Who is pugin

In fact the first monks to eventually move into the Abbey belonged to the Subiaco Order of Saint Benedict. One of the most striking features of the Grange is the tower with the very tall flagpole.

From the tower Pugin had a long view of the shipping passing through the English Channel and was in the habit of wearing a trim naval jacket of the kind affected by sea captains of the time. This was still the epoch of sail on the sea, and of horse and carriage on land: the steam age was only just beginning to impinge on east Kent and the first railway did not come to Ramsgate until a little later. The Grange and Abbey can certainly be situated in the larger annals of the several Gothic Revivals despite differences, Ruskin could never have been the same without Pugin but they are also poignant memorials of an extraordinary personality who marked his age.

In those days the house was somewhat run down but it was full of atmosphere it has since been restored and managed by the Landmark Trust. The Channel winds were always howling around the towers, and the sea was part of our daily experience. One of the upstairs rooms looked out towards Pegwell Bay and I was totally aware of the arrival of St Augustine, of the Danes, even probably of Julius Caesar, on that flat Kent coastline.

As for the Abbey Church, it marked me for life. The exteriors were grim, especially in the winter, but the interiors were glowing with candles, gold leaf, ornament and conviviality.

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We use cookies to personalize and improve your experience on our site. Visit our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to learn more. You can opt out of some cookies by adjusting your browser settings. However, she died in childbirth in , leaving Pugin with a daughter. Just a year later Pugin married again, this time to Louisa Burton, with whom he had another five children.

Louisa died in and Pugin married for a third time, to Jane Knill, with whom he had two more children. In the meantime Pugin converted to Roman Catholicism, a conversion which left him filled with a fervent desire to express his faith through architecture.

He came to regard the period of the "Second Pointed Period" as it was called in the Victorian age , as the apex of human history, when people expressed their faith through the creative arts.

He abhorred the work of James Wyatt and his early 19th century contemporaries, who merely copied the form of Gothic style, but used inferior materials or supported their work with iron. In support of his arguments in favour of authentic Gothic, Pugin produced his master work, Contrasts, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the 14th and 15th centuries and Similar buildings of the Present Day.

Showing a Decay of Taste Pugin followed Contrasts with other books, developing his arguments in favour of Gothic purity. The success of Contrasts and his subsequent works brought Pugin a number of architectural commissions, notably at Southwark Cathedral. Other churches where Pugin had a hand in design - or redesign - include St.

Marie , Derby, and St. Oswald , Liverpool. Pugin was involved in more than ecclesiastical architecture. He designed ornamental and decorative architectural details as diverse as wallpaper, tiles, furniture, stained glass, and gargoyles. One building stands above all others as a testament to Pugin's influence, however. The Palace of Westminster i.

The Houses of Parliament in London, was built under the direction of Sir Charles Barry, but Pugin was responsible for the every aspect of the interiors, as well as for creating working drawings of all the exterior details. In Pugin built a home for himself in Ramsgate, Kent, overlooking the sea. From the library of this rather severe house, called The Grange, Pugin did most of his work. If there was to be a new seat of government, it should mark a new start for architecture as well as parliament.

As the Morning Herald put it: "This time the British people intend to have the choosing of the architects. At the time, however, despite his claims to architectural omniscience, Pugin was little more than a draughtsman. One of his more lucrative jobs had been to provide the decorative details for Barry's winning Westminster design, and he was to return to work on the Palace from time to time for the rest of his life.

Over the years he designed some of its most successful elements, including the interior of the House of Lords. Now, however, the success of Pugin's manifesto launched him as an architect in his own right, and he set about rebuilding Britain as a Gothic Catholic Christendom. It was a Quixotic crusade, but one in which he came closer to success than might ever have been expected. By the time Pugin was 30, he had built 22 churches, three cathedrals, three convents, half a dozen houses, several schools and a Cistercian monastery.

He carried the battle into the heart of the industrial cities, the '"inexhaustible mines of bad taste" at Birmingham and Sheffield, infested with "Greek buildings, smoking chimnies, radicals and dissenters". St Chad 's, his Birmingham church, built amid the squalor of the gunmakers' quarter, became England's first cathedral since Wren's St Paul's.

At the laying of the foundation stone, Pugin announced that he would not rest until the cathedral bells "drowned out the steam whistle and the proving of the gun barrels". Politically he might best be described as conservative radical. He wanted to reform society by returning it to a benign hierarchy, an idealised medievalism, in which each class could look upwards for support, and would accept responsibility for those below them.

It was the indifference of the modern city that appalled him. In he published a second edition of Contrasts , to which he added two new plates that developed the argument beyond individual buildings, to present a whole moral panorama. One showed "contrasted cities", the other "contrasted residences for the poor".

In the first, the medieval city, with its graceful spires and safe, defensive walls, sat beside its modern equivalent, the walls broken down, the spires ruinous and the horizon dominated by kilns and factories. Its point was simple enough: that we build most solidly in the areas of life in which we invest most of ourselves.

The contrasted residences of the poor made a subtler case for the relationship between architecture and ideas. Here Pugin compared a monastic foundation of the Middle Ages, where monks fed and clothed the needy, grew food in the gardens — and in the fullness of time gave the dead a decent burial — with a panopticon workhouse where the poor were beaten, half starved and sent off after death for dissection. Each structure was the built expression of a particular view of humanity: Christianity versus Utilitarianism.

Again he hit home. The workhouses, created under the New Poor Law, troubled many Victorian consciences.