Date a Gothic window by its tracery: openings pierced through a plate (twelfth century); geometric bar tracery of circles and foils (thirteenth); flowing curvilinear tracery of ogees and daggers (fourteenth); and, in England, perpendicular panel tracery with mullions running straight up into the arch (late fourteenth to sixteenth).
Rules · Theory · Ornament · Structure
Pugin’s two great rules
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.
Pugin found both rules obeyed in medieval Gothic, where buttresses, pinnacles, mouldings and roof timbers are at once structure and ornament, and broken in the classicism of his own day, where columns and pediments were applied to walls that did not need them. The rules are more radical than the Gothic he recommended: they amount to saying that ornament must follow construction, and they were taken up by critics who had no interest in pointed arches.
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.
Over the vaults of a northern church raise a timber roof of about 55–60°, its section close to an equilateral triangle, so that snow slides off and the slates or tiles overlap generously.
equilateral roof: pitch = 60°, rafter = span
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.
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, “Pugin’s two great rules”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/pugin-true-principles. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.