A book of paired etchings, published at Pugin’s own expense, setting medieval buildings beside their modern equivalents (a chapel beside a church, a workhouse beside an almshouse, a whole town in 1440 beside the same town in 1840) to argue that architecture declines with faith.
Pugin had just become a Catholic when he published Contrasts in 1836, and the book is as much a religious tract as an architectural one: the Reformation, it claims, destroyed the Christian art of England, and the classical taste of the Georgian age is its pagan heir. The argument is made in pictures. Each plate sets a Gothic building against a modern one of the same use, drawn to make the modern one as mean as possible.
The second edition of 1841 added the two plates that concern planning. “Contrasted Towns” shows a walled town in 1440, its skyline a crowd of spires and towers, every parish with its church; and the same town in 1840, the spires broken or replaced by a gasworks, a lunatic asylum, a new jail and a Socialist hall. “Contrasted Residences for the Poor” sets a panoptical workhouse, where the poor are fed gruel and punished, beside a medieval almshouse, a college of dwellings round a chapel and garden.
The book, part by part
I Contrasted Towns (1841)
A Catholic town in 1440 and the same town in 1840: a skyline of churches against a skyline of utility.
II Contrasted Residences for the Poor (1841)
The almshouse as a Christian college round a chapel, against the workhouse as a prison.
Rules: Almshouses, not workhouses