A Plaza’s Return

Pittsburgh City Paper

How do you restore a landscape or building that has been many different things over time? Do you freeze it in one particular era, or try to represent its many changes through the ages?

Eugene-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, the 19th-century architectural theorist and restorer, struggled with this perennial issue in cathedrals such as Notre Dame in Paris. His solutions allowed features that never existed simultaneously to be shown all at once. The results often look more like 19th-century architecture than the 12th- or 13th-century versions they were supposed to re-create. Read full article