Two lectures that turned the Gothic Revival from a picturesque fashion into a moral argument: a building should have no feature not needed for convenience, construction or propriety, and its ornament should enrich its real construction: rules that Pugin found obeyed in the pointed architecture of the Middle Ages.
Pugin (1812–52), the son of a French émigré draughtsman, converted to Catholicism in 1835 and devoted his short, feverish life to the revival of medieval architecture as the only true Christian style. In Contrasts (1836) he set the decayed classical towns of his own day against their imagined medieval glory; in the True Principles (1841) he gave the argument a rational form. He designed dozens of churches, the interiors and fittings of the new Palace of Westminster with Charles Barry, and the church of St Giles, Cheadle.
The book’s two great rules are stated at the outset. The first, in Pugin’s words: “there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety.” The second is that all ornament should consist of the enrichment of the essential construction. From these he derives a series of lessons in stone, timber and metal: buttresses should show how they resist thrust, roofs should be steep and their timbers visible, hinges and locks should be honest ironwork rather than hidden fittings, and plans should grow from use, not from an imposed symmetry.
Pugin’s moral functionalism outlived his Gothic. By insisting that construction be shown and ornament grow from it, he supplied an argument that Ruskin, William Morris, Viollet-le-Duc and, eventually, the modern movement would all take up.
The book, part by part
I Lecture I: Stone and timber
The two great rules. Pointed architecture as the honest expression of stone construction: buttresses, pinnacles, vaults, mouldings, the steep roof and the open timber roof. Classical and “Pagan” architecture criticised for hiding its construction behind applied orders.
Rules: Pugin’s two great rules · The steep roof
II Lecture II: Metalwork, furniture and propriety
Ironwork, brasswork and furniture designed from their construction; the principle of propriety (that the character of a building should express its purpose) and the irregular plan that follows need.