On the evening of 15 April 2019 a fire destroyed the roof of Notre-Dame in Paris, and at 19:50 the spire above the crossing gave way and fell into the interior of the cathedral. It was a spire of wood and lead 96 metres tall, and it was not medieval: it was built between 1859 and 1860 to a design by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879), replacing an original one already dismantled at the end of the eighteenth century. In the days after the fire, the debate on how to rebuild it touched a question that has divided architectural historians for a hundred and sixty years: what does it mean to restore?
Viollet-le-Duc was born in Paris into a cultured family and refused to attend the École des Beaux-Arts, which he considered too academic. He learned by travelling, drawing French and Italian cathedrals. In 1840 Prosper Mérimée, inspector general of historic monuments, entrusted him with the restoration of the basilica of Vézelay. He was twenty-six. In the following forty years he worked on Notre-Dame (from 1844, with Jean-Baptiste Lassus), the Sainte-Chapelle, Amiens Cathedral, the walls of Carcassonne (from 1853), the château of Pierrefonds for Napoleon III (from 1858). They are, largely, the French medieval buildings we know today.
A theory of restoration
In the Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française (1854–68) Viollet-le-Duc gave a definition that became famous: to restore a building is not to maintain it, repair it or rebuild it, but to “reestablish it in a complete state that may never have existed at any given moment”. The idea is that the restorer, by studying the style and constructional logic of an era, can rebuild what is missing coherently, even where there is no direct evidence. At Notre-Dame he adds the spire, sculptures, pinnacles and the celebrated chimeras of the parapet, which had not existed in the Middle Ages. At Carcassonne he rebuilds the conical slate roofs, typical of northern France more than of the Midi. At Pierrefonds he redesigns a castle reduced to ruin as it might have been.
Ruskin and the controversy
In 1849 the Englishman John Ruskin, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, wrote that restoration is “the most total destruction a building can suffer”: a building cannot be brought back to life, and every intervention erases the history it carries on its skin. For Ruskin, buildings should be maintained with care and, when destined to fall, left to die with dignity. It is the origin of a debate that runs through the whole culture of conservation: on one side those who want to rebuild the “ideal” state of a monument, on the other those who defend all the stratifications of time. A middle way, that of the Italian Camillo Boito, proposed in 1883 to distinguish restorations from the original in a recognisable way: it is the basis of the modern Venice Charter.
The condemnation, however, risks hiding a fact: in 1840 many of the buildings Viollet-le-Duc restored were falling down, or being used as quarries and stables. Without him, Vézelay and Carcassonne would probably be ruins. Not only that: Viollet-le-Duc is also a theorist of structural rationalism. In the Entretiens sur l'architecture (1863–72) he argues that Gothic forms derive from a constructional logic and that modern architecture should do the same with the materials of its own time, iron included. From these pages Art Nouveau, Guimard, Horta and, later, rationalism would draw.