Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

Viollet-le-Duc spent his career restoring France's greatest medieval monuments: Notre-Dame de Paris, the Basilica of Saint Denis, Mont Saint-Michel, Sainte-Chapelle, Carcassonne's walls, Château de Roquetaillade. But the restoration work was only half of it. His writings on decoration and the relationship between form and function became a manual for the next century: every major Art Nouveau architect drew from him — Gaudí, Horta, Guimard, van de Velde — and the first modernists did too. Wright, Mies, Perret, Sullivan, Le Corbusier all considered him foundational; Le Corbusier called him the f…