Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin

English architect

• Born: March 1, 1812
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: September 14, 1852
• Place of death: London, England

Best remembered for designing Great Britain’s Houses of Parliament, Pugin designed and built more than one hundred distinctive buildings during his short career and wrote treatises promoting the Gothic revival in church architecture.

Early Life

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (pew-jihn) was the only son of Augustus Charles Pugin, a French immigrant architectural illustrator, who was fifty when his son was born, and a Calvinist mother, Catherine Welby. His parents were educators who ran a school for training architects and illustrators. In England, young Pugin attended class field trips and learned early to measure and draw buildings. He traveled with classes to France, absorbing the quiet grandeur of the medieval cathedrals. His memories of the crypts of the Continental cathedrals would later fire his interest in the Catholic faith.

When Pugin was twenty-three, his father died, leaving an unfinished manuscript, Examples of Gothic Architecture (1835). Pugin undertook to fulfill his father’s contract for the book, demonstrating his skill and interest in architecture. His education in the field continued, without an apprenticeship. Pugin worked diligently to complete the manuscript, while traveling to study medieval art history and find clients.

Meanwhile, his domestic life inspired his building a home for his second wife, Louisa (his first wife, Anne, having died in childbirth). Saint Marie’s Grange had a pleasing view and its own chapel, but it was soon too small for a growing family. When Pugin tried to sell the house, he found that his tastes were not average. The house did not imitate the fantastic castles and cottages of the day, and it took some time for his growing reputation to make the house salable.

Though reared as a Nonconformist, Pugin converted to Catholicism at the age of twenty-six, several years after the Catholic Emancipation Act. He found Roman Catholic churches in England in poor condition after the Reformation years, their beauty and solemnity sadly diminished. His estimation of the state of the faith was further diminished by the performance of ceremonies without proper attention to details. Trompe l’oeil, artificial flowers, pagan symbols, and shabby upkeep he found incompatible with the aims of the faith. This grave dismay at the condition of his chosen church, and his sense of the Roman Catholic Church, specifically the English branch, manifested itself in a lifelong study of the Church in the medieval world, a time when church power was at its greatest. This scholarship would be the foundation of his building, decorating, and writing endeavors.

A look of serious contemplation is apparent in a portrait of Pugin by J. R. Herbert. Framed in an ecclesiastically styled piece decorated with quatrefoils and intertwined carved ribbons bearing the legend “En Avant,” Pugin’s face and hands seem to float above the dark background. Thin brows and a churlish mouth on a fleshy face seem loath to let the compass and pencil in hand remain still for posing. Pugin was always eager to attack his work—at a hare’s pace.

Life’s Work

As far as Pugin was concerned, the baroque London church St. Mary Woolnoth could keep the hours. Pugin designed churches with bell towers, rather than clock towers, to call the faithful. He believed that the proper concern of church architecture was not the temporal function of classical architectural forms. The influence of Greek and Roman forms Pugin could only regard with contempt as pagan creations, designed for the worship of idols. Not only was the spiritual inspiration defective, but also the current vogue for Roman designs, with the low slope to the roofs, according to Pugin was unsuitable to the severities of the English climate.

In the Gothic Pugin found the “only correct expression of the faith, wants and needs of our country.” Pugin applied these principles by use of local materials, scrupulous attention to church liturgy, and study of medieval Gothic churches.

August, 1839, marked the opening of Pugin’s first completed church, St. Mary’s, Uttoxeter. Commissioned by John Talbot, the earl of Shrewsbury, who would present Pugin with several additional commissions, the church was a monumental accomplishment for Pugin. He called it “the first Catholic structure erected in this country in strict accordance with the rules of ancient ecclesiastical architecture since the days of the pretended reformation.”

Though this church earned his praise, it was not Pugin’s ideal. Its success showed Pugin’s ability to work gracefully within the constraints of a particular job. A simple church in comparison to his later works, it was mostly brick, though Pugin preferred stone, and it had no side aisles.

The inside was illuminated by Pugin’s window of preference, a large round one over the door (usually he had to make do with the tall, pointed ones). The nave’s high ceiling created a grand space separated from the chancel by a rood, or cross, which foreshadowed Pugin’s use of rood screens. In the chancel, Pugin’s reredos, or altar screen, featured eight angels in niches. Curtains to either side of the altar protected the clergy from breezes. To the right, Pugin included the three seats of the sedilia and sacrarium; to the left, a place for holding the consecrated hosts on Maundy Thursday.

This church, like his others, was not a mere copy of medieval designs. Pugin combined the Gothic design vocabulary, sometimes even adapting local medieval patterns, with available materials and the restraints of budget and location to create original solutions to the challenge of church building—with his particular ecclesiastical standards in mind.

For best achieving these standards in his own work, Pugin preferred St. Giles’, Cheadle, another of his early churches commissioned by the earl of Shrewsbury. Metalwork, vestments, and other accessories designed by Pugin and executed at the Hardman works in Birmingham furnished the interior. Begun in 1840 and completed six years later, the church was built from local stone, with local alabaster for the altar. Massive in scale with a two-hundred-foot spire, elaborate in decorations rich with symbolism, and sumptuous in colors all the way up the walls and over the ceiling, St. Giles’ was immediately impressive and distinctively Pugin’s.

Whereas St. Giles’ had the tower in the center of the west side with the main entrance, Pugin’s last churches advocated asymmetry, with the towers standing at the end of aisles or to the side of the nave.

While experimenting with tower location, Pugin was also developing his interior aesthetics. His Irish churches, which showed a remarkable respect for indigenous architecture and materials, contrasted with the ornamentation of St. Giles’. St. Mary’s Cathedral, Killarney, begun in 1842 but completed after Pugin’s death with altar and reredos by his son Edward, was designed as a huge cruciform structure of stone crowned by a spire above the crossing. Irregular stones suggested a solid and immovable landmark, yet still drew the eye upward. Inside, the plain stone walls directed one to the detail in the pointed arches marching up the side aisles to the chancel.

It was not in the innovative achievements of design that Pugin found the most satisfaction. Late in his brief life, he commented that it was his writings that contributed the most to the advancement of Gothic principles. Contrasts (1836), his first book, subtitled “Or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, Shewing the Present Decay of Taste,” sarcastically examines the “advances” of the Reformation and finds them wanting. The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture: Set Forth in Two Lectures Delivered at St. Marie’s, Oscott , which followed in 1841, called for a rational examination of the Gothic to find it the form exclusively appropriate for ecclesiastical building. All upward design elements he found emblematic of the Resurrection, a further reason to complete spires on towers (the other being to shed precipitation). He also used the opportunity to strike another blow at classical design, “Greek temples are utterly inapplicable to the purpose of Christian churches… the architecture and arrangement of which have originated in their wants and purpose.”

The Ecclesiological Society, later called the Cambridge Camden Society, a self-appointed hierarchy of judges on church design in England and abroad, found Pugin too broad-minded in his definition of good architecture. They contended that his principles were not exclusive to Gothic intention. In fact, a reader might be inclined to attribute Pugin’s philosophy to the Bauhaus, nearly a century away: For Pugin, “. . . there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety.” Further,

In pure architecture the smallest detail should have a meaning or serve a purpose; and even the construction itself should vary with the material employed, and the designs should be adapted to the material in which they are executed.

Despite the subservience of form to function and the concern for truth to materials, Pugin would not build by the glass-box standard of the twentieth century. As a Victorian, he added the caveat that there should be ornament suitable to the purpose of the building. He backed the rhetoric with dictionaries of forms suitable for decorating: Designs for Gold and Silversmiths (1836), Floriated Ornament: A Series of Thirty-one Designs (1849), and Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume (1844, 1846, 1868).

For architects merely imitating a style, a group most offensive to Pugin, a little dictionary was a dangerous thing. Decoration, he believed, should be an integral part of the structure. His warning to the imitators was little short of a moral imperative:

The severity of Christian architecture requires a reasonable purpose for the introduction of the smallest detail, and daily experience proves that those who attempt this glorious style without any fixed idea of its unalterable rules, are certain to end in miserable failures.

Pugin’s most famous commission, however, was not ecclesiastical. Sir Charles Barry had been impressed with Pugin’s work, completing projects assigned to his father around the time of his death. When the competition for replacing the Houses of Parliament opened in 1835, Barry hired Pugin to draw his plans. After being awarded the commission, Barry hired Pugin to draw revisions, and later to design the innumerable details of decorating the interiors of the Houses. Under Barry’s exacting standards, Pugin created a full range of secular furnishings with a distinctly Gothic flavor. Not only would Pugin create the design for a particular piece, but he would also detail the manufacturing specifications for John Hardman, in the case of metalwork, or other artisans for tile, wallpaper, furniture, or glass.

Significance

Though the Houses of Parliament remain intact, time has undone much of the Pugin gallery. Fashion, as well as official decree, has had its way with some of his designs. Decay and demolition have obliterated others. Larger congregations called for additions to his small parish churchs, often obscuring the original lines and intention of Pugin’s work. Before the beginning of the twentieth century, many of Pugin’s principles were declared obsolete. Within a century of the publishing of The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, Pope Pius XII officially sanctioned removal of Pugin’s beloved rood screens.

The Houses of Parliament and the churches that remain show Pugin’s success in executing his intentions. His deep understanding of the Gothic style allowed him to transcend design by imitation. He analyzed the essence of design, participating in the canon ranging from Durandus to Charles-Édouard Le Corbusier.

The relentless pace of Pugin’s life, a pace commensurate with the century after his own, combined with his pursuit of the ideals belonging to a time five centuries prior to his own, left him mad in the end, and he died insane. He had, however, the final satisfaction of being buried in his own properly designed church, St. Augustine, Ramsgate.

Bibliography

Anson, Peter F. Fashions in Church Furnishings, 1840-1940. London: Faith Press, 1960. Begins with chapters on the early Victorian era and on Pugin. Very good source on the decoration of churches and altars in the context of the social and ecclesiastical ferment that these details sometimes stirred.

Atterbury, Paul, ed. A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival. New Haven, Conn.: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York, by Yale University Press, 1995. A catalog published to accompany an exhibit at the Bard Graduate Center. Contains ten essays about Pugin, including a biographical sketch, and discussions of the Gothic sensibility, Pugin’s interior design, Pugin’s Catholic churches in England and Ireland, and Pugin and the Gothic Revival movement in France and North America.

Atterbury, Paul, and Clive Wainwright, eds. Pugin: A Gothic Passion. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. A catalog published to accompany an exhibit at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Contains twelve essays offering a complete appraisal of Pugin’s life and achievements, including discussions of his architectural style; his theater, domestic, and church architecture; and his wallpaper, furniture, and book design.

Foster, Richard. Discovering English Churches. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Covering the architectural development of parish churches from the fourth century through the Gothic revival, this book presents the church-building heritage that Pugin researched for inspiration for his designs. Valuable for its glossary of architectural and ecclesiastical terms.

Pugin, A. Welby. An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England. London: John Weale, 1843. Reprint. Oxford, England: St. Barnabas Press, 1969. This book is Pugin’s argument for the revival of old forms and an explanation for the correct approach to employing the Gothic mode. Truly a delight as it castigates Christopher Wren and dismisses the sightseeing architects who brought back nonindigenous design from their travels.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture: Set Forth in Two Lectures Delivered at St. Marie’s, Oscott. London: John Weale, 1841. Reprint. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973. Includes Pugin’s engravings and his opinions on the proper manner of construction and ornamentation of buildings, especially churches.

Stanton, Phoebe. The Gothic Revival and American Church Architecture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968. Though the perspective is from “the Colonies,” the Pugin influence in England and abroad permeates this account of nineteenth century church building. The history of the contentions between various ecclesiastical societies points out the superior achievement of a single individual who could rise above the ferment—not only in his architectural criticism but in the actual building as well.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Pugin. New York: Viking Press, 1972. A well-organized, well-researched biography that benefits from an occasional look at Foster’s glossary (see above). Nice balance between Pugin, the man, and Pugin, the author and architect. Stanton’s bibliographies also recommend Sir Kenneth Clark’s The Gothic Revival (1928), and Benjamin Ferrey’s Recollections of A. N. Welby Pugin and His Father Augustus Pugin (1861).

Watkin, David. Morality and Architecture. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1977. Examines the tradition of critics and designers who have aspired to the Platonic ideal in their architectural undertakings. An especially good book to consider in the light of Pugin’s severe criticism of his own designs.