“Life consists of the totality of functions that resist death”

Viollet-Le-Duc responded to the rage and glory of the romantic period of the Enlightenment, French Revolution and the Terror. There was an aesthetic among nobility toward decay and death realizing the slow decline of an ancient way of life.

Artists tried to grapple with:

-“Jacobian destruction of tradition and the restorative glorification of history”

-The longing for continuity and the experience of discontinuity

-Gothic architecture and the synthesis of these sensibilities

The Dictionnaire by Viollet-Le-Duc was written with close collaboration between him and his close friend Doctor Jean Marc Bourgery. Bourgery wrote Dictionnaire: the Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme and it provided a close model for Viollet. With analytical and

scientific methods Viollet said:

"The timé has come to study the art of the Middle Ages just as we study the development and the life of a living being . . . dissecting its various parts, while describing the functions."

Viollet shuns abstraction emphasizing exploded perspectives and perspectives for their relative objectivity. No other historicals works present this kind of surgical exploration of architecture. These drawings accomplished a multitude of ideas:

-Increasing dynamism of the overall subject

-Explained loads and structural logic

-Illustrated the spatiality of parts

-Presented gestures by masons and construction assembly

-Showed channeling and molding of energy flow

-Communicates structural function but not so mechanistically instead function as the true expression of life

Viollet-Le-Duc explains how Gothic architecture as a body of work can be understood and analyzed as the cyclical process of life itself. There are parallels between Man and Gothic architecture both with regard to time. Gothic structures can be classified as Young, Mature and Old.

All discoveries and scientific explorations could be the objects of translation for artistic experimentation just as the Greeks erected temples to explain their mythologies or validate them.

-“The locomotive would have as a father the personification of fire and as a mother that of fire.”

However, reason and rationality are the obstetric power of the poetic or mythic idea. Under the heading Style Viollet-Le-Duc writes:

"Even while we recognize that a work of art may exist in an embryonic state in the imagination, we must also recognize that it will not develop into a true and viable work of art without the intervention of reason. It is reason that will provide the embryonic work with the necessary organs to survive, with the proper relationships between its various parts" (Dictionnaire, 8:482)

Viollet-Le-Duc says that Art creates the artificial approximation of new life forms whose synthetic sensibilities are buried with layers of fantastic vitality. To satisfy the artistic urge, the battle between the idea and its material realization must be present. The life of the object emerges through this battle.

“Viollet-Le-Duc's architectural fictions are not ideal ornamental configurations that seek to mediate between contingent facts and the world of culture, nor are they a series of historical quotes set in a narrative structure to be read subjectively. Instead his fictions emerge from the global spectacle of the buildings’ organism as it relates to the stability of the whole”

The battle between the static site and the pull of gravity that make of the life of stone are the primary aesthetic material of architecture. The way the architect then must resolve this conflict is by emphasizing it as distinctly and as visibly as possible.

With regard to Viollet-Le-Duc’s understanding of Greek and Christian romantic interpretations, of which he was well versed, his ornamental designs reflected this understanding through the idea that death is a force of life rather than its tragic demise.

Instead of Hugo’s doomful; Ceci Tuera Cela, Le-Duc promotes defiantly; Ceci DOIT Tuer Cela.

Order Top to Bottom:

-Exploded perspective of a human skull, drawn by INI. H. Jacob, in Marc Jean Bourgery

-Analytical drawing of the interior of the apse of the church of Notre-Dame in Dijon,

-Exploded perspective of the springing point of the arch of the nave in a typical 13th-century cathedral, drawn by Viollet-le-Duc

-Top ridge of a flying buttress at the Notre Dame de Dijon

-Detail drawing of the base of the lectern for Notre-Dame de Paris,