Volume 56, Number 14 · September 24, 2009
A Hero of the Gothic
By Fiona MacCarthy
God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain
by Rosemary Hill
Yale University Press, 602 pp., $45.00
In his brief lifespan as an architect and writer A.W.N. Pugin transformed the British landscape. By the time he died, insane, at the age of forty, he had given the great cities of London and Edinburgh two defining landmarks—'Big Ben,' the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, and the spire of the church of Tolbooth St. John's. Pugin had set the pattern for the spires and towers of the Victorian Gothic churches that dominate so many of the smaller British towns. It was largely due to his impassioned advocacy that Gothic became the British national style for nineteenth-century church and civic buildings. He bequeathed his own name to the particular, evocative, Romantic British vistas of monastic settlements and crenellated castles we still describe as 'Puginesque.'
Review, 3790 words
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