Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) was a French architect, restorer and writer, born in Paris. He refused to attend the École des Beaux-Arts and trained instead in architects' offices and by drawing medieval buildings. In 1840 the writer Prosper Mérimée, inspector of historic monuments, gave him the restoration of the abbey church at Vézelay, the first of many medieval buildings he restored for the French state.

With Jean-Baptiste Lassus he restored Notre-Dame de Paris from 1844 to 1864. He added a new spire of lead-covered oak, completed about 1859-1860, which fell in the fire of 15 April 2019 and was rebuilt to his design. He restored the walls and towers of the fortified city of Carcassonne from 1853 and rebuilt the ruined Château de Pierrefonds for Napoleon III. He defined restoration as returning a building to a complete state that may never have existed at any one time, so his work often added parts that were not there before.

His Dictionnaire raisonné de l'architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (1854-1868) explained French medieval buildings as structural systems in which each part carries a load or has a use. His Entretiens sur l'architecture (1863-1872) proposed using iron in new buildings. Victor Horta, Antoni Gaudí and Hector Guimard drew on his writings.