With a masterful hand, Victor Hugo, a noble lover and a great student of architecture, traces her fall in Notre-Dame.
The prophecy of Frollo, that "the book will kill the edifice," I remember was to me as a boy one of the grandest sad things of the world.
After seeking the origin and tracing the growth of architecture in superb fashion, showing how in the Middle Ages all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one point - architecture - he shows how, in the life of that time, whoever was born poet became an architect. All other arts simply obeyed and placed themselves under the discipline of architecture. They were the workmen of the great work. The architect, the poet, the master summed up in his person the sculpture that carved his façades, painting which illuminated his walls and windows, music which set his bells to pealing and breathed into his organs - there was nothing which was not forced in order to make something of itself in that time, to come and frame itself in the edifice.
Got to be something in this for these times.
From Art and Craft of the Machine
by Frank Lloyd Wright
Which I am reading slowly thanks to the Daily Lit.
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