A month shy of his 40th birthday, A W N Pugin finished designing the iconic clock tower that would become known as Big Ben. "I am the whole machinery of the clock," he wrote, meaning that he was responsible for it. It is a slip of the pen that retrospectively seems to betray the severe mental strain he was struggling under. He was being burdened with work by the chief architect of the new Palace of Westminster, Charles Barry, whose background in classical styles of building meant that he could do no more than bluff in the complicated vocabulary of Gothic. Four months later, Pugin was confined to Bedlam; seven months later, he was dead. It is fitting that he should have glimpsed himself as "the whole machinery" of the new parliamentary complex, though. Ever since two rival architects had commissioned drawings from him as they jostled for the contract in 1835, he had been the frantic though fragile engine driving the reconstruction of parliament. He had been consulted on many of the exterior features of the building and had designed interior fittings that ranged from the monarch's throne to the clerks' umbrella stands. In 1847, however, he was absent from both the opening of the House of Lords and from the press reports that celebrated the new building.
This anonymity was in keeping with Pugin's genius. Although there is no question that he suffered financially from merely "assisting" Barry at Westminster, he tended to thrive as an outsider at a time when the practice of architecture was becoming increasingly professionalised. He cherished the status of an artist and cultivated his personal eccentricity accordingly, dressing in home-made nautical garb and attempting to build "a romantic Catholic paradise in the middle of an expanding seaside resort" for his Ramsgate home. He was an integral part of and decisively apart from his age. Rosemary Hill's superb new biography traces the creative frictions between Pugin and his early Victorian contemporaries. With meticulous research and persistent insight, she has reconstructed the stubborn Romantic vision of the extraordinary character who did more than anybody to shape the Gothic townscapes of Victorian Britain.
One of the many pleasures of this book is Hill's facility with the religious debates (and debacles) of the period. She steers through the personal and doctrinal divisions among the English Catholics and crypto-Catholics to illustrate how Pugin worked for himself and for his own unique set of Catholic principles. He was attracted to the theatricality of church ritual as it seemed to chime with his tendency towards hyperbole: he once told his daughter that he had designed a cathedral for her birthday. This intensely personal religion informed his working habits. He baulked at compromise and fretted about collaboration. He was fastidious, controlling and frequently unrealistic. He threw tantrums when Catholic patrons queried his preference for rood screens or plain chant. As other architects rapidly expanded their practices, Pugin reluctantly employed a solitary assistant. The frontispiece of his True Principles of Pointed Architecture etches him working in calm isolation, a medieval humanist kept company by architectural spoils and assorted Catholic bric-a-brac.
Pugin was consistently frustrated by the financial and temporal constraints of translating his ground plans and elevations into bricks and mortar. He was most satisfied with his imaginary constructions, the ideal buildings that he incubated in the cloistered recesses of his mind. "I have lived to see every building on which I have set my heart either upset or ruined," he wrote, as the disappointments of the material world fostered his unremitting mental and geographical restlessness. Although he married three times and built two houses for himself, he was happiest when making frenetic tours of the Continent or his own building sites, thus avoiding the obligations of the Victorian home.
On one of those drawing tours, Pugin wrote that he would "return home quite rich in new/old devices". His version of the Gothic was at once new and old. He continued the architectural surveys that his father had begun, and restored the complexity of Gothic architecture in its local and historical variety. By the mid-1830s, Hill argues, "almost everyone with an informed interest in Gothic architecture saw it, knowingly or not, through the eyes of the Pugin family". Where the first proponents of the Gothic revival had indulged in liberal confections of pointed arches and other approximated features, Pugin approached even the finest details of tracery with the careful integrity of an antiquarian. His sincerity was one of his greatest innovations.
God's Architect illuminates the Janus-faced ambition of Pugin's life and work, the atavistic tug towards a comprehensive medievalism that he believed would instal a bright new era of English Catholicism. In the event, it was the medievalist design principle that struck a chord with the Victorian public; Pugin's colourful medieval court at the Great Exhibition in 1851 must have clashed prominently with the engineering feats of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, but it was immensely popular and cemented his reputation as a designer. It has been more difficult to assess his architectural legacy, as so many of the buildings he worked on have been destroyed, damaged or altered since his death. Bishop's House in Birmingham made way for a ring road in 1959; Pugin would no doubt have registered the bitter irony as a unique masterpiece was demolished by town planners.
Hill writes with great sympathy about space and the individual merits of Pugin's cathedrals, churches and domestic experiments. Her lucid prose succeeds in evoking even those buildings that have been disfigured by bombs or insensitive renovation projects. She has an eye for colour that restores a vivid tone to the lively architectural debates of the period: in Nash's Brighton Pavilion, the Prince Regent and guests were accustomed to sitting down "in a building that looked like a giant pudding, to enjoy puddings that looked like little buildings"; while Pugin's house at Ramsgate is invested with "something of the character of a pirate's lair". That house has been brilliantly restored by the Landmark Trust and was reopened last year. It has now been joined, in the form of Hill's book, by another magnificent monument to the architect who was so unjustly forgotten during his own lifetime.
