Quotes by or about AWN Pugin

Augustus Welby Pugin

In pure architecture the smallest detail should have a meaning or serve a purpose.

Nothing can be more dangerous than looking at prints of buildings, and trying to imitate bits of them. These architectural books are as bad as the Scriptures in the hands of the Protestants.

The two great rules for design are these: First, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety; second, that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building. The neglect of these two rules is the cause of all the bad architecture of the present time.

It is alright to decorate construction but never construct decoration.

Let then the Beautiful and the True be our watchword. - The True Principles of Christian or Pointed Architecture, 1841.

About Pugin

He was an extraordinary and prolific inventive genius, one of those figures who only appear every few hundred years, like a Leonardo or a Mozart. He lived just 40 years, from 1812 to 1852, and his working life was just 15 years. But during that time he produced thousands upon thousands of designs for buildings, and for the applied arts including textiles, woodwork, metalwork, ceramics and stained glass. He believed that if he could re-create the principles of Gothic architecture and design, the reinvigoration of spiritual values would follow. - Sydney Morning Herald, February 4, 2003.

Right across Australia, from outback towns with tiny churches made out of corrugated iron with a little pointed door and pointed windows, to our very greatest cathedrals, you have buildings which are directly related to Pugin's ideas. There's not a city in Australia that wasn't influenced by him. - Sydney Morning Herald, February 4, 2003.

Pugin's legacy began to fade immediately after his death. This was partly due to the hostility of John Ruskin. In his appendix to The Stones of Venice (1851), Ruskin wrote of Pugin, "he is not a great architect but one of the smallest possible or conceivable architects". Contemporaries and admirers of Pugin, including Sir Henry Cole, protested at the viciousness of the attack and pointed out that Ruskin's idea on style had much in common with Pugin's. After Pugin's death, Ruskin "outlived and out-talked him by half a century". Sir Kenneth Clark wrote, "If Ruskin had never lived, Pugin would never have been forgotten." - Wikipedia.

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, had already written to demonstrate how classical architecture was inappropriate to a Christian country such as England, since its origins were in the pagan ancient worlds of Athens and Rome. In short, Pugin advocated a return to the medieval forms of craftsmanship and a ‘truth to materials’, central tenets of the later Arts and Crafts Movement. - Visual & Decorative Arts Blog, The Arts & Crafts Movement and Key Players, Masterpieces of Art.

(I)t would be wrong to dismiss Pugin as a mere nostalgist. His proposals were not simply the product of dusty researches and a fear of the new. His program for Gothic building responded to contemporary exigencies. It embodied a vision of social reform that appealed to many people worried about the state of industrial England. - Pugin or Newman? The debate over tradition that still divides Catholics, The Catholic Herald, April 16, 2020.