Architect, born in London, UK. Trained by his father, he worked with Charles Barry, designing a large part of the decoration and sculpture for the new Houses of Parliament (begun 1840). He became a Catholic (c.1833), and most of his plans were made for churches within that faith, such as the Catholic cathedrals at Birmingham and Newcastle. His designs and publications, especially Contrasts (1836), did much to revive Gothic architecture in England.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (March 1, 1812–September 14, 1852) was an English-born architect, designer and theorist of design now best remembered for his work on churches and on the Houses of Parliament. He was the son of a French draughtsman, Augustus Charles Pugin, who trained him to draw Gothic buildings for use as illustrations in his books. This was the key to his work as a leader of the Gothic revival movement in architecture. Pugin became an advocate of Gothic architecture, which he believed to be the true Christian form of architecture. A fine example of his work in this regard is the church of St Giles in Cheadle, Staffordshire.
After the burning of the Palace of Westminster in 1834, Pugin was employed by Sir Charles Barry to work on the new Parliament buildings in London. He converted to Roman Catholicism, but also designed and refurbished Anglican as well as Roman Catholic churches throughout the country and abroad. His views, as expressed in works such as True Principles of Christian Architecture (1841) were highly influential.
Other works include the interior of St Chad's Cathedral and Oscott College, both in Birmingham.
Pugin produced a "mediæval court" at the Great Exhibition of 1851, but died suddenly after a mental collapse.
Slightly less grand than the above - are the railway cottages at Windermere Station in Cumbria. Pugin and Peter Paul Pugin, who continued their father's architectural firm as Pugin and Pugin, including several buildings in Australasia.
Early years
Augustus Northmore Welby Pugin was the son of an émigré French architect who came to England to escape the Revolution. His father, Augustin Pugin (originally de Pugin), a French Protestant of good family, worked in the fashionable “gothick” taste of the late eighteenth century. In England he got work as designer and illustrator of books on Gothic architecture and decoration compiled by the architect John Nash. In this way the younger Pugin accumulated a wealth of detailed knowledge about the Gothic style from an early age. At his father’s death in 1832 Pugin was able to carry on the illustrated series that his father had begun.
The young Pugin received his elementary education as a day-boy at Christ's Hospital, better known as the Blue-coat School. Pugin had shown a precocious talent for design and at the age of 15 went to work for the London furniture-makers Morel & At 17 Pugin set up his own small business, supplying furniture and ornamental carved work for houses throughout the United Kingdom. During this period Pugin was also designing for Covent Garden Theatre, notably the staging for Sir Walter Scott’s “Kenilworth” adapted as a ballet.
In 1833 he was working with Sir Charles Barry on designs for King Edward’s School, Birmingham. This collaboration was followed in 1835-6 by detailed designs for Barry's entries in the competition to build the new Houses of Parliament. In the same year he built his first house, St. Marie’s Grange, Salisbury, and most importantly, converted to Catholicism.
Marriage and conversion
In 1831 he married Ann Garnett, and shortly afterwards was imprisoned for non-payment of rent. Pugin) and the youngest, Peter Paul (1851-1904). In 1835 he bought a small plot of ground at Laverstock, near Salisbury, on which he built for himself a quaint fifteenth-century-style house, St. Marie's Grange.
Pugin the man
Pugin was somewhat below the middle stature and rather thick-set, with long dark hair and grey eyes that seemed to take in everything. A voluble talker both at work and at table, he possessed a fund of anecdote and a great power of dramatic presentation; Inured to industry from childhood, as a man he would work from sunrise to midnight with extraordinary ease and rapidity. His short thick hands, his stumpy tapering fingers, with the aid of a short pencil, a paid of compasses and a carpenter's rule, performed their delicate work even under such unfavourable circumstances as sailing his lugger off the South Coast. Most of his architectural work he entrusted to an enthusiastic builder whom he had known as a workingman at Beverley.
Architecture did not take up his entire attention at The Grange; from the tower of the house Pugin would watch for ships aground off the Goodwin Sands.
Scarisbrick Hall
By 1836 Pugin had formulated his ideas on architecture, and in that year he published “Contrasts”, which was virtually his manifesto as a Catholic, Gothic, architect. In it he set out to prove that “the degraded state of the arts in this country is purely owing to the absence of Catholic feeling”, and that the Gothic style of architecture was the only one appropriate for a Christian country to adopt. “Contrasts” brought Pugin’s ideas to a wide audience, and as the new champion of Catholic architecture he was rapidly taken up by Catholic patrons including Charles Scarisbrick. In 1836 he designed the roofed stone garden seat at the north side of Scarisbrick Hall, and also the fireplace in the Great Hall. On 24 April 1837 he noted in his diary “Began Mr. Scarisbrick’s house.”
Pugin began work on Thomas Rickman’s existing west wing, to which he added the library bay window, the garden porch and north west turret, as well as external and internal decoration.
The problems of planning the building were considerable, as it was the client’s wish to preserve the old part of the Hall, and any new work had to take this into account. Pugin put skylights over the east-west corridor and a glazed turret over the point where the corridors crossed.
In 1838 Pugin proceeded to design the north elevation and this was followed by the Clock Tower in 1839. Pugin (his son), but the original appears in the carved view of the Hall on the main staircase at Scarisbrick.
Drawings of 1840 show Pugin working on the windows of the Great Hall, and designing the series of attractive and humorous carvings that ornament the bosses on its exterior. In the same year Pugin made designs for the main staircase and staircase roof.
In 1841 Pugin was engaged in designing the leaded windows of the Library.
After this there comes a gap in the dated drawings. Pugin’s work was in demand from other clients, and although he continued to work at Scarisbrick until at least 1845, the first impetus was gone and Charles Scarisbrick’s generosity seems to have been wearing thin. From 1844 onwards Pugin was involved in the tremendous task of designing the interior decoration and furniture for the new Houses of Parliament. Once asked why he kept no clerk to help him, Pugin replied: “Clerk, my dear sir, clerk, I never employ one. I should kill him in a week.” Instead, Pugin wore himself out, and died in 1852.
In such a short life it is remarkable that Pugin had managed to influence the course of architecture and design so strongly.
St. Mary's College, Oscott
In 1837 he made the acquaintance of the authorities of St. Mary's College, Oscott, where his fame as a writer had preceded him. He built both lodges and added the turret called "Pugin's night-cap" to the tower.
Palace of Westminster
Much discussion has arisen concerning the claims of Pugin to the credit of having designed the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. plans for the new buildings were invited, and those of Charles Barry (afterwards Sir Charles) received the approval of the Commissioners from among some eighty-four competitors. At the outset Barry called in Pugin (1836-37) to complete his half-drawn plans, and he further entrusted to him the working plans and the entire decoration (1837-52). Pugin's own statement on the subject is decisive: Barry's great work, he said, was immeasurably superior to any that I could at the time have produced, and had it been otherwise, the commissioners would have killed me in a twelve-month (i.e.
Writings
The influence he wielded must be ascribed as much to his vigorous writings and exquisite designs as to any particular edifice which he erected. Scarcely less important were his designs for Furniture (1835), for Iron and Brass Work (1836), and for Gold and Silver-Smiths (1836) to which should be added his Ancient Timber Houses of the XVth and XVIth Centuries (1836), and his latest architectural work on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts (1851).
Besides the above elaborately illustrated productions, many other explanatory and apologetic writings, especially his lectures delivered at Oscott (see Catholic Magazine, 1838, April and foll.) gave powerful expression to the message he had to deliver.
'Architectural genius'
In knowledge of medieval architecture and in his insight into its spirit and form, he stood above all his contemporaries. He invented now new forms of design, though he freely used the old; his instinct led him to Art as such, but to the Gothic embodiment of Art, which seemed to him the only true form of Christian architecture. His unquestioned merit is the restoration of architecture in England and the revival of the forms of medieval England, which since his day have covered the land. Queen Victoria granted his widow a pension of 100 pounds a year, and a committee of all parties founded the Pugin Travelling Scholarship (controlled by the Royal Institute of British Architects) as the most appropriate memorial of his work and a partial realization of the project which he had brought forward in his "Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England" (1843),
Pugin and the Earl of Shrewsbury
Pugin had a longterm professional relationship with John Talbot, the sixteenth Earl of Shrewsbury. It was an interesting combination of minds for both architect and patron were Roman Catholic converts: Pugin, a wealthy gentleman architect from the upper middle class, and Talbot, the richest noble in the land.
Pugin’s God-given genius fused with the Catholic fervour and finance of the Talbots peppered Staffordshire with churches, convents and schools of medieval splendour and magnificence. Pugin, the medieval dreamer and set designer of Victorian Gothic found in John Talbot not only a friend but also a collaborator. The building programme was certainly led by Talbot as patron, with Pugin as his master-craftsman.
The list of buildings erected by the Talbot–Pugin partnership in Staffordshire during the twelve years between 1836 and 1848 is formidable: St Mary’s, Uttoxeter;
Pugin and Australia
The first Catholic bishop of New South Wales, Australia, John Bede Polding, met Pugin and was present when St Chad's Cathedral in Birmingham and St Giles Church, Cheadle were officially opened. Polding persuaded Pugin to design a series of churches for him. Although a number of churches do not survive, in particular none in Sydney, St Francis Xavier's in Berrima, New South Wales is regarded as a fine example of a Pugin church. Pugin's legacy in Australia, is particularly of the idea of what a church should look like:
Pugin's notion was that Gothic was Christian and Christian was Gothic, ... It became the way people built churches and perceived churches should be. Even today if you ask someone what a church should look like, they'll describe a Gothic building with pointed windows and arches. Right across Australia, from outback towns with tiny churches made out of corrugated iron with a little pointed door and pointed windows, to our very greatest cathedrals, you have buildings which are directly related to Pugin's ideas.
After his death A.W.Pugin's two sons; Pugin and Peter Paul Pugin, continued operating their father's architectural firm under the name Pugin and Pugin. This work includes most of the "Pugin" buildings in Australia and New Zealand.
Later years
During this period he did much of his best work in writing, teaching, and structural design. but he had his compensation in the gift from Pius IX of a splendid gold medal as a token of approval, which gratified Pugin more than any event in his life. In the meantime he had removed from Laverstock, and after a temporary residence at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea (1841), he took up his residence at Ramsgate, living first with his aunt, Miss Selina Welby, who made him her heir, and then in the house called St. Augustine's Grange, which, together with a church, he had built for himself.
Under a presentiment of approaching death, of which he had an unusual fear, he went into retreat in 1851, and prepared himself by prayer and self-denial for the end.
A.W.N. Pugin died, at the age of 40, on 14 September 1852 as a result, not of insanity, but probably of the effects of mercury poisoning. Rosemary Hill)
Pugin's legacy extends far beyond his own architectural designs.
User Comments Add a comment…