Style consists in distinction of form Writing about style in architecture, the nineteenth-century theorist Viollet-le-Duc asserted that "style consists in distinction of form," and complained that animals expressed this better than the human species. He felt that his contemporaries had "become strangers to those elemental and simple ideas of truth which lead architects to give style to their designs," and he found it "necessary to define the constituent elements of style, and, in doing so, to carefully avoid those equivocations, those high-sounding but senseless phrases, which have been repeated with all that profound respect which most people profess for that which they do not understand." Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, The Evolution of Useful Things Having quite lost sight of the principle style
The usages of life A Fragment by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc victorianweb.org During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries architects not only paid attention to internal arrangements, but subordinated the designs for the exterior to them. The usages of life dictated the arrangement and the arrangement suggested the form of the building. This was the dominant principle in times of Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Timeless Way of BuildingForm follows function architecturefunction
Discourses on Architecture A Book by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc Style consists in distinction of formHaving quite lost sight of the principle
But then the knoll was gone These banks were making the same mistake as a family I know who bought an acre in the country on which to build a house. For many years, while they lacked the money to build, they visited the site regularly and picnicked on a knoll, the site’s most attractive feature. They liked so much to visualize themselves as always there, that when they finally built they put the house on the knoll. But then the knoll was gone. Somehow they had not realized they would destroy it and lose it by supplanting it with themselves. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities 104. Site Repair