Rogue architecture

Rogue architecture. Term used by H. S. Goodhart-Rendel to describe works by those Gothic-Revival architects, addicted to Go, whose whose works were not marked by scholarship, serenity, or tact. Among the more celebrated ‘Rogues’ were E. Bassett Keeling, E. B. Lamb, S. S. Teulon, and George Truefitt (1824–1902), all practitioners, and Thomas Harris (1830–1900), whose Victorian Architecture (1860) and Examples of the Architecture of the Victorian Age (1862) earned him some opprobrium. Keeling and Lamb designed churches for the Evangelical persuasion—both gloried in repetitive notchings and chamferings, expressed their roof-structures in an outlandish, restless way, and seemed to want to jar the eye with saw-toothed arrises, scissor-shaped trusses, and harsh, barbaric polychromy. Their almost frantic originality, debauched acrobatic Gothic, and elephantine compositions brought the wrath of the Ecclesiologists on their heads, and few have taken their work seriously ever since. See also Rageur, Raguer.

Bibliography

AH, xvi (1973), 60–9 and xlii (1999), 307–15;
J. Curl (2002b);
RIBA Journal (Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects), ser. 3, lvi/6 (1949), 251–9