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 father of modern architecture. English architect William Burges put it plainly: "We all crib from Viollet-le-Duc, although probably not one buyer in ten reads the text." At the 1862 International Exhibition in London, the aesthetic works of Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Webb, and Morris traced directly back to drawings in his Dictionary.