Viollet-le-Duc: drawing worlds

Uittreksel

"An exploration of the role of graphic work in the career of one of the nineteenth century's most influential architects. Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) was nineteenth-century France's most prominent architect and restorer. This groundbreaking study examines how he used drawing and printmaking as a mode of seeing and thinking and as a means to intensify relationships by capturing the vitality of historical worlds and hidden analogies between human culture and the natural realm. Making sense of Viollet-le-Duc's vast graphic production, scholars consider his imaginative recreations of the most minute aspects of medieval warfare; his approach to the practical tasks of restoring very complex medieval monuments; his experiments in new means of publicly diffusing architectural ideas in the yearly Parisian salons, in didactic manuals, and in children's books; and even a fantastic project to restitute the original structure of the formidable massif of Mont Blanc. The gamut of techniques employed by Viollet-le-Duc stretches from large painted tableaux to lithographs, steel engravings, woodcuts, gouaches, tracings, and full-scale details. This generously illustrated volume offers an unparalleled window into the architect's working process and explores how his mastery of the graphic arts helped him harness the power of the press to disseminate architectural knowledge and spread ideologies based on antagonism, most notably nationalism and racism."-- Provided by publisher.

Inhoud

1. Drawing as restoration / Martin Bressani -- 2. Drawn to exhibit: Viollet-le-Duc and the culture of display / Barry Bergdoll -- 3. A collection without equal: the Viollet-le-Duc archive at the Médiathèque du Patrimoine et de la Photographie / Jean-Charles Forgeret -- 4. The past drawn: Percier's absorption versus Viollet-le-Duc's distancing / Jean-Philippe Garric -- 5. Travel watercolors: possible sources / Jean-Michel Leniaud -- 6. Genesis, transposition, and reproduction: the diffusion of Viollet-le-Duc's graphic work in Baron Taylor's Voyages Pittoresques / Ségolène Le Men -- 7. Illuminating Picardy / Stephen Bann -- 8. Paper work: the site drawings / S. Diane Daussy and Arnaud Timbert -- 9. Medium, media, mediation: Viollet-le-Duc's graphic techniques / Peter Sealy -- 10. Viollet-le-Duc's satirical streak / Laurent Baridon -- 11. Demonstrating ornament: teaching through drawing / Estelle Thibault -- 12. Representing racial histories in Viollet-le-Duc's Histoire de l'Habitation Humaine / Irene Cheng -- 13. Le Massif du Mont Blanc: methods of observation and reconstruction for the architect-geologist / Aisling O'Carroll -- 14. The Taormina theater in "a finished state, which may in fact never have actually existed" / Bérénice Gaussuin -- 15. A forgotten monstrance by Viollet-le-Duc / Gaël Favier -- 16. Illustration of an iris in the Dictionnaire Raisonné de l'Architecture Française du XIe au XVIe Siècle / Ralph Ghoche -- 17. The belfry / Antoine Picon -- 18. Passing the baton: Viollet-le-Duc's Histoire d'un Dessinateur and the education of the eye / Shana Cooperstein -- 19. Restoring Notre-Dame de Paris in the nineteenth century and today / Barry Bergdoll in conversation with Philippe Villeneuve.