This Artiou exhibition guide is a practical entry point for planning a visit to “Hugo and architecture. From stone to pen”, with the key context, venue, and source details in one place.

About the exhibition

Romantic writer, accomplished playwright, committed poet, visionary artist and decorator, Victor Hugo maintains a privileged and essential relationship with architecture which has always deeply inspired him. Churches, cathedrals and castles fill his notebooks and give meaning to his stories.

Like the first half of the 19th century when literature and architecture were closely associated, where the question of heritage became central, the poet placed himself as an ardent defender of heritage following his famous plea "War on the demolitionists" in 1825. His most famous work on this subject remains of course the novel Notre-Dame de Paris, a true aesthetic manifesto published in 1831, in which he developed his particular conception of architecture where the cathedral, a grandiose monument, refers as much to history as to writing. In the famous chapter “This will kill that”, the writer makes an analogy between stones and words. Both construction materials, literature is an architecture of words just as architecture is a writing of history.

This presence of architecture is found in other novels with an important place given to buildings which scaffold and punctuate the story.

This interest in the architectural motif also permeates all of his graphic work. Castles and dungeons, ruins and roads, churches and cathedrals, fortresses and staircases... very early on formed the main iconography of his sketchbooks and drawings.

Victor Hugo's sense of observation and imagination unfold through real or dreamed monuments, famous or intimate, precise or visionary, immense and tiny, grandiose or modest. This approach also concerns a personal architecture at Hauteville House, his home during exile in Guernsey, where he experiments with a three-dimensional architectural vision.

Visit information

  • Venue: Maison de Victor Hugo, 6 place des Vosges, 75004, PARIS
  • Dates: Du jeudi 11 juin 2026 au dimanche 22 novembre 2026 :

mardi, mercredi, jeudi, vendredi, samedi, dimanche

de 10h00 à 18h00