Running to Keep Up: Processing the Psychological Impact of the AI Revolution
Why Victor Hugo mourned the death of architecture — and how he ultimately saved it.
Victor Hugo believed the printing press spelled the end of architecture.
“The book will kill the edifice,” declared Claude Frollo as he looked from the pages in his hands to the towering walls of the Notre Dame Cathedral, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame de Paris).
Civilizations used to carve their stories, ideas, and imaginations into majestic feats of architecture, the “great book of humanity.” Hugo writes,
“In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century… architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.”
Hugo saw the printing press as the watershed invention that shifted the primary means of human expression. The canvas of paper will replace the canvas of wood and stone.
But this is no surprise, he said, as buildings take years and are expensive, but Gutenberg made the book capable of being so quickly made by one or a few people. It’s like digging a trench deeper than the riverbed and watching the water follow the new course: it’s only to be expected.
The book has overtaken architecture as the place where all human thought flows. And architecture has, and will, suffer because of it.
But Hugo wasn’t anti-print. His great writings, the likes of Les Misérables and Notre-Dame de Paris, benefited greatly from this medium. But he did mourn the apparent death of architecture as the chief artform. It has lost its beauty, its originality, its spirituality; today, buildings are mere copies of others. He writes:
“It becomes bare, denuded of its foliage, and grows visibly emaciated. It is petty, it is poor, it is nothing. It no longer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art of another time. Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts, because human thought is abandoning it, it summons bunglers in place of artists. Glass replaces the painted windows. The stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all originality, all life, all intelligence. It drags along, a lamentable workshop mendicant, from copy to copy.”
Now, you might be wondering: Victor Hugo wrote all this around the turn of the 1830s while Gutenberg’s invention came in 1440, almost a full 400 years prior.
Why was he talking about this now?
Hugo was watching as the Gothic architecture of old was neglected and devalued. Some were destroyed to be replaced by new buildings, and parts of others were remade in a newer style, both he deemed as significantly uglier. The medieval stained glass of the Notre-Dame Cathedral was replaced by white glass to let more light into the church.
Part of what drove this cultural attitude was the fact that the country was living in the wake of the French Revolution, which birthed a generation that saw all “old” things as relics of the monarchy they despised. The cathedral itself was desecrated during the Revolution, where statues were beheaded or torn down completely.
In the years hence, Notre-Dame had fallen into such disrepair that Paris’ leaders seriously considered tearing it down.
Hugo fought back and argued for the preservation of architecture, the books that the people of old had written in stone, especially Notre-Dame. In 1825, he wrote a paper titled, Guerre aux Démolisseurs (War on the Demolishers), aimed at saving Paris’ medieval architecture. But it fell on deaf ears.
A few years later, in 1831, Hugo finished writing his great literary work encapsulating this thesis: The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
And it worked.
The popularity of the book spurred a historical preservation movement in the country, leading to a 20-year restoration project of Notre-Dame.
I, for one, a fan of Gothic architecture, am grateful for Victor Hugo’s fight for ancient architecture’s preservation. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that if it weren’t for him, the Cathedral wouldn’t be standing today.
As we look around at modern architecture today, I think Hugo would be appalled. His declaration of the death of architecture appears to be true: As human expression furthered its advance from the book to the Internet, the “fine lines” of architecture has decayed to, in the words of Hugo himself, “the cold and inexorable lines of geometry.”
Multi-passionate creative and cultural philosopher. I love talking psychology, culture, education, and anything else that deals with living as better people.