Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (French: [øʒɛn vjɔlɛ lə dyk]; 27 January 1814 – 17 September 1879) was a French architect and author, famous for his restoration of the most prominent medieval landmarks in France. His major restoration projects included Notre-Dame de Paris, the Basilica of Saint Denis, Mont Saint-Michel, Sainte-Chapelle, the medieval walls of the city of Carcassonne, and Roquetaillade castle in the Bordeaux region.
His writings on decoration and on the relationship between form and function in architecture had a fundamental influence on a whole new generation of architects, including all the major Art Nouveau artists : Antoni Gaudí,Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, Henry Van de Velde, Henry Sauvage and the Ecole de Nancy, Paul Hankar, Otto Wagner, Eugene Grasset, Emile Gallé, Hendrik Petrus Berlage... He also influences the first modern architects, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Auguste Perret, Louis Sullivan... and Le Corbusier, who considered Viollet le Duc as the father of modern architecture : "The roots of moderne architecture are to be found in Viollet le Duc". His writings also influenced John Ruskin, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts mouvement. And at the 1862 international exhibition in London the esthetic works of Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Philip Webb, William Morris, Simeon Solomon et Edward Poynter are directly influenced from drawings in Viollet le Duc's Dictionnary. The english architect William Burgess admitted in his late life "We all cribbed on Viollet le Duc even though no one could read French."
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