Viollet-le-Duc

Eugène Viollet-le-Duc was a French architect best known for his extensive 19th-century restorations of medieval buildings in France. His most famous projects include the restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris, the Sainte-Chapelle, and the fortified city of Carcassonne.

Viollet-le-Duc believed that restoring a building meant restoring it to a state of completeness that may never have actually existed at any given time. This approach, summarized by his famous quote 'to restore an edifice is to re-establish it in a finished state,' was highly controversial.

While he did not sculpt the Statue of Liberty, Viollet-le-Duc was originally chosen by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi to design its internal support structure. He conceptualized a wooden framework filled with sand to support the copper skin, though this design was later modified by Gustave Eiffel.

Aside from his restorations, Viollet-le-Duc was a prominent architectural theorist whose writings deeply influenced the development of modernism. His emphasis on structural rationalism and the honest use of materials inspired later pioneers like Antoni Gaudí and Frank Lloyd Wright.