Introduction: Architecture and geology

In September 1868, French architect Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) made his first expedition to Mont Blanc. The trip lasted ten days, during which he traversed the Mer de Glace and the Bossons Glacier and climbed Brévent to complete his earliest panorama sketch of the celebrated peak. The voyage inaugurated a series of eight annual pilgrimages made by the architect-turned-geologist between 1868 and 1875.

Over the course of these expeditions, Viollet-le-Duc produced over five hundred drawings and sketches of the mountain range. While his early drawings were characterized by a softness of line and shadow that molded the mass and presence of the mountain, on subsequent trips his drawing style transitioned towards a more analytical technique, dissecting the disintegrating landscape piece by piece to comprehend its underlying order. These later drawings, annotated with labels, extensive notes, and explanatory sketched diagrams, demonstrate a meticulous attention to detail and a concerted effort to understand morphological processes through drawing. Ultimately, his depictions turned not only towards analysis, but towards a process of synthesis. The geoscientific laws and relationships ascertained through his Alpine investigation were synthetically applied through artistic visualizations in order to render the primitive configuration of existing topographies at the moment of their formation. Additionally, these synthetic visualizations were used to produce new typological landscape configurations.