21 was public enemy number one. As far as France is concerned (to which he never ceases to praise the quality of its architectural tradition and to praise the exceptional and still living skill of its craftsmen), the favoring of restoration is said to be due to the lack of maintenance which he attributes, in a way which is original to say the least, to a "systematic reaction"²² by masons to find work.
But we must go further in the confrontation between the two authors - and begin by re-reading Viollet's article entitled "Restauration". What does it mean "to restore [an edifice] to a complete state that may even never have existed", except that Viollet postulates from the outset the inauthenticity of the restored edifice: it is not, he specifies, a question, he says, of "maintaining it, [nor] of repairing or rebuilding it". "Both the word and the work itself are modern", and their finality has nothing to do with ancient procedures. He also points out that "no civilization but our own" has ever devised such practices. This is a direct consequence of our culture's unprecedented relationship with the past in general and with its past in particular, while also aiming at understanding the present moment and the identity of the sub-cultures that are unfolding in the present.
This conception engages Viollet in a double role-play. On the one hand, as a theorist, he explains the history of architectural forms through the evolution of specific constructive systems, which are subject to rational analysis. On the other hand, as a practitioner, this analysis puts at his fingertips the "structural principle"²³ of a "national architecture" which he deplores for having been pushed aside by the neoclassicism and eclecticism dominant in the School of Beaux-Arts and in which he places his hopes, like Ruskin. It can thus be understood that the meaning and value of Viollet's structural restoration boil down to a pedagogy or, better still, a propaedeutic. It is not a question of restoring to an edifice an original identity whose loss is irretrievable, still less of making it an object of aesthetic delight, but only of allowing reason to penetrate the structure which gives an architecture its own cultural note. This is also why this rationalism in Viollet-le-Duc's restoration in no way prevented the French architect from vibrating in unison with Ruskin in the face of the masterpieces of the "beautiful Gothic"²⁴ and their local differences.
In fact, Viollet-le-Duc was restoring without his will to avoid the worst. He was fully aware that he lived in a country which, unlike its neighbors, had neither the culture of ^{maintenance25} nor the respect for a past whose monuments had been vandalized in France since the time of the religious wars: "Germany believes in traditions and has never stopped following them... In Germany, as in Italy, art is respected by all, it is part of the family; in France, art is patronized by governments, feared by the scientist, but it remains a stranger to be welcomed on feast days, without interfering in ordinary life"^26. His position is nowhere better expressed than in the first part of his article "Entretien et restauration des cathédrales de France"²⁷, which is still topical today. At the end of a magisterial analysis, he denounces the derisory insufficiency, over time, of the budgets devoted to the maintenance of [his] monuments in France and clearly shows that their promotion to the status of "historic monuments" on the basis of the new financial requirements of restoration has not changed this atavistic shortage.

II. THE TRAUMA OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Not only do Ruskin and Viollet share the legacy of the antiquarians and its renewal in favor of the epistemological leap forward primed by the Age of Enlightenment, but they also experience and perceive in the same way the cultural trauma imposed on the European peoples by the industrial revolution, whose country of origin is England.
England is also the first, a few decades later, to endure and then denounce not only the territorial upheaval imposed by industrialization, but also its impact on all social fields and ^behaviour28. By way of example, I will quote only the observation of John Carlyle, an author who has been a constant reference for Ruskin since his youth: "Nothing is now done directly, everything is done according to rules and subject to calculation. Not only our external environment and the physical world are now organized by machines, but also our inner and spiritual world. The same procedure also governs our ways of acting and thinking, our sensitivity. People have become as mechanical in spirit and soul as their hands"^29.
All these themes were tackled by Ruskin, trained in the British climate, but in almost the same terms and with the same ^nostalgia30, and by Viollet, who lived in a firmly progressive country like France. The upheaval of the territories and its consequences can be symbolized, for both authors, by the normalization of cities, now devoted to money and its idols. Ruskin: 'Even admitting, for the moment, that the great thoroughfares of Manchester, the neighborhoods adjoining the Bank [of England] in London, or the Stock Exchange and boulevards of Paris, already belong to a future Kingdom of Heaven, where all the earth will be only Stock Exchange and boulevards, if we refer to the world which our ancestors tell us was divided, as we know, according to conditions of climate, ^race31 and age, the mentality of man should be discussed under these three essential aspects: conditions of climate, race and epoch"^32. Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin similarly point, on the one hand, to the transformation of the built environment, characterized by the disappearance of the scale of contact and proximity, the priority given to communication routes, the rectilinearity of road systems and the anonymity of the buildings bordering them; on the other hand, to the mental and societal impact of the new built environment. Thus, the hegemony of speed generates the contraction of time: "Everyone does in a day what used to be done in a week or in an hour what used to be done in a day... in economics, this is called wealth", laments Viollet in the "Treizième Entretien"; the new city-dwellers are nothing but hurried, huddled nomads, as Ruskin all too well observes in relation to the travelers passing through Amiens; the shortening of time causes the loss of collective identity memory and enshrines individualism at the expense of the old solidarities. The two authors seem to foreshadow the problems posed today in global terms by the electro-telematics revolution. Who would not think that the lines in Entretiens would be written by Ruskin: "We are a civilized people, but what are most of our cities like, and what will they become in a few centuries, when, in all probability, the gross satisfaction of material needs will have made the few remnants of former ages disappear forever? What are New World cities? What are the industrial cities of England?

What we think of as civilization caused us, in the nineteenth century, to criss-cross wide streets and line them with buildings uniform in appearance. Thus our cities become deserts for reflection; they have the tiresome monotony of solitude without its grandeur. As you walk through these huge chessboards of streets, what memory moves you? Where does the troubled spirit find rest? Where should we stop? Who tells us that a hundred generations have scorched the earth before us? It is not that I regret the foul and winding streets of our old cities, but at least in this chaos you could find the imprint of man, of his labor, his memories and his history, something more than the evidence of his material interest of the moment..."^33. However, we find something even more unexpected in "Septième entretien", where Viollet-le-Duc analyzes the "scenography" of ^old towns as a precursor of urban morphology, and according to the same concepts as Sitte 20 years later (enclosure and asymmetry of public spaces, differentiation of facades, etc.)34. But he does not deduce the same consequences as the Viennese theorist, i.e. a minimum set of rules35 applicable to contemporary urban projects. Indeed, all Viollet the practitioner's involvement in the service of modernity is in the direction of architecture, to the detriment of urbanism. This option is in the same spirit as that of the great French writers Hugo, Balzac and Mérimée, who, since the third decade of the 19th century, have militated for the preservation of historical monuments and who, for different reasons, but equally marked by French cultural identity, considered the cause of ancient urban fabrics as lost without appeal.
In the end, the two authors' formulations hint at, if not outright pessimism, at least a deep unease about the destiny of European identity and perhaps, as we shall see later, of our species.

^III36. FOR A PEDAGOGY OF ^{EDIFICATION37}

It is remarkable, however, that while emphasizing the urgency of the situation, neither Ruskin nor Viollet remain inactive. The last lines of Seven lamps make this clear: "The storm appears on the horizon, but so does the sunrise. The sun was shining on the earth when Lot entered Zoar'. And in anticipation of spring, the two authors react by advocating a pedagogy of edification. "Evil lies in education"³⁸, says Viollet, referring to the School of Beaux-Arts, responsible for the neo-classicism and eclecticism of French architecture. It was also with this in mind that he wrote his two volumes of Entretiens sur l'architecture.
Beyond this professional orientation, however, the two authors are in agreement in proposing to educate the general public. Ruskin asserts that "architecture is an art which everyone should learn, because it interests everyone"³⁹; that "all men are Builders"⁴⁰ and he does not cease to invest his energy in numerous conferences for the inhabitants of ^towns41 and in articles for the non-specialized press. Even more remarkably, Ruskin and Viollet both wrote works for young people. The work Our fathers have told us, of which Ruskin wrote only the first part, The Bible of Amiens, was intended for a young audience. Viollet-le-Duc's books for young readers are masterpieces, all commissioned by the great publisher ^Hetzel42. Whether intended for the "first and second ages" targeted by the Collection blanche, such as Le siège de La Rochepont (1879), or part of the Bibliothèque d'Education et de ^{Récréation43}, they all have the particularity of integrating the technical exposition (the insertion of buildings into the landscape and the built context, the choice of materials, the building structure, the plan) into a story, a true novel. The characters and their adventures are treated with the same care as the buildings, each category revealing its own narrative or technical design style. Even today, as well as serving as models for an education absent from our schools, these works could be reprinted and continue to delight schoolchildren and high school students.

^V44. THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL DIMENSION

The pedagogical project underlying the written and drawn works of the two authors is the logical consequence of a shared analysis that ascribes a double belonging to the works created by humans. On the one hand, as we have seen, these edifices are part of the natural world with which they are inseparable: they are, at one and the same time, the product of geography, ^geology45, climatic conditions, fauna and flora of the environment in which they are embedded. Products of living beings, by their relationship with the natural environment and by their morphology, they bear witness to the organic nature of the living ^world46.
This observation is linked to the development of the natural sciences from the second half of the 18th century onwards and their synchronous repercussions on the conception, constitution and representation of a scientific history of architecture. The first article signed by Ruskin under his real name appeared in 1834-1836 in the Magazine of Natural History. In his battle against the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Viollet-le-Duc never ceased to invoke Cuvier's teaching: "When will our poor school see its own Cuvier [appear] to teach us the comparative anatomy of ancient and modern monuments and how not to put rabbit's feet on a monkey's body?" he exclaimed in 1852 in the Revue générale de l'^{architecture47}. The joint approach of the two authors has since then been based on the same method of scientific observation, involving a direct bodily experience assisted by drawing and photography, which from the outset have been complementary: on the one hand, photography provides 'a precious historical document' and allows 'the drawing up of irrefutable verbal processes and documents that can be consulted permanently, even when restorations hide the traces left by the ruin'⁴⁸; on the other hand, drawing constitutes a method of intellectual appropriation of the structure and its organicity in Viollet, of the aesthetic quality of work and art in Ruskin. The two authors thus trace the hidden features of their objects of ^study49.
On the other hand, the built environment is generated by a particular living species, man. It is therefore equally marked by what characterizes the speaking animal, its language, its institutions, its insertion in temporality and history, whose particular modalities determine the fundamental differentiation of cultures. In other words, and more and more clearly as their thinking matured and their reflection on the need for a national architecture became clearer, Ruskin and Viollet tended to make of edification what we today call a fundamental anthropological device that fixes and symbolically doubles in matter the evanescence of the word. As early as his first article on architecture, Ruskin noted how: 'The peculiar character of national architectures arises not only from their adaptation to places and climates, but also from their relation to the particular mental climate in which they have developed'^50. Twelve years later, inventing a magnificent neologism, ^{voicefullness51}, he evokes the "powerful voice" of the buildings of the past, the power with which they are endowed to question us, those of us who live here and now. And in the chapter devoted to the lamp of obedience, architecture is associated with laws whose authority and rigor are akin to those of language: "The architecture of a nation is not great unless it is as irrevocably constituted as its language... [must be teachable in schools] just as we teach English spelling, English grammar"^52. The freedom of the architect, like that of the poet or the great orator, can only manifest itself if the basic rules are respected. Like Viollet, Ruskin denounces the illusory liberties and originality of fashionable ^{practitioners53}. For his part, Viollet, who had just evoked how Cuvier's teaching applies to the analysis of the man-made environment, states that "on this new path, [following in his footsteps] philologists are discovering the origins of European languages, all of which have come from the same source. The ethnologists follow their researches towards the study of their races and their aptitudes... all these works are interlinked and in competition with each other..."^54.
The limits of this exposition do not allow me to develop these different themes further; I will only evoke the relation of the two theorists to human temporality, through the shared dialectic of time, through Ruskin's interrogation of the past and Viollet's questioning of the present. Nowhere is Ruskin's focus on the relation between the act of building and the past more visible than in The Seven Lamps. Does he not state at the beginning of the chapter "The Lamp of Memory" that "we can live without [architecture], we can pray without it, but [that] without it we cannot remember"⁵⁵? In other words, it is architecture that, by addressing our memory as a result of our physical experience as living beings, ensures the fidelity and continuity of our cultures with themselves. Without attempting to invent lexical forms, he thus establishes the difference between 'monument (Denkmal)' and 'historical monument' (kunsthistorisches Denkmal) formulated half a century later by Riegl. But he goes further. While Riegl clearly distinguishes the memorial function of the monument from the gnoseological function of the historical monument, he dissociates himself from the former in order to focus his analysis on the monument of art and history, protected by the new legislation of the 19th century. Ruskin also recognizes the memorial function of the monument and formulates the synonymy of the qualifiers memorial and ^monumental56. However, he does not limit his reflections to the case of great intentional monuments such as cathedrals, but attributes the same memorial value to the humblest expressions of domestic architecture that inscribe the present generations in the lineage and continuity of the work and achievements of past human generations: he does not hesitate to write that "the dwelling is a kind of monument"⁵⁷ and, in the first sections of "Lamps of Memory", formulates several ideas that make the dwelling-monument a universal characteristic of the human species.
This valorization of modest buildings, civil or domestic, has been associated with that of the urban fabrics in which they are integrated. Ruskin thus rightly reveals himself as one of the sources of Camillo Sitte and, in particular, of Gustavo Giovannoni, the inventor of the concept of "urban heritage", who himself recognizes this ^filiation58. The real significance of the memorial value attributed by Ruskin to the old buildings of everyday life, however, lies precisely in the fact that the value is neither deliberate nor assumed as such by those who built or inhabit them, but unconscious. In other words, although he ignores the anthropology that was to emerge later, Ruskin gives the built environment the institutionalizing and identifying function that the seminal works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-Pierre ^Venant59 would attribute to it in the twentieth century.
As for Viollet, he also incidentally acknowledges this non-deliberate vocation of the human environment when, in his analysis of old urban markets, he attributes their organization to ^instinct60. As a practitioner, he is primarily involved in the present. So the question that is nagging at him is: how is it still possible in the present and at the present time to produce a new architecture that is in tune with the industrial age and with the march of history - and which is also endowed with the same powers as traditional architecture? Hence his structural research, his interest in new materials (especially metal) and his fears that the architect would disappear in favour of the engineer, whose figure symbolizes the sovereign development of technology.
Despite the divergences between the two, largely because of the differences between their "ethnicities" understood as European subcultures, Ruskin, as early as 1849, also posed the question of a new architecture which he described as ^historical61 and therefore belonging to his own time; Viollet, for his part, never abandons his reference to the past, which for him too is a sign of the human world.
There can be no clearer proof of this agreement, which goes beyond the limits and particularities of their respective subcultures, than the similar way in which the two authors condemn the museification of the constructed testimonies of the past; against this threat, which they describe as visions, both one and the other advocate the use of what we now call the built heritage for living and contemporary purposes. Viollet-le-Duc does not hesitate to say that: 'The best way to preserve a building is to find a purpose for it and to ensure that it satisfies all the needs that this purpose implies. It is clear, for example, that the architect whose task it is to turn the beautiful refectory at Saint-Martin des Champs into a library for the School of Arts and Crafts should endeavor, while respecting the edifice.... to organize the files in such a way that it will never again be necessary to return to change the layout of this room"^62.

In conclusion

Ruskin's closeness to Viollet makes it possible to put in a premonitory, even if simple and familiar, premonitory scene the spatial consequences of globalization and their contribution to a process of dehumanization of our societies, at the end of which the reign of the "post-human" kingdom would be^{established63.} I hope that the reader has already understood this. That is why I would like to conclude with another crucial theme of my presentation: the unity and diversity of European culture, by illustrating it with an example involving, alongside Ruskin and Viollet, a number of European authors who followed them.
Every architect called upon today to restore an ancient monument knows or should know the text (Der moderne ^{Denkmalkultus64}) in which Riegl analyzes the various, often contradictory, ^values65 with which historic monuments are charged and the conclusion he reaches: there is no fixed rule for the treatment of ancient monuments. Any solution adopted can only be relative, linked to the specificity of each case and the dialectic of values at stake.
But in a different form, incidentally, this very ^relativism66 and a similar dialectic of values can be found in Ruskin and Viollet. Would Riegl not have known this? The answer is simple. At the time, especially in matters of built heritage, the scholarly community more often than not omitted to cite authors whose works, by all accounts, constituted a common reference for their readers. Viollet never cites Ruskin... In the Denkmalkultus, Riegl cites neither Ruskin, nor Viollet, nor even Boito and, even more surprisingly for today's reader, neither the two German-speaking authors, Fiedler and Nietzsche, who have nourished his thought: the vitality of inter-European exchanges is self-evident. This consubstantial circulation of ideas makes explicit reference to the authors involved in the production of the text unnecessary for the contemporary reader. It is a fact of European ^culture67. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

1. At this conference, I used a Power Point presentation to project onto a screen, without reading them, the texts by Ruskin and Viollet-le-Duc on which my demonstration was based. Convinced of the value of direct testimonies, I have reproduced these texts here in their entirety, adding others. However, all the quotations, original or new, whose length would have made it difficult or distorted the obligatory schematic nature of a one-hour lecture, have been placed in an appendix, together with a synoptic table of the biographical and bibliographical chronologies of the two authors. For lack of space, however, these will not appear in the Romanian version of the text. On the other hand, the drafting of my speech led me to split the third part into two distinct parts, devoted to pedagogy (III), which I had just touched on (and which is fundamental to both authors), and to the anthropogenetic status (IV) that the two authors confer on the edified world.
2. The seven lamps of architecture, "The lamp of memory", London, Dent and Sons, 1907 edition, XVIII, p. 199 and XIX, p. 200.
3. Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle, Paris, Libraires - Imprimeries réunies, vol. VIII, 1868, p. 14. Mérimée wrote in 1845, in his Rapport sur la restauration de Notre Dame de Paris: 'By restoration we mean the preservation of what exists and the reproduction of what has manifestly existed'.
4. Op. cit., p. XV, Preface to the first edition, footnote, in which he explains the delays in editing the book by the time required by a non-practitioner to search for written information and in situ drawings of medieval buildings, 'now in the process of destruction, before the destruction is completed by the restorer'.
5. My thanks to François Chaslin, who shared a copy of this document with me some ten years ago, and to Dr. Irena Murray and Sir Banister Fletcher, Director of the RIBA's British Architectural Library, to whom I am indebted for the recipient information.
6. "Brantwood, March 2, 1887. My dear boy, There is but one book on architecture which contains all things, legitimately, it is Mr. Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary. Every architect ought to learn French, for the best architecture is all in France - and French craftsmen are skillful in the highest degree. For the rest, you must trust only your own sensibility and your own observations. My books are historical or sentimental and very good in their own way. But you must simply learn from things. Yours, believer."
7. Paris, Mercure de France, 1904. Proust knows no English. He asked his mother to do a word-for-word translation, which was then revised by friends. The result, preceded by an 86-page "Foreword" and followed by footnotes, the volume of which competes with Ruskin's text, reveals Proust's profound misunderstanding. Cf. infra, p. 8, note 48.
8. Ruskin was only eighteen when he published under the pseudonym Kata Phusin ("following nature", after a common formula in classical Greek philosophy), in the November 1837 fascicle of The architectural magazine, "The poetry of architecture" (reissued under his own name in 1892). Viollet was only 26 when he restored the Madeleine Church in Vézelay.
9. In his autobiography, Ruskin would say of his own article of 1837: 'I could not have expressed more succinctly, in fewer words, so full of meaning, the definition of what was to occupy half of my later life', Praeterita, 1883-'89, vol. 1, chap. 12. As for Viollet-le-Duc's written work, it reveals an impressive continuity in the choice and formulation of his themes, from the great article of 1846, "Du style gothique au XIXe siècle", to the last volume of the Dictionnaire and the Entretiens in their entirety.
10. The term is taken here in the sense given to it by cultural anthropology and has, of course, no racial connotation.
11. Cf., for example, that of school and university education, their methods and content, or that of agricultural production.
12. Cf. supra notes 8 and 9.
13. Op. cit. p. 20-21.
14. The historian Arnaldo Momigliano ("La contribution de Gibbon à la méthode historique", in Problèmes d'historiographie ancienne et moderne, trans. fr. Alain Tachet, Gallimard, 1983) dates this event to the appearance of Gibbon's Decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776), which Ruskin defends. Be that as it may, the development of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe contributed in no small measure to its designation as the "century of history".
15. Cf. infra p. 8, note 46.
16. The Bible of Amiens, London, George Allen, 1902 edition, chap. IV, 55, p. 250.
17. Op. cit. chap. II. 2, pp. 51 sq. The quoted texts are found in 1, pp. 50-51.
18. Cf. op. cit. p. 19, p. 165, and p. 180, two references to volume VI of the Dictionnaire.
19. Ruskin goes so far as to emphasize the literal untranslatability of certain French architectural terms, such as 'fleche'.
20. Cf. E. A. Freeman, Principles of Church Restoration, or the articles in The Ecclesiologist (founded in 1847), which distinguish three types of restoration: destructive, conservative and eclectic.
21 (1811-1878) Cf. A plea for the faithful restoration of our ancient churches, in which he preaches the systematic restoration of the original state. His doctrine would triumph in Great Britain until 1895.
22. Seven lamps, op.cit., "The lamp of memory", XIX, p. 200. And he continues: "Thus the abbey of Saint-Ouen was dismantled by the magistrates of the city in order to give work to vagrants, [in accordance with the principle of] first not maintaining buildings in order to restore them later". On the difference between restoration and maintenance, cf. the long critical development on France and England in the article "On the opening of the Crystal Palace" (1854), parts 9-13.
23. Viollet's "structuralism" is magnificently developed in Entretiens. As for Ruskin, he also uses the notion of an architectural or constructive "system", cf. Seven lamps, op. cit., preface, p. XVI. Cf. and doc. 1.
24. And for Ruskin, "the Gothic of the thirteenth century, as the northern countries have left it to us, is exemplified by the cathedrals of Lincoln and Wells in England, those of Paris, Amiens, Chartres, Reims and Bourges...", Seven lamps, op. cit., preface to the second edition, pp. XXII-XXIII.
25. "In France, an edifice is scarcely finished, that everyone lets it down. No other nation has built so much, but no other nation has demolished or left in ruins so many buildings. Are the state's resources scarce? Instead of being concentrated on existing buildings of real value, these scarce resources are wasted on thousands of works abandoned as soon as they are finished', 'Entretien et restauration des édifices de France', Revue d'architecture et des travaux publics, IX, Paris, 1851. Cf. and doc. 2.
26. "Lettres d'Allemagne adressées à M. Adolphe Lance, architecte", from Mr. Viollet-le-Duc, in Encyclopédie d'Architecture, September, 1854.
27. Op. cit.
28. Cf. the remarkable analysis by Raymond Williams, who reveals the precocity (between 1760 and 1830) of the awareness of the phenomenon by economists and social thinkers, in Culture and Society, London, Hogarth Press, 1958.
29. "Signs of the time", essay published in 1829, in The Edinburgh Review.
30. Cf. "Lettres d'Allemagne, op. cit.
31. The term, which is synonymous with ethnicity, has none of the connotations of our age.
32. Bible d'Amiens, op. cit., III, 3-4, p. 111.
33. "Deuxième entretien, op. cit., vol. 1 (1863), p. 66. Cf. Ruskin, "On the opening of the Crystal Palace considered in some of its relations to the prospects of art, 1854".
34. Op. cit. "Ninth Interview, p. 254. Cf. and ibid, pp. 254-256, "we erect a monument, but we place it badly, we arrange it badly... the monument drawn on paper does not generally take into account the place, the orientation, the effects of shadow and light, the neighborhoods, the differences in level". The "principle of symmetry" has replaced a lost instinct.
35. These minimal rules, in both cases the result of a rational deduction based on structural analysis (also opposed by the two author-practitioners to the now lost "instinct" which inspired the builders of the past. Cf. infra p. 9 and note 56). This "instinct" must in no way be equated with animal instinct. It is a spontaneity driven by cultural identity.
36. Cf. p. 1, note 1.
37. The term, first used by Alberti to designate the arrangement of space (architectural and territorial), is taken up by Ruskin in English (edification), with the same meaning, at a time when the word no longer had any religious meaning. Cf. The seven lamps of architecture, op. cit., "The lamp of sacrifice", I, p. 7.
38. "Essai sur les origines et le développement de l'art de bâtir", Revue générale de l'architecture, vol. X, 1852, p. 378.
39. 'Lecture on architecture and painting, delivered at Edinburgh', November, 1853.
40. Seven lamps, op.cit., "The lamp of obedience", X, p. 219.
41. Lectures on architecture and painting, 1854-1855.
42. We recall that it was Victor Hugo's editor in exile who came up with the general title for La comédie humaine, who not only invented Jules Verne, but also commissioned Dumas, Feuillet, Paul de Musset, Nodier, George Sand for his Collection blanche... Monsieur le Vent et Madame la Pluie (Musset), as well as Trésor des fèves et fleur des pois (Nodier) have not aged at all.
43. Cf. Histoire d'une forteresse, text and drawings by Viollet-le-Duc, Paris, Hetzel, 1874; Histoire de l'habitation humaine des temps préhistoriques à nos jours, text and drawings by Viollet-de-Duc, 1875; Histoire d'un Hôtel de Ville et d'une Cathédrale, text and drawings by Viollet-le-Duc, 1878. Jules Verne was edited in the same collection as Contes et romans de l'histoire naturelle, by Dr. Candèze.
44. Cf. supra note 1.
45. It is worth recalling the shared interest in the mountains of Ruskin and Viollet, cf. synoptic table.
46. For Ruskin and for Viollet, especially in the article "Restauration", with the permanent metaphor of the edifice seen in the form of a body and "organism", op. cit., pp. 27, 28, 29.
47. Op. cit., pp. 47-48. Cuvier had published Le Règne animal distribué d'après son organization in 1817, where we find one of the sources of Viollet's organicist approach. Cf. for example, later, in the Dictionnaire (article "Restauration"): "Cuvier, through his works on comparative anatomy, through his geological research, suddenly reveals to the eyes of his contemporaries the history of the world before the rule of man". Op. cit., vol. VIII, p. 15.
48. The first quotation is from Ruskin, in Seven lamps, op. cit. p. 33.
49. In the Preface to the Preface to his translation of The Bible of Amiens, Proust interprets Ruskin's illustrations as expressing a kind of absurd humor that we find in his descriptions. Thus, in his study of St. Mark's Church in Stones of Venice, he criticizes him for "describing none of the important parts [of the monument] and devoting many pages... to a bas-relief which you never notice, which you distinguish with difficulty and which, moreover, is of no interest', Paris, Mercure de France, 1947 edition, p. 13. We could not find a better testimony to the misunderstanding of the Ruskinian approach and the meaning that the English theorist gives to architecture: for the latter, a hidden sculpture is a sign of the craftsman's dedication to his work. Viollet, for his part, looks for the smallest clues to his structural hypotheses. Cf., for example: 'For restoration, there is one dominant principle from which we must never depart, and on no pretext whatsoever, namely to take account of any trace that would indicate a disappearance', Dictionnaire, op. cit., article 'Restauration', p. 34.
50. Op. cit., p. 37.
51. Seven lamps, op. cit., 'The lamp of memory', X, pp. 190-191.
52. Viollet uses the same metaphor on several occasions. Cf., in particular, "Huitième Entretien", op. cit., pp. 337-338.
53. Op. cit. "The lamp of obedience" III, IV, V and VII, pp. 206-212.
54. Dictionnaire, article "Restauration", supra, pp. 15-16.
55. Op. cit., II, p. 182.
56. Ibid, op. cit. II, p. 182.
57. Ibid, VI, p. 186.
58. Cf. in Giovannoni, Vecchie città ed edilizia nuova (1931), tr. fr. L'urbanisme face aux villes anciennes, Paris, le Seuil, 1998, numerous references to Sitte (the author most often cited), pp. 44, 47, 52, 58, 59, 143-146, de la trans. fr.
59. Cf. in particular, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale, Paris, Plon, 1958, ch. 7, as well as Race et Histoire and Race et culture, edited together, Paris, Albin Michel, 2002; Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs, Paris, Maspero, 1965, chap. 3, "L'organization de l'espace".
60. Cf. supra, notes 33 and 34 p. 6. Cf. and the passages in "Premier entretien", op. cit., pp. 21-24, on the relationship of primitive peoples and children to space.
61. "La lampe de l'architecture", op. cit. II, p. 182.
62. Restauration, op. cit., pp. 31, 32.
63. A concept which first appeared in the United States to designate either critically or, on the contrary, favorably, the emergence of a new species which, through the mediation of technoscience and prostheses, frees itself from its condition of being alive and from its traditional relations with both nature and other humans. Its origins can be found in the admirable novel Brave New World (1931), followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited (1958). On the scale and popularity of this concept, cf. Francis Fukuyama, "La fin de l'Histoire dix ans après", in Le Monde, June 17, 1999.
64. Vienna, 1903. French translation by Daniel Wieczorek, Le culte moderne des monuments, le Seuil, Paris, 1984.
65. Values related to the past: memorial, historical, patriotic, of antiquity; values related to the present: absolute art value (integrity and good form), relative art value, use value.
66. In 1863, Viollet wrote in his "Dixième Entretien": "We shall not have an architecture until the day when we are willing... to appreciate the works of the past at their relative value", Entretiens, op. cit. p. 474.
67. There would, moreover, be exciting research to be done on the common treasure from which the two draw, each focusing on or developing what corresponds to his or her national identity.


Article in Zeppelin magazine no 80/2010

Summary of the magazine ARCHITECTURE, NR.6/2017-1/2018
POST-RESTORATION