French “Iron Gothic” Movement

France’s Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was a leading architect of the Gothic Revival period. He was a brilliant theorist, but was also well known for his masterful work in restoration. Viollet-le-Duc believed in restoring Gothic buildings to standards that exceeded those to which they were originally built, an ideal to which he restored the city of Carcassonne and the Parisian cathedrals of Notre-Dame and Sainte Chapelle. This kind of restoration sometimes required the materials put into place by the original builders, a factor in contrast from Ruskin. Practicality such as that of Viollet-le-Duc was rare in a movement based on romanticism and may have been a forerunner for the Modernist movement.

The focus of archeological Gothic architecture was that of a return to the stylistic integrity of the original structures. Viollet-le-Duc was of two minds over the concept of building his Gothic Restoration structures with a combination of masonry and iron, as iron had been deemed unfit for consideration as archeologically correct Gothic architecture, regardless of whether it was visible to the naked eye or not. The reluctance to use iron in Gothic-style architecture appeared to evaporate when the Crystal Palace, which incorporated iron in its structure, was built. Over approximately a decade, Viollet-le-Duc published a set of building designs that combined masonry and iron in Gothic architecture. The projects proposed in these designs were never completed, but they continued to have influence over later architects of the Gothic Revival movement.

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