A.W.N. Pugin's "True Principles" Gothic Furniture: Evolutionary, Revolutionary, Reactionary?

Abstract

First paragraph: However much we may be indebted to those ancient supporters of Pointed Architecture who, faithfully adhering to its traditions at a period when the style fell into general disuse, strove earnestly, and in some instances ably, to preserve its character; whatever value in the cause which we may attach to the crude and isolated examples of Gothic which belong to the eighteenth century, or to the eforts of such men as Nash and Wyatt, there can be little doubt that the revival of Mediæval design received its chief impulse in our own day from the energy and talents of one architect whose name marks an epoch in the history of British art, which, while art exists at all, can never be forgotten […] Augustus Northmore Welby Pugin.1 As the above passage indicates, Charles Locke Eastlake (1833-1906) considered A.W.N. Pugin (1812-1852) to be the most important architect for the advancement of the Gothic Revival in nineteenth-century Britain. He and Charles Barry (1795-1860) designed and executed the most prestigious and visible Gothic Revival commission of the century - the Palace of Westminster (1840-1860) - and Pugin’s tracts, including Contrasts (1836 and 1841) and Te True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), promoted new research and manifesto-like interpretations of Gothic architecture and design. Subsequent authors have shared Eastlake’s perspective, and established collectively Pugin as the pre-eminent exponent and reformer of the Gothic Revival. Paul Atterbury, for example, states that Pugin’s Contrasts (1836) was “a revolutionary book whose outspoken text and polemical illustrations laid down for the frst time the design principles that were to establish the genuinely structural and medievally based Gothic, as opposed to the decorative and fanciful Gothic, as the primary style of the nineteenth century”.2  1 Eastlake, A History of the Gothic Revival, 145.  2 Atterbury, A.W.N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival, 9