by Ross Wolfe & Sammy Medina Victor Hugo once proclaimed the death of architecture at the hands of the printing press.  “Make no mistake about it,” he wrote in his Hunchback of Notre Dame.  “Architecture is dead, dead beyond recall; killed by the printed book.”[1] In drawing this analogy, Hugo was trying to make a broader point about the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism in European history — traditions symbolized by the grandeur of the Gothic cathedral (“architecture”) and the vernacular of the delatinized Bible (“the printed book”), respectively. But Gutenberg’s invention carried a still-greater significance vis-à-vis architecture. It granted an almost … Continue reading Taking notes 23: Architecture: A social and political history since 1848