God's Architect

God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain by Rosemary Hill, 498 pages

Augustus Pugin died in 1852 at the age of forty.  His brief career as an architect, which did not begin in earnest until the publication of his manifesto Contrasts in 1836, defined British architecture - and much else besides - in the Victorian era.  Indeed, as Rosemary Hill documents in her exhaustive - but at times exhilarating - biography, a direct line line runs from Pugin through Ruskin and the Rossettis to Morris and beyond.  In his quest to recreate the Gothic, Pugin founded workshops to meet the demand for fabric, woodwork, tile, and stained glass.  In her telling, Pugin was not merely an antiquarian or even an influential ecclesiastical architect, but a daring theorist with definite ideas of how the modern city could be tamed and made more humane.

God's Architect manages to interweave the public and private lives of Pugin, covering his professional projects - most famously his work on the Houses of Parliament, including the clock tower popularly (but erroneously) called "Big Ben" - and his often tragic personal life, complicated by his own uncompromising nature.  Hill compellingly follows the often troubled relationships between Pugin and his circle of "Romantic Catholics" with the Tractarians on the one hand and ultramontane Catholics on the other.  These connections are often neglected in histories of the Oxford Movement and its personalities, and while her account, viewed as it is through the prism of Pugin's career, is not entirely fair to some of the other individuals involved, it does make God's Architect a critical addition to our understanding of nineteenth century art and religion.