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
The modern infrastructural ideal The form and possibility of the "modern infrastructural ideal" is increasingly under threat, as cracks (sometimes literal ones) show up in our bridges, our highways, our airports, and the nets of our social welfare systems. For these and other reasons, broken world thinking asserts that breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practices and thought about are the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today. Attached to this, however, comes a second and more hopeful approach: namely, a deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by which stability (such as it is) is maintained, the subtle arts of repair by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time. Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair How Buildings Learn infrastructurehope