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Gothic Reviver
| Article
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19040 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
2,949 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ARCHITECTURE
Selections from the Dictionnaire raisonne by Eugene-Emmanuel Violletle-Duc
Translated by Kenneth D. Whitehead
New York: George Braziller, 1990
272 pp., $14.95
Who was Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, and what is his interest to us today?
The question arises because George Braziller has just published The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire raisin, in a translation by Kenneth D. Whitehead and with an introduction by Barry Bergdoll, assistant professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University.
The simple answer is that Viollet-le-Duc was a nineteenth-century architect, restorer, and polemicist whose passionate advocacy of Gothic architecture makes him a sort of bridge between Romanticism and early theories of modern architecture, notably functionalism. His Dictionnaire is perhaps his most comprehensive architectural statement. Its availability in English is sure to improve the reputation of an individual long vilified and misunderstood.
But why now? Perhaps, paradoxically, because competing impulses and orthodoxies within the architectural profession have created a more receptive climate for Viollet-le-Duc's ideas than ever before. One of these impulses the newly widened horizons of historical reference and quotation permitted by the rise of Post-Modern architecture. In Philip Johnson's abandonment of the International Style "glass box" for his AT&T headquarters in Manhattan, and his use instead of idioms drawn from eighteenth-century English furniture and American skyscrapers of the 1930s in a single building, we have an almost exact contemporary parallel to Viollet-le-Duc's rejection of architectural classicism--the "International Style" of his own day--and his celebration of older architectural styles.
Similarly, the retrospection central to Prince Charles' vision of an architectural utopia finds an echo in Viollet-le-Duc, at least in one respect. The prince's call to "Let where it's at be what it's made of" (one of his celebrated "Ten Commandments") sounds like a latter-day version of Viollet-le-Duc's admiration for the gothic architect's use of indigenous
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