Although Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris was originally published over one hundred and fifty years ago, the book contains within its proem one of the most tragic and beautifully prophetic accounts of a major city evolving in and through time. Within those opening paragraphs, as we witness the pathos with which Hugo recounts the removal of a single word – fatality – once etched into the spires of the old Cathedral, it becomes apparent that even the smallest act of erasure from the urban fabric can be emblematic of a volatility or flux at a much larger scale (the book itself predates Baron Georges Haussmann’s razing of the medieval city by only a few decades). Perhaps to consider that etching as something more than simply a cipher lost to the will of some unknown agent, affords the questioning of where an architectural identity resides, not just in immediate contextual relationships, but also in a more abstracted and temporal field of accumulated meanings.
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Allan Wes Wilson
Additionally, we might entertain the possibility that Hugo’s prose underscores a very critical paradox of architecture, where ‘identity’ becomes both a concretising yet extremely fragile term. For example, though cities are large physical entities which contain tangible and qualitative properties, they are undoubtedly an accretion of materials, of matter which is susceptible to processes of change. In a very literal sense we may assume that architecture remains in a state of instability and that what we have assumed to be the absolute definition of a place (or a work of architecture) is actually much more complicated.
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