The revival of medieval Gothic, first as a picturesque taste for ruins and follies, then, with Pugin and Ruskin, as a moral and religious argument for honest construction, which filled the nineteenth century with pointed churches, colleges, parliaments and railway hotels.
Gothic never quite died in England, where masons went on building pointed windows in churches and colleges into the seventeenth century. Its revival as a fashion began with Horace Walpole’s house at Strawberry Hill (from 1749), a playful assembly of Gothic details copied from tombs and screens, and with the eighteenth-century taste for ruins and the sublime. This early “Gothick” was decoration applied to Georgian buildings, and its details were often in plaster and wood.
The serious revival came in the 1830s and 40s. Augustus Pugin argued that Gothic was the only true Christian architecture and, in the True Principles (1841), that its forms were the honest expression of construction (Pugin’s two great rules). The Cambridge Camden Society (the Ecclesiologists) prescribed the correct arrangement of the Anglican church (chancel, nave, porch, steep roof, fourteenth-century “Decorated” details), and hundreds of churches were built to their rules. The rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster after the fire of 1834, by Charles Barry with Pugin’s detail, made Gothic the national style of Britain.
John Ruskin widened the argument (The Lamp of Truth). He admired the polychrome Gothic of Venice and Verona, and inspired a High Victorian Gothic of coloured brick and stone: Butterfield’s All Saints, Margaret Street, Deane and Woodward’s University Museum in Oxford, Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras. On the Continent the completion of Cologne Cathedral (1842–80) was a national project, and Viollet-le-Duc in France restored medieval monuments and read Gothic as a rational structural system, prefiguring the engineers’ architecture of iron.
The revival spread through the empire and to America, where Richard Upjohn’s Trinity Church in New York (1839–46) and James Renwick’s St Patrick’s Cathedral set the pattern for Gothic churches and, later, Gothic universities and skyscrapers. Its most enduring legacy was the idea, shared by its enemies, that architecture should be judged by its truth to materials and construction.