Pugin, Augustus Welby

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PUGIN, AUGUSTUS WELBY

PUGIN, AUGUSTUS WELBY (1812–1852), English architect, designer, and theorist.

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin grew up with Gothic architecture; his father, the French émigré architect and draftsman Augustus-Charles Pugin (1762–1832), had earned fame as the illustrator of books on Gothic architecture, furniture, and ornaments. Pugin's architectural training consisted of traveling with his father around England and France, assisting in the measurement and drawing of medieval buildings. He provided many of the illustrations for his father's last book (Examples of Gothic Architecture, 1831), proving himself a gifted draftsman.

Pugin's architectural career started in 1835 with the construction of his own house (St. Marie's Grange, Salisbury) and his first work for Sir Charles Barry (1795–1860)—the design of furniture and ornamental details for the King Edward VI Grammar School in Birmingham. In the same year Pugin converted to Roman Catholicism and began writing his first and most influential book, Contrasts; or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day, Shewing the Present Decay of Taste.

Published in 1841, Contrasts was the first serious polemic of the Gothic Revival movement. Juxtaposing illustrations of medieval buildings with those of his own time, Pugin compared the beauty and harmony of the Middle Ages with the squalor and ugliness of the contemporary world. It was a contrast Pugin attributed to the relative decline in religious faith and the abandonment of the Gothic style after the Reformation. In a bold synthesis of his religious views and love of Gothic design, Pugin argued that Gothic was not merely a "style": it had moral value as the true architectural embodiment of Christian belief, whereas other styles were "pagan" in origin, and therefore un-Christian. It was a turning point. Previously Gothic had been admired for its picturesque and ornamental qualities; now Pugin gave it a moral and symbolic value. It was an argument he developed further in The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841). Pugin's ideas were to be an influence on later Gothic Revival theorists including John Ruskin (1819–1900), who wrote Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879).

Contrasts was published at a time of religious revival. In 1818, Parliament had called for the construction of six hundred new churches to serve Britain's expanding cities. The Oxford Movement, which sought the revival of Roman Catholic ideals and rituals in the Church of England, was gaining momentum through the 1830s and 1840s. Pugin's arguments appealed especially to Catholic patrons, and he began to receive commissions from prominent members of the Catholic community, particularly Charles Scarisbrick (Scarisbrick Hall, Lancashire, 1837–1845) and John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury (Alton Towers and Alton Castle, Staffordshire, 1837–1852). But of greater significance was the series of more than thirty churches and religious buildings that Pugin designed. The most notable of the early works was St. Marie's, Derby (1837–1839), where Pugin achieved a sense of soaring verticality in the interior through the use of scale and an exaggerated proportion between height and width, accentuated by tall arcades of bare stonework. A similar verticality can be seen in St. Chad's, Birmingham (1839–1840)—Pugin's first cathedral, and the first Roman Catholic cathedral to be built in England since the Reformation. In the 1840s, through the patronage of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Pugin was able to build the church that most clearly fulfilled his architectural manifesto—St. Giles', Cheadle (1840–1846). Huge in scale, opulent but restrained, in the year of its opening St. Giles was described by John Henry Newman (1801–1890), leader of the Oxford Movement, as "The most splendid building I ever saw."

Pugin's best-known work is the Houses of Parliament (from 1836), which he worked on throughout his career. Sir Charles Barry won the competition to design a new building in 1835, but it is now widely accepted that Pugin was involved in the design, especially in the decorative details. Pugin had never restricted himself to architecture but from the earliest days of his career had designed furniture, ceramics, textiles, wallpaper, and metalwork, collaborating with the manufacturers John Gregory Crace, Herbert Minton, and John Hardman. His work in the interior of the Houses of Parliament presented the opportunity to bring all these aspects together into a Gothic whole. From chandeliers to inkwells, Pugin designed every detail and the result was arguably the finest Gothic Revival interior of the nineteenth century.