15. Victor Hugo

What Victor Hugo really meant by ‘this will kill that’

“By 1832, the year he published his novel, Hugo believed architecture had reached an impasse: architects had nothing new to say. This artistic bankruptcy was revealed in the profusion of movements that toyed with earlier styles: neo-classicism, neo-Byzantine, neo-this, neo-that. Architecture was dead, but architects hadn’t yet heard the news.” -From the University of Houston’s series The Engines of Inginuity (No 2293: Victor Hugo and Architecture).

Further reading: The Drifting Language of Architectural Accessibility in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris by Essaka Joshua