The Johns Hopkins University PressSociety for the History of Technology http://www.jstor.org/stable/3105106 . Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Society for the History of Technology and The Johns Hopkins University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Technology and Culture. http://www.jstor.org StructuralImperative and the Origin of New Form ROBERT MARK AND DAVID P. BILLINGTON Contemporary writing on architecture, following art history, tends to focus on formal analysis where visual ideas dominate the discussion of the origin and meaning of style. Technology is rarely touched upon; and structure, although generally understood as necessary, is hardly seen as a legitimate giver of form, even for large-scale building.' This modern point of view must be understood, at least partly, as a reaction to the ideas of Eugene Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79), self-trained architect, restorer, archaeologist, and theorist. Mainly on the basis of his extensive practical experience with the restoration of medieval monuments, Viollet-le-Duc compiled a ten-volume encyclopedia, Dic- tionnaire raisonne de l'architecturefranfaise du XIe au XVIe siecle (1854- 68), that remains even today probably the single most important pub- lished work on medieval building technology (fig.