"Architecture is a literary form of expression, giving permanence to human thought in monuments known as buildings. The architect is like a stylus who writes ‘at the dictate of the general idea of an epoch…those marvelous books which were also marvelous buildings’. […] Prior to the 15th century, the books that most fully expressed human thought were made of stone and are called buildings: ‘In fact, from the origin of things up to and including the fifteenth century…architecture was the great book of mankind, man’s chief form of expression…’ It was ‘the chief, the universal writing’, and no idea of any importance came into being without being ‘inscribed in stone’."

“Ceci tuera cela”. - Victor Hugo

Neil Levine, The Book and the Building: Hugo’s Theory of Architecture and Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Ste-Genevieve