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 writer, 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 by drawings in Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionary.

Youth and education

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.