Let there be no feature about a building that is not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; and let all ornament be the enrichment of the essential construction.
A town ordered by its churches
Let a town’s churches and public buildings, not its engines of utility, shape its skyline: a spire to each parish, halls for its guilds, a cross in its market place.
Pugin’s plate shows the same town in 1440 and 1840. In the first, the eye goes from spire to spire: fourteen churches and religious houses inside the walls. In the second, the spires are stumps or have been rebuilt in a mean classical style, and the new landmarks are a gasworks, an iron works, a lunatic asylum, a prison and a Socialist hall. The polemic is religious, but it makes a lasting point about planning: the silhouette of a town tells what the town values.
Victorian towns took the lesson literally, building Gothic churches, town halls and schools whose towers and spires gave industrial places a new skyline.
Related rules
Commit no architectural deceit: do not suggest a structure other than the real one, do not paint or carve one material to look like another, and do not pass off cast or machine-made ornament as handwork.
House the poor as a Christian community: small dwellings, each with its own door and hearth, round a garden court, with a chapel over the gate, not in a walled workhouse built for surveillance and punishment.
Arrange a building for its uses first and let its outline follow: gables, bays, chimneys and towers go where the rooms behind need them. Never contrive irregularity for effect, and never force a symmetrical front on an unsymmetrical plan.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A town ordered by its churches”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/pugin-contrasted-towns. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.