Home, Degeneration and Decadence: Discursive Connections between Bénédict Morel and Eugène Viollet-le-duc

Abstract

This article shows how Bénédict Morel’s degeneration theory underlays Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s architectural discourses. It illustrates how notions that originated in medical and scientific fields such as racial degeneration and the concept of human type were appropriated by Viollet-Le-Duc and used as critical tools to create a theory of domestic architecture while also fuelling his attack on Second-Empire domestic designs. Thus, on the one hand, this article contributes to scholarship on the influence of medicine and science in the work of Viollet-Le-Duc. On the other hand, it adds to the field of the Medical Humanities by providing a comparative discourse analysis between medical and architectural theories

Keywords

• degeneration theory
• psychiatry
• domestic architecture
• medicine
• morel
• viollet-le-duc