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Architectural Conservation and Restoration: Theories of restoration: Viollet-le-Duc to Ruskin · Viollet-le-Duc and Stylistic Restoration

How Viollet-le-Duc defined restoration as completing a building's ideal style, where he applied it, and why later conservators rejected it.

Architectural Conservation and Restoration · 23 questions

Try 3 questions

1. Viollet-le-Duc famously defined restoring a building as reestablishing it in what kind of state?

  1. Its condition on the day it was abandoned
  2. The exact state recorded in its oldest drawings
  3. A complete state that may never have existed
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Answer: A complete state that may never have existed

In his Dictionnaire he wrote that to restore is to reestablish a building in a finished state that may never have existed at any given time. That openly allowed invention in the name of the ideal.

2. What principle led Viollet-le-Duc to remove later additions that did not match a building's dominant style?

  1. Minimum intervention
  2. Unity of style
  3. Distinguishability of new work
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Answer: Unity of style

Stylistic restoration aimed at a coherent whole in one style, so Renaissance or Baroque layers on a Gothic church could be stripped away. Minimum intervention and distinguishability are later principles that reject this.

3. Which official, as France's Inspector General of Historic Monuments, launched Viollet-le-Duc's restoration career?

  1. Prosper Mérimée
  2. Victor Hugo
  3. Baron Haussmann
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Answer: Prosper Mérimée

Mérimée, the writer who served as Inspector General, entrusted the young Viollet-le-Duc with the abbey church of Vézelay in 1840. Hugo campaigned for monuments but held no such post.

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