A flaw in his restorations is that he rebuilt all Gothic cathedrals according to a single model, removing some interesting quirks in the original designs.
thus, essentially erasing gothic heritage and building neo-gothic abominations instead? some of them at least. bad. not as bad as baron Haussmann, maybe, but. edit: nothing against genuine neo-gothic, built from scratch. victorian historicism. bit funny and disney-esque, but not bad essentially. renovating 13th c building in neo-gothic is a crime against humanity and taste, though.
@@p1rgit As much as I love architecture and history, I wouldn't exactly call it a crime against humanity, as the vast majority of the population cannot tell the difference between Neo-Gothic and Gothic design. The goal of le Duc was to save the buildings themselves as without him, the restoration team wouldn't have succeeded and the buildings likely wouldn't exist today. A complete removal of the style from our reality, is what I'd consider a crime against humanity. Not a design change that only the few design and architecture nerds would notice.
@@Visiopod The number of people able to distinguish between Original Gothic and Neo Gothic is irrelevant. Thanks to Viollet Le Duc, building were preserved, bur still at the price if some falsification of history. Transforming a XIIIth Gothic building into a Neo Gothic one, even just partially, is definitely NOT to ever be taken ligthly. Some people would no doubt love to start cutting corners like so, make a few approximations here and there and just shrug because "most people don't see the difference, anyway". And that would, sooner or later, lead to bigger parts of a country's history being utterly marred and falsified. As a history enthusiast and a die-hard French patriot, I cannot subscribe to that. Eugène Viollet - Le Duc did what he could with what he had, and meant only the best in what he was doing, but we should definitely exercise more caution than what he did. We must do better.
@@Briselance He was the first person who considered preserving them in the first place. I don't think it's fair to compare his methods with methods of our time when in his time no such methods even existed. That is when you do some really, Really bad work tho (like Schliemann did in the field of archaeology f.e.), even if being the first, doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize. But I don't think this is the case.
You need to have music in the background. Classical is great for background music, but the volume that your music is playing at is competing with your speech, making it difficult to listen.
He didn't like medieval architecture: he liked his idea of it, or in fact practically completely neo-gothic style created in his head. Not to mention the damage he inflicted on interiors that he "purged" out of anything not fitting his vision.