ABSTRACT
John Summerson, who has probably done more to establish Viollet-le-Duc's reputation as pioneer modernist than any other historian, described the iron projects in his lecture at Bristol University as nothing short of failures. The locomotive would have had as father the personification of fire, and for mother, that of water; thus personified in turn, she would have become god or goddess. Jean-Hilaire Belloc, for instance, director of the ecole de dessin where Viollet-le-Duc taught until 1850, seemed to have had something close to Hugo's vision in mind when he commented on a competition for the ornamentation of a locomotive in a public speech at the cole de dessin in 1847. Victor Baltard's great covered iron markets in central Paris, under construction from 1855 to the late 1870s, provided the image for a futuristic rebirth of Paris, as we can gauge from Zola's Le ventre de Paris.
