Anyone who has played Carcassonne or pictured Notre-Dame with its spire knows Viollet-le-Duc’s Middle Ages, mostly without knowing his name.
“Drawing Worlds,” curated by Barry Bergdoll and Martin Bressani, gathers nearly one hundred sheets from the Médiathèque du patrimoine in Paris across the four floors of Bard Graduate Center’s townhouse, each floor in its own saturated color. The display logic is the show’s quiet strength: framed drawings on the walls, the publications they became in vitrines below, so that every sheet reads twice, as working document and as circulating print. The attachements that recorded the restoration of Notre-Dame hang beside the watercolor chart that decodes their colors. A label concedes that the chimeras, “entirely inventions,” now pass for medieval.

The introduction promises “deep structures of geology, climate, and race.” Race arrives on the third floor, where the labels are unsparing: Le Duc’s friendship with Gobineau, the Aryan chalet, the 1864 monument for colonial Algiers annotated with “the art production belonging to our race.” Few monographic shows would hang any of this; the framing, however, presents it as context for his “late scholarship.” Race becomes a chapter that opens around 1860 and closes within a room.

The fourth floor, “The Atelier,” asks how his restorations continue to shape our contemporary conception of the medieval. Only silhouettes travel upstairs: the conical slate roofs kept in the Carcassonne board game’s box art, the Lego spire, the copper rooster regilded in 2023. The fantasies of nation and race that produced those silhouettes stay downstairs; ETH Zurich’s reconstruction of La Vedette, his Lausanne house, alone admits the racial theory into its painted panorama.

The Lego instructions end by turning Saint Thomas, modeled on Viollet-le-Duc’s likeness, to face the spire, the architect admiring his own work. The show studies him with far more honesty, and still leaves him looking at the building rather than at us.

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