Tracing the Integrations of Race and Style Theory in Nineteenth-Century Architectural Style Debates: E. E. Viollet-le-Duc and Gottfried Semper, 1834-1890

DISSERTATION

This dissertation outlines the racial epistemologies produced by the conceptual integration of race and style theory in Gottfried Semper’s (1803--1879) and Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc's (1814--1876) organic metaphors for architectural design. This research uses the textual references to scientific race theory found in historical treatises to locate the biological, ethnographic and nationalist meanings embodied by modernist designs in western Europe. It employs a close reading of several domestic buildings to make its case: using the notion of typology in Gottfried Semper's Die Vier Elemente der Baukunst and Der Stil, it examines the Germanic body constructed in his design of Villa Garbald for Agostino Garbald in Castasegna, Switzerland of 1863; and the Aryan personhood embodied in the racial teleologies of Viollet-le-Duc's Histoire de l'habitation humaine, depuis les temps préhistoriques jusqu'à nos jours, which are later expressed spatially and materially in his design of Villa la Vedette of Lausanne, Switzerland of 1875.

Charles L. Davis II