page_title: Gothic Revival architecture
section_title: Viollet-le-Duc and Iron Gothic
hierarchical_section_title: Gothic Revival architecture / Viollet-le-Duc and Iron Gothic
caption_attribution_description: Looking south, detail of filigree work. Gothic Arch, Spanning bridlepath south of tennis courts at north
context_page_description: Gothic Revival is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. Its momentum grew in the early 19th century, when increasingly serious and learned admirers of neo-Gothic styles sought to revive medieval Gothic architecture, in contrast to the neoclassical styles prevalent at the time. Gothic Revival draws features from the original Gothic style, including decorative patterns, finials, lancet windows, hood moulds and label stops. By the mid-19th century, it was established as the preeminent architectural style in the Western world.
  The Gothic Revival movement's roots are intertwined with deeply philosophical movements associated with Catholicism and a re-awakening of high church or Anglo-Catholic belief concerned by the growth of religious nonconformism. Ultimately, the "Anglo-Catholicism" tradition of religious belief and style became known for its intrinsic appeal in the third quarter of the 19th century.
context_section_description: France had lagged slightly in entering the neo-Gothic scene, but produced a major figure in the revival in Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. As well as a powerful and influential theorist, Viollet-le-Duc was a leading architect whose genius lay in restoration. He believed in restoring buildings to a state of completion that they would not have known even when they were first built, theories he applied to his restorations of the walled city of Carcassonne,  and to Notre-Dame and Sainte Chapelle in Paris. In this respect he differed from his English counterpart Ruskin, as he often replaced the work of mediaeval stonemasons. His rational approach to Gothic stood in stark contrast to the revival's romanticist origins. Throughout his career he remained in a quandary as to whether iron and masonry should be combined in a building. Iron had in fact been used in Gothic buildings since the earliest days of the revival. It was only with Ruskin and the archaeological Gothic's demand for historical truth that iron, whether it was visible or not, was deemed improper for a Gothic building. Ultimately, the utility of iron won out: "substituting a cast iron shaft for a granite, marble or stone column is not bad, but one must agree that it cannot be considered as an innovation, as the introduction of a new principle. Replacing a stone or wooden lintel by an iron breastsummer is very good". He strongly opposed illusion, however: reacting against the casing of a cast iron pillar in stone, he wrote; "il faut que la pierre paraisse bien être de la pierre; le fer, du fer; le bois, du bois" (stone must appear to be stone; iron, iron; wood, wood).
  The arguments against modern construction materials began to collapse in the mid-19th century as great prefabricated structures such as the glass and iron Crystal Palace and the glazed courtyard of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History were erected, which appeared to embody Gothic principles. Between 1863 and 1872 Viollet-le-Duc published his Entretiens sur l'architecture, a set of daring designs for buildings that combined iron and masonry. Though these projects were never realised, they influenced several generations of designers and architects, notably Antoni Gaudí in Spain and, in England, Benjamin Bucknall, Viollet's foremost English follower and translator, whose masterpiece was Woodchester Mansion. The flexibility and strength of cast-iron freed neo-Gothic designers to create new structural Gothic forms impossible in stone, as in Calvert Vaux's cast-iron Gothic bridge in Central Park, New York (1860s; illustration, left). Vaux enlists openwork forms derived from Gothic blind-arcading and window tracery to express the spring and support of the arching bridge, in flexing forms that presage Art Nouveau.
caption: Cast-iron Gothic tracery supports a bridge by Calvert Vaux, Central Park, New York City.
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