The Notre-Dame de Paris has had several close shaves down the years – even before the 2019 fire that nearly obliterated it. The revolutionaries temporarily turned it into a ‘Temple of Reason’, then a grain warehouse; some of it was even sold for scrap. It only became the recognisable Gothic fantasy and French national icon that we know today largely down to the efforts of architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who headed its definitive restoration from 1844 to 1864. Following the cathedral’s 2024 rebirth, Bard Graduate Center is now hosting the most comprehensive exhibition in the Anglosphere of the architect’s work.

Viollet-le-Duc kept superhuman working hours: 6 a.m. to midnight. And this show, spanning four floors, is testament to his prodigious use of drawing as a multi-pronged tool to observe, (re)create and seek truth.

Such was the fluency of Viollet-le-Duc’s gothicisms that they cotinue to be mistaken for medieval originals

Such was the fluency of Viollet-le-Duc’s gothicisms that they cotinue to be mistaken for medieval originals

Declining to study at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, Viollet-le-Duc instead learned by sketching the architecture of France and Italy. Filling the first room is work from his teens and early twenties: Chartres Cathedral’s portals, ink washes of the polychromic façade of Florence’s Duomo. The Beaux-Arts........

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