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The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture
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88 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1895
About the author
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin
80 books8 followersAugustus Welby Northmore Pugin was an English architect, designer, artist and critic, chiefly remembered for his pioneering role in the Gothic Revival style; his work culminated in the interior design of the Palace of Westminster. Pugin designed many churches in England, and some in Ireland and Australia. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus...]
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December 18, 2024
About a third of this I thought was rubbish, about a third I did not understand, and another third I found actually thought-provoking; I’ll dwell on the last third for a bit. One of the ideas Pugin keeps returning to is that building according to “true principles” involves beautifying the useful or necessary. This approach is opposed to concealing necessity and to fabricating ornament. There are various ways in which Pugin expresses this thought: by celebrating “the great principle of decorating utility” and “rendering the useful a vehicle for the beautiful”; by claiming that “[p]ointed architecture does not conceal her construction, but beautifies it,” whereas “classic architecture seeks to conceal instead of decorating”; and by denouncing buildings that “construct [their] ornament instead of confining it to the enrichment of [their] construction,” to name some. I’m going to set aside the critique of classical architecture, because it isn’t evidenced enough to convince me that it isn’t specious. I’m also skeptical of the extension of Pugin’s claim to all of medieval design (this happens in the book) when another premise of his is that construction in the Gothic style was ennobled by religious – that is, Catholic – faith, so let’s say the idea applies to the design of ecclesiastical buildings and objects in the middle ages, for the sake of whatever precision can be had. Within that scope, this idea that there was a tendency almost to embrace the materials that were being worked, to turn necessity or, as Pugin puts it at one point, irregularity to good account, and to avoid treating beauty in isolation is both a potent and a legitimate one. Pugin does provide some evidence of this, which I found illuminating – in his cross-section of the dome of St. Paul’s, for instance, which shows the internal structure obscured where it would be exposed in medieval building, and in his observation that hinges, locks, and rivets would be profusely decorated things centuries ago. He explains and illustrates how it was that medieval objects manifested a kind of authenticity; they didn’t just let it all hang loose, so to speak: they owned it. This isn’t quite the same thing, but a partial analogue would be botching a stroke in a painting and deciding whether to paint over it or integrate it into the design: the Christian architect would choose the latter course, and this would attest to his greater artistic prowess. Pugin makes the point overtly, and unsurprisingly, that the modern artisan has either ignorance or ineptitude to show for centuries of evolution in his trade, so instrumentalized and artless has that craft become.
The more I consider it, the further this idea of Pugin’s unfolds itself in various directions. There’s quite a lot wrapped up in his claim about beautifying the useful. It smacks strongly of William Morris, doesn’t it, and the broader Arts & Crafts movement of which he was (co-)originator. There is a whole literature of the period, and entirely in keeping with a Marxist/Socialist engagement with labor (thinking outside the Victorian context here), that exposes and critiques the alienation of art from handcraft. This is super interesting as an argument unto itself, because it suggests that at some point there was no such thing as high art or art for its own sake, so interlocked were artistry and artisanry, and then there came a point when beauty became this separate, fetishized, rarified [read: elitist] thing [read: commodity]. Before, beauty and usefulness were fused, and what was exalted was also popular because it was partaken of by all in the name of religion. The beginning of the end was when beauty became engraftable, when show split off from substance, and if you ask someone like Pugin, Protestantism (AKA paganism) is to blame, whereas someone like Ruskin or Morris would malign industrialization.
The other point arising from Pugin’s overarching statement is the opposition of authenticity to semblance. This is also super interesting as there is a philosophical literature in the 1800s (and after) tugging at this thread. This one’s a bit trickier to unravel. Maybe it owes itself to eighteenth-century notions of returning to nature and exploding the cant of civilized society (all under the influence of Enlightenment, curiously enough), but I am thinking more along religious/Marxist lines again, and to people like Carlyle and Newman, in whose writing you find their historical moment indicted for worshipping materiality. The industrial, increasingly irreligious world has lost touch with spirit, only the outward shell of which remains, or else it has seen the intrinsic worth of objects eclipsed by their symbolic value in the marketplace. The really interesting point here, in a string of really interesting points, is that use has two meanings: either it’s aligned with the genuine, uncorrupted, essential, or it can be associated with the very bugbear of reactionary thinkers appropriated by progressivism, utility. And in Pugin, you find that what the Victorian-era metalworker, say, has become expertly good at is supplying the demand for useful objects: he’s brought usefulness to a kind of fever pitch, you could say. I just find it curious that it’s this, as it were, amplification of utility that signifies an impoverishment of use for people like Pugin, because it reifies use, in a way. Paradoxically enough, use becomes an end in itself even as it doesn’t, even as Utilitarianism tends in the direction of making things expendable, perishable (insofar as it subordinates means to ends). To say that Utilitarianism treats things as immaterial may very well send my poor brain into overdrive as it tries to figure this out.
Staying on the subject of things and their uses, it occurs to me that there is another opposition contained within Pugin’s statement, although not articulated in his book, and that is between production and consumption. Actually, it’s not even an opposition – or rather, for the likes of Pugin, the point is that production and consumption, like high art and handcraft, beauty and usefulness, being and appearance, are inseparable until estranged from each other, and modernity has pulled them apart. I think this account is the common denominator of the various critiques named above, in fact, and I’ll explain why it isn’t anachronistic (i.e., Marxist) of me to locate it, albeit on mute, in Pugin. It might be a conjectural leap, but so is practically everything Pugin wrote that I’ve read (earmarking this point for later), and it certainly isn’t as ideologically inflected.
So I want to focus on this question of material. I’m interested in the nature of engagement with matter – the attitude to it as fodder, of sorts, for beautiful and useful and hallowed objects, and then the attitude to those. Because the question arises as to why people would have bothered to take such pains with building and decorating centuries ago, when certainly these processes would have taken more labor and more time than they did by Pugin’s day. Pugin would probably say that it had to do with glorifying God, at least in the religious context to which I’ve delimited his discussion, because the grandeur of the object should be commensurate with its intended use, and there could be no higher purpose than the one church objects/structures were meant to serve. Pugin misses no opportunity to remind us that everything to do with church architecture is vested with symbolic value, including the elongation characteristic of pointed arches and lofty spires (which directs the viewer’s gaze upward and mirrors the ascension). So this creates a kind of double signification of churchly objects, one symbolic and the other material, and both evocative of awe and magnificence. This is in line with the defense of the opulence of Catholic and Orthodox ritual as fitting for worship, so far as I can tell: the church and its contents are supposed to be great because of what they stand for. What interests me about this is that this approach seems particularly prone to the reification of what is material. And actually, it doesn’t even seem so, but it was so on the evidence of the Reformation, which was partly aimed at curbing material excesses. Pursuing this idea, it is possible to conceive of someone who witnesses the tokens of religious worship and falls in with it absent true belief. You can easily imagine the effect a reliquary exquisitely wrought in gold, studded with gemstones, etc. would have on the likes of a medieval farmhand: it would leave him in raptures, probably, and this was what religion was supposed to do, more or less. (I presume a farmhand would have seen a reliquary at some point? Example chosen for effect.) So it would be possible to conceive of a slippage, ready enough, between religious worship and object worship, of a feeling of awe not only inspired, but encompassed, by material things. This lands us, paradoxically, in the very domain of counterfeit and dissembling that Pugin campaigned to avoid.
There is another explanation that suggests itself to me, though, unarticulated by Pugin, for the scale and the prestige of the workmanship apparent in medieval design. That I would extend this tradition far into the pre-industrial period may account for Pugin’s silence; post Reformation is circa disaster for him. Could there be something about the relative rarity of materials, the difficulty of their extraction, the time-intensiveness of sowing, harvesting, processing, preserving, the ingenuity required for shaping and combining them into something new or something different – could these factors have lent a hand to the practice of activating every unit of potential that a raw material had? It seems to me eminently plausible that, the less you have, the more you try to make of it, and the harder you come by something, the likelier you are to make it last. Mechanizing and fabricating the processes involved in turning something raw into something finished speed up and simplify those processes and multiply the products generated. This is generally called progress and considered a good thing, whereas it should be a neutral thing, and it does encourage treating objects with less care, because they can be more easily replaced. There is another reason for the unsustainability of objects and their uses once mechanical or artificial factors are introduced into productive processes, and that has to do with the more Marxist-sounding cleft between the thing that is wrought and the thing that is consumed. The activity of turning something into what is usable is offloaded, whether to a machine or to a person whose labor is too remote, spatially or epistemically, to be meaningfully engaged with. So those means of production are more easily forgotten about or omitted from the experience of consumption; the consumer and producer, a la Marx, drift apart. This, too, encourages taking what is consumed for granted, because the thing may as well have come into being fully formed, for all the consumer knows and appreciates about its method of creation.
I don’t find it easy to live in a world dominated by the attitudes that Pugin discountenances – dominated even more than in his day. On the contrary, I find it hard, even as these attitudes optimize efficacy and convenience. Those are the cardinal virtues of contemporary society, but they are not mine. I don’t really know what to do with that awareness.
I want to come back, though, to my earmark at conjectural thinking. It seemed to me kind of all over this book, and maybe I’m being skeptical because there are no sources, but on the other hand, there are no sources. (That the sources used in Contrasts comprised the bulk of the book in an appendix is a thorny matter in a different way.) Pugin does stick more or less strictly to the architectural/structural domain, without straying too far afield into historical mores and manners, but because I’ve brought up attitudes, I want to linger for a bit on that subject. I’ve suggested that what Pugin identifies as the impulse to adorn and, thereby, embrace necessity in medieval design could have been motivated by an avoidance of wastefulness, by an appreciation not only of the final causes bringing objects into being, but also of their material causes. What I’ve done in saying so was made an assumption about the attitude held by the average person engaging with beautiful-cum-useful objects centuries ago, and based on the logic of my reasoning, this assumption could notionally extend to the average person centuries ago, without distinction. The evidence I used for my inference was the objects that remain from that time and some casual knowledge of productive processes back then. So I based my suggestion on the evidence of extant things, and although I don’t think my impression of the time- and labor-intensiveness of manufacture, in the sense of hand-making, is any kind of revisionist view, I am missing access to those things that have not survived from the period. I am also, it must be said, inferring a mindset, which is an abstract thing, from the material realm by attempting to understand what people thought on the basis of what they made and how they made it. That can only take me so far.
So this is where, if I’m really trying to get closer into the minds of those who came before me by hundreds of years, I might consult the written records they left of their ideas. This can involve the study of formal, controlled expression – like philosophical writing, which adheres to conventions of genre and has for its objective the examination of ideas – or more colloquial, spontaneous formats like diaries and correspondence. The trouble here is that, depending on the period, I might not have so much of the latter to work with at all, and the objection is never tardy in academic circles that written records represent the attitudes of an elite social minority right up until, and even into, Pugin’s own century.
I think a few things can be said at this juncture. One is to push back a bit at this particular critique of intellectual history as a bit too hasty. Yes, it was only the educated minority who produced much of our philosophical tradition, but it was also largely this minority who held social power and determined or actuated the social structures within which many more people operated. It was also the legacy of this minority that influenced succeeding generations of minorities with the same sway. That an idea is not present on a popular scale – that it does not secure mass appeal, in other words – does not discount it as dynamic and influential.
So much for the academic critique, which, as you could probably tell, somewhat annoys me. Now for the rest of what I had to say about the problems with written evidence. In the first place, different periods come with different writing conventions, so that, for example, what could afford an intimate look into an author’s mental landscape in the twentieth century would be a token of participation in an established form in the eighteenth; letters could be conceived as public-facing documents in the 1700s in a way that they wouldn’t be two centuries later. This makes it important to bring period-specific knowledge to the study of any historical archive, and knowledge takes energy, application, and time to amass, especially if it is intended for constructive uses. Furthermore, writing comes with personal motives that may distort the written record silently, or else duplicitously, if false motives are declared. Even writing of a definitively private character has its weaknesses as a testament to the ideas of its authors. Again, any conclusion drawn on its basis has to reckon with the gaping omission of what went unrecorded, and this is a stumbling-block the size of a boulder for the purposes of generalization, even were the author supremely transparent about what was said.
I don’t say all this to negate the possibility of understanding the assumptions people had in the past. But I do maintain that it is very hard to be able to understand them, that this understanding can never be perfect or complete, and that any claim about those assumptions can never have more than a moderate, conditional kind of strength. What’s more, I think any claim about standard assumptions, whether it refers to past or present ones, is always incapable of being proven, not only because it’s impossible to get inside someone else’s head, but also because generalization is inherently a sloppy exercise: it must leave things out for the sake of pattern. Not only do I personally hold that people are especially entitled to an appreciation of singularity: I think it’s objectively obvious that the actions from which assumptions can ostensibly be derived are so context-dependent as sometimes to belie those assumptions. So when I ventured to describe the prevailing attitude of my own historical moment, I did so with greater confidence than I felt in pronouncing on the past, but still in the knowledge that I am myself a challenge to a generalizing maneuver, an exception that somewhat resents being elided. Were it said, 200 years from now, that the twenty-first century was a wasteful period handicapped by technological reliance, I would probably catch myself simultaneously agreeing and feeling guilty for the tendentious thinking I am half-willing to retract even now as subjectively upheld. Because claims about other people are some of the least conformable to objective measures of truth.
[Oops! Ran out of characters. Review continued in comment.]
The more I consider it, the further this idea of Pugin’s unfolds itself in various directions. There’s quite a lot wrapped up in his claim about beautifying the useful. It smacks strongly of William Morris, doesn’t it, and the broader Arts & Crafts movement of which he was (co-)originator. There is a whole literature of the period, and entirely in keeping with a Marxist/Socialist engagement with labor (thinking outside the Victorian context here), that exposes and critiques the alienation of art from handcraft. This is super interesting as an argument unto itself, because it suggests that at some point there was no such thing as high art or art for its own sake, so interlocked were artistry and artisanry, and then there came a point when beauty became this separate, fetishized, rarified [read: elitist] thing [read: commodity]. Before, beauty and usefulness were fused, and what was exalted was also popular because it was partaken of by all in the name of religion. The beginning of the end was when beauty became engraftable, when show split off from substance, and if you ask someone like Pugin, Protestantism (AKA paganism) is to blame, whereas someone like Ruskin or Morris would malign industrialization.
The other point arising from Pugin’s overarching statement is the opposition of authenticity to semblance. This is also super interesting as there is a philosophical literature in the 1800s (and after) tugging at this thread. This one’s a bit trickier to unravel. Maybe it owes itself to eighteenth-century notions of returning to nature and exploding the cant of civilized society (all under the influence of Enlightenment, curiously enough), but I am thinking more along religious/Marxist lines again, and to people like Carlyle and Newman, in whose writing you find their historical moment indicted for worshipping materiality. The industrial, increasingly irreligious world has lost touch with spirit, only the outward shell of which remains, or else it has seen the intrinsic worth of objects eclipsed by their symbolic value in the marketplace. The really interesting point here, in a string of really interesting points, is that use has two meanings: either it’s aligned with the genuine, uncorrupted, essential, or it can be associated with the very bugbear of reactionary thinkers appropriated by progressivism, utility. And in Pugin, you find that what the Victorian-era metalworker, say, has become expertly good at is supplying the demand for useful objects: he’s brought usefulness to a kind of fever pitch, you could say. I just find it curious that it’s this, as it were, amplification of utility that signifies an impoverishment of use for people like Pugin, because it reifies use, in a way. Paradoxically enough, use becomes an end in itself even as it doesn’t, even as Utilitarianism tends in the direction of making things expendable, perishable (insofar as it subordinates means to ends). To say that Utilitarianism treats things as immaterial may very well send my poor brain into overdrive as it tries to figure this out.
Staying on the subject of things and their uses, it occurs to me that there is another opposition contained within Pugin’s statement, although not articulated in his book, and that is between production and consumption. Actually, it’s not even an opposition – or rather, for the likes of Pugin, the point is that production and consumption, like high art and handcraft, beauty and usefulness, being and appearance, are inseparable until estranged from each other, and modernity has pulled them apart. I think this account is the common denominator of the various critiques named above, in fact, and I’ll explain why it isn’t anachronistic (i.e., Marxist) of me to locate it, albeit on mute, in Pugin. It might be a conjectural leap, but so is practically everything Pugin wrote that I’ve read (earmarking this point for later), and it certainly isn’t as ideologically inflected.
So I want to focus on this question of material. I’m interested in the nature of engagement with matter – the attitude to it as fodder, of sorts, for beautiful and useful and hallowed objects, and then the attitude to those. Because the question arises as to why people would have bothered to take such pains with building and decorating centuries ago, when certainly these processes would have taken more labor and more time than they did by Pugin’s day. Pugin would probably say that it had to do with glorifying God, at least in the religious context to which I’ve delimited his discussion, because the grandeur of the object should be commensurate with its intended use, and there could be no higher purpose than the one church objects/structures were meant to serve. Pugin misses no opportunity to remind us that everything to do with church architecture is vested with symbolic value, including the elongation characteristic of pointed arches and lofty spires (which directs the viewer’s gaze upward and mirrors the ascension). So this creates a kind of double signification of churchly objects, one symbolic and the other material, and both evocative of awe and magnificence. This is in line with the defense of the opulence of Catholic and Orthodox ritual as fitting for worship, so far as I can tell: the church and its contents are supposed to be great because of what they stand for. What interests me about this is that this approach seems particularly prone to the reification of what is material. And actually, it doesn’t even seem so, but it was so on the evidence of the Reformation, which was partly aimed at curbing material excesses. Pursuing this idea, it is possible to conceive of someone who witnesses the tokens of religious worship and falls in with it absent true belief. You can easily imagine the effect a reliquary exquisitely wrought in gold, studded with gemstones, etc. would have on the likes of a medieval farmhand: it would leave him in raptures, probably, and this was what religion was supposed to do, more or less. (I presume a farmhand would have seen a reliquary at some point? Example chosen for effect.) So it would be possible to conceive of a slippage, ready enough, between religious worship and object worship, of a feeling of awe not only inspired, but encompassed, by material things. This lands us, paradoxically, in the very domain of counterfeit and dissembling that Pugin campaigned to avoid.
There is another explanation that suggests itself to me, though, unarticulated by Pugin, for the scale and the prestige of the workmanship apparent in medieval design. That I would extend this tradition far into the pre-industrial period may account for Pugin’s silence; post Reformation is circa disaster for him. Could there be something about the relative rarity of materials, the difficulty of their extraction, the time-intensiveness of sowing, harvesting, processing, preserving, the ingenuity required for shaping and combining them into something new or something different – could these factors have lent a hand to the practice of activating every unit of potential that a raw material had? It seems to me eminently plausible that, the less you have, the more you try to make of it, and the harder you come by something, the likelier you are to make it last. Mechanizing and fabricating the processes involved in turning something raw into something finished speed up and simplify those processes and multiply the products generated. This is generally called progress and considered a good thing, whereas it should be a neutral thing, and it does encourage treating objects with less care, because they can be more easily replaced. There is another reason for the unsustainability of objects and their uses once mechanical or artificial factors are introduced into productive processes, and that has to do with the more Marxist-sounding cleft between the thing that is wrought and the thing that is consumed. The activity of turning something into what is usable is offloaded, whether to a machine or to a person whose labor is too remote, spatially or epistemically, to be meaningfully engaged with. So those means of production are more easily forgotten about or omitted from the experience of consumption; the consumer and producer, a la Marx, drift apart. This, too, encourages taking what is consumed for granted, because the thing may as well have come into being fully formed, for all the consumer knows and appreciates about its method of creation.
I don’t find it easy to live in a world dominated by the attitudes that Pugin discountenances – dominated even more than in his day. On the contrary, I find it hard, even as these attitudes optimize efficacy and convenience. Those are the cardinal virtues of contemporary society, but they are not mine. I don’t really know what to do with that awareness.
I want to come back, though, to my earmark at conjectural thinking. It seemed to me kind of all over this book, and maybe I’m being skeptical because there are no sources, but on the other hand, there are no sources. (That the sources used in Contrasts comprised the bulk of the book in an appendix is a thorny matter in a different way.) Pugin does stick more or less strictly to the architectural/structural domain, without straying too far afield into historical mores and manners, but because I’ve brought up attitudes, I want to linger for a bit on that subject. I’ve suggested that what Pugin identifies as the impulse to adorn and, thereby, embrace necessity in medieval design could have been motivated by an avoidance of wastefulness, by an appreciation not only of the final causes bringing objects into being, but also of their material causes. What I’ve done in saying so was made an assumption about the attitude held by the average person engaging with beautiful-cum-useful objects centuries ago, and based on the logic of my reasoning, this assumption could notionally extend to the average person centuries ago, without distinction. The evidence I used for my inference was the objects that remain from that time and some casual knowledge of productive processes back then. So I based my suggestion on the evidence of extant things, and although I don’t think my impression of the time- and labor-intensiveness of manufacture, in the sense of hand-making, is any kind of revisionist view, I am missing access to those things that have not survived from the period. I am also, it must be said, inferring a mindset, which is an abstract thing, from the material realm by attempting to understand what people thought on the basis of what they made and how they made it. That can only take me so far.
So this is where, if I’m really trying to get closer into the minds of those who came before me by hundreds of years, I might consult the written records they left of their ideas. This can involve the study of formal, controlled expression – like philosophical writing, which adheres to conventions of genre and has for its objective the examination of ideas – or more colloquial, spontaneous formats like diaries and correspondence. The trouble here is that, depending on the period, I might not have so much of the latter to work with at all, and the objection is never tardy in academic circles that written records represent the attitudes of an elite social minority right up until, and even into, Pugin’s own century.
I think a few things can be said at this juncture. One is to push back a bit at this particular critique of intellectual history as a bit too hasty. Yes, it was only the educated minority who produced much of our philosophical tradition, but it was also largely this minority who held social power and determined or actuated the social structures within which many more people operated. It was also the legacy of this minority that influenced succeeding generations of minorities with the same sway. That an idea is not present on a popular scale – that it does not secure mass appeal, in other words – does not discount it as dynamic and influential.
So much for the academic critique, which, as you could probably tell, somewhat annoys me. Now for the rest of what I had to say about the problems with written evidence. In the first place, different periods come with different writing conventions, so that, for example, what could afford an intimate look into an author’s mental landscape in the twentieth century would be a token of participation in an established form in the eighteenth; letters could be conceived as public-facing documents in the 1700s in a way that they wouldn’t be two centuries later. This makes it important to bring period-specific knowledge to the study of any historical archive, and knowledge takes energy, application, and time to amass, especially if it is intended for constructive uses. Furthermore, writing comes with personal motives that may distort the written record silently, or else duplicitously, if false motives are declared. Even writing of a definitively private character has its weaknesses as a testament to the ideas of its authors. Again, any conclusion drawn on its basis has to reckon with the gaping omission of what went unrecorded, and this is a stumbling-block the size of a boulder for the purposes of generalization, even were the author supremely transparent about what was said.
I don’t say all this to negate the possibility of understanding the assumptions people had in the past. But I do maintain that it is very hard to be able to understand them, that this understanding can never be perfect or complete, and that any claim about those assumptions can never have more than a moderate, conditional kind of strength. What’s more, I think any claim about standard assumptions, whether it refers to past or present ones, is always incapable of being proven, not only because it’s impossible to get inside someone else’s head, but also because generalization is inherently a sloppy exercise: it must leave things out for the sake of pattern. Not only do I personally hold that people are especially entitled to an appreciation of singularity: I think it’s objectively obvious that the actions from which assumptions can ostensibly be derived are so context-dependent as sometimes to belie those assumptions. So when I ventured to describe the prevailing attitude of my own historical moment, I did so with greater confidence than I felt in pronouncing on the past, but still in the knowledge that I am myself a challenge to a generalizing maneuver, an exception that somewhat resents being elided. Were it said, 200 years from now, that the twenty-first century was a wasteful period handicapped by technological reliance, I would probably catch myself simultaneously agreeing and feeling guilty for the tendentious thinking I am half-willing to retract even now as subjectively upheld. Because claims about other people are some of the least conformable to objective measures of truth.
[Oops! Ran out of characters. Review continued in comment.]
December 6, 2023
Provides an good understanding of how Gothic ornamentation derives from functional forms. Really interesting, even if you don't like Gothic architecture. The conflict of imitators of something vs. those with an understanding of the subject comes up, and he disdains overly-ornamental Gothick that the Victorians have been later criticised for.
Like John Ruskin, and other Victorian authors it is definitely opinionated. I certainly don't agree with all his opinions and his belief that Gothic is the only suitable style for this country. However, I think his concern over the 'amalgamation of architecture, style, and manners' that has only significantly increased since his day, with the consequence that 'Europe would soon present such sameness as to cease to be interesting', is certainly of some merit in a world where boxes of glass and concrete without ornamentation are ubiquitous all over the world. As he says, 'England is rapidly losing its venerable garb; all places are becoming alike'. The character of a place has been shown to have huge value in a variety of ways, and yet modern architecture shows no appreciation of this.
Like John Ruskin, and other Victorian authors it is definitely opinionated. I certainly don't agree with all his opinions and his belief that Gothic is the only suitable style for this country. However, I think his concern over the 'amalgamation of architecture, style, and manners' that has only significantly increased since his day, with the consequence that 'Europe would soon present such sameness as to cease to be interesting', is certainly of some merit in a world where boxes of glass and concrete without ornamentation are ubiquitous all over the world. As he says, 'England is rapidly losing its venerable garb; all places are becoming alike'. The character of a place has been shown to have huge value in a variety of ways, and yet modern architecture shows no appreciation of this.
March 1, 2026
I especially love the illustrations to describe, really informative
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews