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THE GOTHIC REVIVAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE

The Gothic Revival was an architectural movement which originated in mid-18th century England. In the nineteenth century, increasingly serious and learned neo-Gothic styles sought to revive medieval forms, in distinction to the classical styles which were prevalent at the time. The Gothic Revival was paralleled and supported by medievalism, which had its roots in antiquarian concerns with survivals and curiosities. The movement had significant influence throughout the United Kingdom as well as in Europe and North America, and perhaps more Gothic architecture was built in nineteenth and twentieth centuries than had originally ever been built.

In English literature, the architectural Gothic Revival and classical Romanticism gave rise to the Gothic novel genre, beginning with Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, and inspired a 19th century genre of medieval poetry which stems from the pseudo-bardic poetry of "Ossian." Poems like "Idylls of the King" by Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson recast specifically modern themes in medieval settings of Arthurian romance. In German literature, the Gothic Revival also had a grounding in literary fashions.

History
Survival and revival

Gothic architecture did not die out completely in the 15th century, but instead lingered on in on-going cathedral-building projects and the construction of churches in increasingly isolated rural districts of England, France, Spain and Germany. In Bologna, in 1646, the Baroque architect Carlo Rainaldi constructed Gothic vaults (completed 1658) for the Basilica of San Petronio which had been under construction since 1390; there, the Gothic context of the structure overrode considerations of the current architectural mode. Similarly, Gothic architecture survived in an urban setting during the later 17th century, as shown in Oxford and Cambridge, where some additions and repairs to Gothic buildings were apparently considered to be more in keeping with the style of the original structures than contemporary Baroque. Sir Christopher Wren's Tom Tower for Christ Church College, Oxford University, and, later, Nicholas Hawksmoor's west towers of Westminster Abbey, blur the boundaries between what is called "Gothic survival" and the Gothic revival.

In the mid 18th century, with the rise of Romanticism, an increased interest and awareness of the Middle Ages among some influential connoisseurs created a more appreciative approach to selected medieval arts, beginning with church architecture, the tomb monuments of royal and noble personages, stained glass, and late Gothic illuminated manuscripts. Other Gothic arts continued to be disregarded as barbaric and crude, however: tapestries and metalwork, as examples. Sentimental and nationalist associations with historical figures were as strong in this early revival, as purely aesthetic concerns. A few Britons, and soon some Germans, began to appreciate the picturesque character of ruins - "picturesque" becoming a new aesthetic quality - and those mellowing effects of time that the Japanese call wabi-sabi and which Horace Walpole independently admired, mildly tongue-in-cheek, as "the true rust of the Barons' wars." The "Gothick" details of Walpole's Twickenham villa, "Strawberry Hill," (illustrated, left) appealed to the rococo tastes of the time, and by the 1770s, thoroughly neoclassical architects such as Robert Adam and James Wyatt were prepared to provide Gothic details in drawing-rooms, libraries, and chapels, for a romantic vision of a Gothic abbey, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire. Inveraray Castle, constructed from 1746 with design input from William Adam, displays early revival of Gothic features in Scotland. The "Gothick" style was an architectural manifestation of the artificial "picturesque" seen elsewhere in the arts: these ornamental temples and summer-houses ignored the structural logic of true Gothic buildings and were effectively Palladian buildings with pointed arches. The eccentric landscape designer Batty Langley even attempted to "improve" Gothic forms by giving them classical proportions.

A younger generation who took Gothic architecture more seriously provided the readership for J. Britten's series of Cathedral Antiquities, which began appearing in 1814. In 1817, Thomas Rickman wrote an Attempt… to name and define the sequence of Gothic styles in English ecclesiastical architecture, "a text-book for the architectural student". Its long title is descriptive: Attempt to discriminate the styles of English architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation; preceded by a sketch of the Grecian and Roman orders, with notices of nearly five hundred English buildings. The categories he used were Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular. It went through numerous editions and was still being republished in 1881.

Romanticism and nationalism

French neo-Gothic had its roots in a minor aspect of Anglomanie, starting in the late 1780s. In 1816, when French scholar Alexandre de Laborde said "Gothic architecture has beauties of its own," the idea was novel to most French readers. Starting in 1828, Alexandre Brogniart, the director of the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, produced fired enamel paintings on large panes of plate glass, for Louis-Philippe's royal chapel at Dreux. It would be hard to find a large, significant commission in Gothic taste that preceded this one, save for some Gothic features in a handful of jardins à l'anglaise.

The French Gothic revival was set on sounder intellectual footings by a pioneer, Arcisse de Caumont, who founded the Societé des Antiquaires de Normandy at a time when antiquaire still meant a connoisseur of antiquities, and who published his great work on Norman architecture in 1830 (Summerson 1948). The following year Victor Hugo's Nôtre Dame de Paris appeared, in which the great Gothic cathedral of Paris was at once a setting and a protagonist in a hugely popular work of fiction. Hugo intended his book to awaken a concern for the surviving Gothic architecture, however, rather than to initiate a craze for neo-Gothic in contemporary life. In the same year that Nôtre-Dame de Paris appeared, the new French monarchy established a post of Inspector-General of Ancient Monuments, a post filled in 1833 by Prosper Merimée, who became the secretary of a new Commission des Monuments Historiques in 1837. This was the Commission that instructed Eugène Viollet-le-Duc to report on the condition of the abbey of Vézelay in 1840. When France's first prominent neo-Gothic church[2] was built, the Basilica of Sainte-Clothilde,[3] Paris, begun in September 1846 and consecrated 30 November 1857, the architect chosen was, significantly, of German extraction, François-Christian Gau (1790-1853); the design wassignificantly modified by Gau's assistant, Théodore Ballu, in the later stages, to produce the pair of flêches that crown the west end.

Meanwhile, in Germany, interest in the Cologne Cathedral, which had begun construction in 1248 and was still unfinished at the time of the revival, began to reappear. The 1820s Romantic movement brought back interest, and work began once more in 1824, significantly marking a German return of Gothic architecture.

Because of Romantic nationalism in the early 19th century, the Germans, French and English all claimed the original Gothic architecture of the 12th century as originating in their own country. The English boldly coined the term "Early English" for Gothic, a term that implied Gothic architecture was an English creation. In his 1832 edition of Notre Dame de Paris Victor Hugo said "Let us inspire in the nation, if it is possible, love for the national architecture", implying that Gothic was France's national heritage. In Germany with the completion of Cologne Cathedral in the 1880s, at the time the world's tallest building, the cathedral was seen as the height of Gothic architecture.

In Florence, the Duomo's temporary façade erected for the Medici-House of Lorraine nuptials in 1588-1589, was dismantled, and the west end of the cathedral stood bare again until 1864, when a competition was held to design a new facade suitable to Arnolfo di Cambio's structure and the fine campanile next to it. This competition was won by Emilio De Fabris, and work on his polychrome design and panels of mosaic was begun in 1876 and completed in 1887.
Pugin, Ruskin and the Gothic as a moral force.

In the late 1820s, A.W.N. Pugin, still a teenager, was working for two highly visible employers, providing Gothic detailing for luxury goods. For the Royal furniture makers Morel and Seddon he provided designs for redecorations for the elderly George IV at Windsor Castle in a Gothic taste suited to the setting. For the royal silversmiths Rundell Bridge and Co., Pugin provided designs for silver from 1828, using the 14th-century Anglo-French Gothic vocabulary that he would continue to favour later in designs for the new Palace of Westminster.

In Contrasts (1836), Pugin expressed his admiration not only for mediæval art but the whole mediæval ethos, claiming that Gothic architecture was the product of a purer society. In The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841), he suggested that modern craftsmen seeking to emulate the style of medieval workmanship should also reproduce its methods. Pugin believed Gothic was true Christian architecture, boldly saying "The pointed arch was produced by the Catholic faith". Pugin's most famous building is The Houses of Parliament in London, which he designed in two campaigns, 1836-1837 and again in 1844 and 1852, with the classicist Charles Barry as his co-architect. Pugin provided the external decoration and the interiors, while Barry designed the symmetrical layout of the building, causing Pugin to remark, "All Grecian, Sir; Tudor details on a classic body".

John Ruskin supplemented Pugin's ideas in his two hugely influential theoretical works, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1853). Finding his architectural ideal in Venice, Ruskin proposed that Gothic buildings excelled above all other architecture because of the "sacrifice" of the stone-carvers in intricately decorating every stone. By declaring the Doge's Palace to be "the central building of the world", Ruskin argued the case for Gothic government buildings as Pugin had done for churches, though only in theory. When his ideas were put into practice, Ruskin despised the spate of public buildings built with references to the Ducal Palace, including the University Museum in Oxford.

Ecclesiology

In England, the Church of England was undergoing a revival of Anglo-Catholic and ritualist ideology in the form of the Oxford Movement and it became desirable to build large numbers of new churches to cater for the growing population. This found ready exponents in the universities, where the ecclesiological movement was forming. Its proponents believed that Gothic was the only style appropriate for a parish church, and favoured a particular era of Gothic architecture - the "decorated". The Ecclesiologist, the publication of the Cambridge Camden Society, was so savagely critical of new church buildings that were below its exacting standards that a style called the 'archaeological Gothic' emerged, producing some of the most convincingly mediæval buildings of the Gothic revival. However, not every architect or client was swept away by this tide. Although Gothic Revival succeeded in becoming an increasingly familiar style of architecture, the attempt to associate it with superiority of the high church, as advocated by Pugin and the ecclesiological movement, was anathema to those with ecumenical or nonconformist principles. They looked to adopt it solely for its aesthetic romantic qualities, to combine it with other styles or look to northern Europe for Gothic of a more plain appearance, and to consciously choose a quite different style; or in some instances all three of these as at the ecumenical Abney Park Cemetery for whom the architect William Hosking FSA was engaged.

Viollet-le-Duc and Iron Gothic

If France had not been quite as early on the neo-Gothic scene, she produced a giant of the revival in Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. As well as being a powerful and influential theorist, Viollet-le-Duc was a leading architect whose genius lay in restoration. He believed in restoring buildings to a state of completion that they would not have known even when they were first built, theories he applied to his restorations of the walled city of Carcassonne and Notre-Dame and Sainte Chapelle in Paris. In this respect he differed from his English counterpart Ruskin as he often replaced the work of mediaeval stonemasons. His rational approach to Gothic was in stark contrast to the revival's romanticist origins, and considered by some to be a prelude to the structural honesty demanded by Modernism.

Throughout his career he remained in a quandary as to whether iron and masonry should be combined in a building. Iron had in fact been used in Gothic buildings since the earliest days of the revival. It was only with Ruskin and the archaeological Gothic's demand for structural truth that iron, whether it was visible or not, was deemed improper for a Gothic building. This argument began to collapse in the mid-19th century as great prefabricated structures such as the glass and iron Crystal Palace and the glazed courtyard of the Oxford University Museum were erected, which appeared to embody Gothic principles through iron. Between 1863 and 1872 Viollet-le-Duc published his Entretiens sur l'architecture, a set of daring designs for buildings that combined iron and masonry. Though these projects were never realised, they influenced several generations of designers and architects, notably Antonio Gaudi.
By 1872 the Gothic Revival was mature enough in the United Kingdom that Charles Locke Eastlake, an influential professor of design, could produce A History of the Gothic Revival, but the first extended essay on the movement that was written within the maturing field of art history was Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival. An Essay, which appeared in 1928.

Gothic Revival in the decorative arts

The revived Gothic style was not limited to architecture. Whimsical Gothick detailing in English furniture is traceable as far back at Lady Pomfret's house in Arlington Street, London (1740s), and gothic fretwork in chairbacks and glazing patterns of bookcases is a familiar feature of Chippendale's Director (1754, 1762), where, for example the three-part bookcase employs gothick details with Rococo profusion, on a symmetrical form. Sir Walter Scott's Abbotsford exemplifies in its furnishings the "Regency gothic". By the mid-nineteenth century Gothic traceries and niches could be inexpensively recreated in wallpaper, and gothic blind arcading could decorate a ceramic pitcher. The illustrated catalogue for the Great Exhibition of 1851 is replete with gothic detail, from lacemaking and carpet designs to heavy machinery.

The 20th century and beyond

At the turn of the 20th Century, technological developments such as the light bulb, the elevator, and steel framing caused many to see architecture that used load-bearing masonry as obsolete. Steel framing supplanted the non-ornamental functions of rib vaults and flying buttresses. Some architects used Neo-Gothic tracery as applied ornament to an iron skeleton underneath, for example in Cass Gilbert's 1907 Woolworth Building skyscraper in New York and Raymond Hood's 1922 Tribune Tower in Chicago. But over the first half of the century, Neo-Gothic became supplanted by Modernism. Some in the Modern Movement saw the Gothic tradition of architectural form entirely in terms of the "honest expression" of the technology of the day, and saw themselves as the rightful heir to this tradition, with their rectangular frames and exposed iron girders.

In spite of this, the Gothic revival continued to exert its influence, simply because many of its more massive projects were still being built well into the second half of the 20th century, such as Giles Gilbert Scott's Liverpool Cathedral. In the USA, James Gamble Rodgers' reconstruction of the campus of Yale University and Charles Donagh Maginnis's early buildings at Boston College helped establish the prevalence of Collegiate Gothic architecture on American university campuses. The Gothic revival skyscraper on the University of Pittsburgh's campus, the Cathedral of Learning, for example, used very Gothic stylings both inside and out, while using modern technologies to make the building taller. Ralph Adams Cram became a leading force in American Gothic, with his most ambitious project the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York (claimed to be the largest Cathedral in the world), as well as Collegiate Gothic buildings at Princeton University. Cram said "the style hewn out and perfected by our ancestors [has] become ours by uncontested inheritance." In addition to Princeton University, Lehigh University and Boston College, some of the buildings on West Chester University's campus are also built in the Collegiate Gothic style. Indeed, Atlanta's historic Oglethorpe University continues to build in the Collegiate Gothic style to this day, with its four newest residence halls mimicking the school's "Silent Faculty" of academic buildings.

Though the number of new Gothic revival buildings declined sharply after the 1930s, they continue to be built. The cathedral of Bury St. Edmunds was constructed between the late 1950s and 2005. In 2002, Demetri Porphyrios was commissioned to design a neo-Gothic residential college at Princeton University to be known as Whitman College. Porphyrios has won several commissions after votes by student bodies, not university design committees, confirming what modernist architects have suspected: that neo-gothic architecture may be more popular among the public, in spite of resistance to gothic as a "style" among the architectural establishment, and cost restraints.

GOTHIC REVIVAL ARCHITECTS

WILLIAM BUTTERFIELD

William Butterfield (7 September 1814 - 23 February 1900), born in London, architect of the Gothic revival, and associated with the Oxford Movement (aka the Tractarian Movement).
William Butterfield was born in London in 1814. His parents were strict non-conformists and ran a chemist shop in the Strand. He was one of nine children and was educated at a local school. At the age of 16, he was apprenticed to a builder in Pimlico, Thomas Arber, who later became bankrupt. He studied architecture under E. L. Blackburne (1833-1836). From 1838 to 1839, he was an assistant to Harvey Eginton, an architect in Worcester, where he became articled. He established his own architectural practice at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1840.

From 1842, Butterfield he was involved with the Cambridge Camden Society, later The Ecclesiological Society. He contributed designs to the Society's journal, The Ecclesiologist. His involvement influenced his architectural style. He also drew religious inspiration from the Oxford Movement and as such, he was very "High Church", despite his non-conformist upbringing. He was a Gothic revival architect, and as such he reinterpreted the original Gothic style in Victorian terms. Many of his buildings were for religious use, although he also designed for colleges and schools.
In 1884, Butterfield was the recipient of the RIBA Gold Medal. In 1900, he died in London.

FRANK FURNESS

Frank Heyling Furness (November 12, 1839 - June 27, 1912) was a noted American architect.
Furness was born in Philadelphia. His father, William Furness, was a prominent Unitarian minister, and his brother, Horace Furness, was an outstanding Shakespeare scholar; Furness, however, did not attend a university and apparently did not travel to Europe. He is remembered for his eclectic, often idiosyncratically scaled buildings and for his influence on Louis Sullivan and the acclaimed 20th theater designer William Harold Lee. Although much of Furness' architectural designs were uniquely his own creation, Gothic Revival was a prevailing theme throughout.

Furness began his architectural training in the office of John Fraser, Philadelphia, in the 1850s. He participated in the Beaux-Arts-inspired atelier of Richard Morris Hunt, New York, from 1859 to 1861 and again in 1865. During the Civil War he served as Captain and commander of Company F, 6th Pennsylvania Volunteer Cavalry ("Rush's Lancers"), receiving a Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery at the Battle of Trevilian Station, Virginia, on June 12, 1864-the only American architect to receive this honor.

Furness considered himself Hunt's apprentice and was influenced by Hunt's dynamic personality and accomplished, elegant buildings. He was also influenced by the architectural concepts of Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin. Louis Sullivan worked briefly as a draftsman in Furness's office, and his use of decorative organic motifs can be traced, at least in part, to Furness.
During his career, Furness designed over four hundred buildings including banks, churches, synagogues, railway stations for the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio railroads, and numerous stone mansions in Philadelphia and along Philadelphia's Main Line, as well as a handful of commissioned houses at the New Jersey seashore, Washington, D.C., New York state, and Chicago, Illinois.
Furness died on June 27, 1912, and is buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Following decades of neglect, in which many of his most important buildings were destroyed, there was a revival of interest in Furness's work in mid-twentieth century. Robert Venturi in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture wrote, not unadmiringly, of the Philadelphia Clearing House: "... it is an almost insane short story of a castle on a city street."
A fictional desk built by Furness was featured in the John Bellairs novel The Mansion in the Mist.

COPE AND STEWARDSON

Cope & Stewardson (1885-1912) were an architecture firm best known for their academic building and campus designs. They are often regarded as Masters of the Collegiate Gothic style. Walter Cope and John Stewardson established the firm in 1885, and were later joined by Emlyn Stewardson in 1887. The firm went on to became one of the most influential and prolific Philadelphia firms to span from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Between 1886 and 1904 they made formative additions to the campuses of Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Although Walter Cope and John Stewardson were major exponents and purveyors of the Collegiate Gothic architectual style which swept campuses across the country in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, they were equally adept at other styles and other building types. Their earliest important commission was Radnor Hall at Bryn Mawr College (1886), when, ironically, they replaced Cope's mentor Addison Hutton as campus architects. Commissions shortly followed for buildings on the campuses of the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Washington University in St. Louis (which were part of buildings designed for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair). Although these academic buildings were their hallmark, other projects included residential, commercial, institution, and industrial buildings.

As important as their contribution to the architecture of Philadelphia and its environs is the role which Cope & Stewardson played in architectural education. Great numbers of young apprentices and would-be architects passed their days of training in the office, making it a general stopping place for many architects who would later become famous in their own right. In 1923 the annual T-Square club exhibition catalog published a photograph of the Cope & Stewardson office from about 1899. Included in the number of partners and younger architects are: Walter Cope; John A. MacMahon; James O. Betelle (later of Newark, NJ); Emlyn Stewardson; S. A. Cloud; Wetherill P. Trout; Herbert C. Wise; James P. Jamieson; Eugene S. Powers; E. Perot Bissell; Louise Stavely; Charles H. Bauer (later in Newark, NJ); William Woodburn Potter; John Molitor, Camillo Porecca; and C. Wharton Churchman.

Walter Cope (1860-1902)

In 1860, Walter Cope was born and Christened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Thomas P. Cope and Elizabeth Waln Stokes Cope. After graduating from the Germantown Friends School, he attended classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1883. A year later, he traveled to England and France and in 1885 the firm of Cope and Stewardson was established.
Cope was a founding member of the T-Square Club in 1883 and later served as vice-president, secretary, treasurer, president, and as a member of the executive committee. He was also a Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania from 1892 to 1902. After teaching at Penn, he became a Professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Cope was also part of the investigating committee appointed to study conditions governing the new State Capitol Building competition in 1901. From 1896 to 1898 he was chairman of the committee on the restoration of Independence Hall.

John Stewardson (1858-1896)
John Stewardson, son of Thomas and Margaret Haines Stewardson, was born in 1858. His early education had been in private Christian schools in the Philadelphia area. He continued his studies at Adams Academy in Quincy, Massachusetts from 1873 to 1877. After graduation, he entered Harvard College, but left in 1878. He briefly continued he studies at the University of Pennsylvania and than joined the Atelier Pascal in Paris, France. In 1882 he returned to Philadelphia, working first in T. P. Chandler's office and then in the office of Frank Furness.

In 1884 he returned to Europe to travel through Italy and Belgium. A year later, he joined in personal practice with Walter Cope. They were joined in 1887 by John's younger brother Emlyn L. Stewardson, who had recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in civil engineering.
In 1892, Stewardson joined the University of Pennsylvania as staff lecturer in their new School of Architecture. He was also one of the founding members of the T-Square Club, serving in 1885 and 1891 as president of that organization. He also served as treasurer of the Philadelphia Chapter of the AIA in 1886.

He is credited with the taste for English Gothic Revival which Cope & Stewardson used in their collegiate buildings. Talbot Hamlin, in his biographical description, for the Dictionary of American Biography notes that, following Stewardson's trip to England in 1894, the buildings at the University of Pennsylvania, which were on the boards at the time, changed from stone structures to brick with stone trim.
Stewardson's career was abruptly halted in 1896 when he died following a skating accident on the Schuylkill River, where he had gone for an afternoon's outing with his friend Wilson Eyre.

RALPH ADAMS CRAM

Ralph Adams Cram, (December 16, 1863 - September 22, 1942), was an American architect of collegiate and ecclesiastical buildings, often in the gothic style. His work is represented on a number of campuses, including Cornell University, Sweet Briar College, University of Richmond, Williams College, Rice University, Wheaton College in Massachusetts, the United States Military Academy, and St. George's School, but he is most closely associated with Princeton, where he served as Consulting Architect from 1907 to 1929.

From 1898 to 1914 he was in partnership with Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue in the Boston firm then known as Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson.
Born into a Unitarian clerical family, as a young man Cram considered himself an agnostic. But after a dramatic conversion during Christmas Eve mass in Rome in 1887, he became and remained a fervent Anglo-Catholic. As author and lecturer as well as architect, he propounded an aesthetique holding that the Renaissance was in part an unfortunate dead-end detour for western culture: authentic development could come only by picking up where it had left off, i.e. by taking inspiration from Gothic.

ALEXANDER JACKSON DAVIES

Alexander Jackson Davis (A.J. Davis) (New York City July 24, 1803 - January 14, 1892) was the most successful and influential American architect of his generation.

He studied at the American Academy of Fine Arts, the New-York Drawing Association, and from the Antique casts of the National Academy of Design. Dropping out of school he became a respectable lithographer and from 1826 worked as a draftsman for Josiah R. Brady, a New York architect who was an early exponent of the Gothic revival: Brady's Gothic 1824 St Luke's Episcopal Church is the oldest surviving structure in Rochester, New York.

Davis made a first independent career as an architectural illustrator in the 1820s, but his friends, especially painter John Trumbull, convinced him to turn his hand to designing buildings. Picturesque siting, massing and contrasts remained essential to his work, even when he was building in a Classical style. In 1826, Davis went to work in the office of Ithiel Town and Martin E. Thompson, the most prestigious architectural firm of the Greek Revival; in the office Davis had access to the best architectural library in the country, in a congenial atmosphere where he gained a thorough grounding.
From 1829, in partnership with Town, Davis formed the first recognizably modern architectural office and designed many late classical buildings, including some of public prominence. In Washington, Davis designed the Executive Department offices and the first Patent Office building (1834), and the Custom House of New York City (1833 - 42, illustration,above right).

A series of consultations over state capitols followed, none apparently built entirely as Davis planned: the Indiana State House, Indianapolis (1831 - 35) elicited calls for his advice and designs in building other state capitols in the 1830s: North Carolina's (1833 - 40, with local architect David Paton), the Illinois State Capitol, often attributed entirely to the Springfield, Illinois architect John Rague, who was at work on the Iowa State Capitol at the same time, and in 1839 the committee responsible for commissioning a design for the Ohio Statehouse asked his advice. The resulting capitol in Columbus, Ohio, often attributed to the Hudson River Valley painter Henry Cole consulting with Davis and Ithiel Town, has a stark Greek Doric colonnade across a recessed entrance, flanked by recessed window bays that continue the rhythm of the central portico, all under a unique drum capped by a low saucer dome. With Town's partner James Dakin he designed the noble colossal Corinthian order of "Colonnade Row" on New York's Lafayette Street, the very first apartments designed for the prosperous American middle class (1833, half still standing). He continued in partnership with Town until shortly before Town's death in 1844.

In 1831 he was elected an associate member of the National Academy. Davis was one of three architects who established the American Institute of Architects in May, 1837; in his retirement years he resigned, because he believed the A.I.A. had strayed from its original purpose.
From 1835, Davis began work on his own on Rural Residences, his only publication, the first pattern book for picturesque residences in a domesticated Gothic Revival taste, which could be executed in carpentry, and also containing the first of the "Tuscan" villas, flat-roofed with wide overhanging eaves and picturesque corner towers. Unfortunately the Panic of 1837 cut short his plans for a series of like volumes, but Davis soon formed a partnership with Andrew Jackson Downing, illustrating his widely-read books.

house. Many of his villas were built in the scenic Hudson River Valley- where his style informed the vernacular Hudson River Bracketed that gave Edith Wharton a title for a novel - but Davis sent plans and specifications to clients as far afield as Indiana, with the understanding that construction would be undertaken by local builders. This practice put Davis's personal stamp on the practical builders' vernacular throughout the Eastern United States as far south as North Carolina, where he designed Blandwood, the 1846 home of Governor John Motley Morehead that stands as America's earliest Tuscan Villa. Innovative interior features, including his designs for mantels and sideboards, were also widely imitated in the trade. Other influential interior details include pocket shutters at windows, bay windows, and mirrored surfaces to reflect natural light.

In the late 1850s, Davis worked with the entrepreneur Llewellyn S. Haskell to create Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, a garden suburb that was one of the first planned residential communities in the United States.

Davis designed buildings for the University of Michigan in 1838, and in the 1840s he designed buildings for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
At Virginia Military Institute, Jackson's designs from 1848 through the 1850s created the first entirely Gothic revival college campus, built in brick and stuccoed to imitate stone. Davis's plan for the Barracks quadrangle was interrupted by the Civil War; it was sympathetically completed to designs of Bertram Goodhue in the early 20th century.

With the onset of Civil War in 1861, patronage in house building dried up, and after the war, new styles unsympathetic to Davis's nature, were in vogue. He built little in the last thirty years of his life, but spent his easy retirement in West Orange drawing plans for grandiose schemes that he never expected to build, and selecting and ordering his designs and papers, by which he determined to be remembered. They are shared by four New York institutions: the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A further collection of Davis material has been assembled at the Henry Francis DuPont Winterthur Museum library.
Contemporary interest in Davis was spurred by a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 1992.

ANDREW JACKSON DOWNING

Andrew Jackson Downing (born October 30, 1815 - died July 28, 1852) was an American landscape designer and writer, a prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival style in the United States, and editor and publisher of The Horticulturist magazine (1846-52).
Downing was born in Newburgh, New York, United States, to Samuel Downing (a nurseryman) and Becky Crandall. After finishing his schooling at 16, he worked in his father's nursery and gradually became interested in landscape gardening and architecture. He began writing on botany and landscape gardening and then undertook to educate himself thoroughly in these subjects. In 1841 his first book, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America, was published to a great success.

In 1842 Downing collaborated with Alexander Jackson Davis on the book Cottage Residences, a highly influential pattern book of houses that mixed romantic architecture with the English countryside's pastoral picturesque, derived in large part from the writings of John Claudius Loudon. The book was widely read and consulted, doing much to spread the so-called "Carpenter Gothic" and Hudson River Bracketed architectural styles among Victorian builders, both commercial and private.
With his brother, Charles, he wrote Fruits and Fruit Trees of America (1845), long a standard work. This was followed by The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), another influential pattern book.
In 1850, as Downing traveled in Europe, an exhibition of continental landscape watercolors by Englishman Calvert Vaux captured his attention. He encouraged Vaux to emigrate to the United States, and opened what was to be a thriving practice in Newburgh. Frederick Clarke Withers (1828-1901) joined the firm during its second year. Downing and Vaux worked together for two years, and during those two years, he made Vaux a partner. Together they designed many significant projects, including the grounds in the White House and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. Vaux's work on the Smithsonian inspired an article he wrote for The Horticulturist, in which he stated his view that it was time the government should recognize and support the arts.

Shortly afterwards in 1852, Downing died during a fire in a steamboat accident. A boiler explosion quickly spread flames across the wooden vessel and Downing was consumed in a bath of fiery death. A few ashen remains and his clothes were rescued days later. His remains were interred in Cedar Hill Cemetery, in his birthplace of Newburgh, New York. Withers and Vaux took over Downing's architectural practice.

Downing influenced not only Vaux but also landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted; the two men met at Downing's home in Newburgh. In 1858, their joint design--the Greensward Plan--was selected in a design competition for the new Central Park in New York City. In 1860, Olmsted and Vaux proposed that a bust of Downing be placed in the new park as an "appropriate acknowledgment of the public indebtedness to the labors of the late A. J. Downing, of which we feel the Park itself is one of the direct results." The monument was never built in the park, but a memorial honoring Downing stands near the Smithsonian main building in Washington, D.C. Botanist John Torrey named the genus Downingia after Downing.

BERTRAM GOODHUE

Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (April 28, 1869-April 23, 1924) was a renowned American architect celebrated for his work in neo-gothic design. He also designed notable typefaces, including Cheltenham and Merrymount for the Merrymount Press.

Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue was born in Pomfret, Connecticut to Charles Wells Goodhue and his second wife, Helen (Eldredge) Grosvenor Goodhue. Due to financial constraints he was educated at home by his mother until, at age 11 years, he was sent to Russell's Collegiate and Military Institute. Finances prevented him from attending university, but he received an honorary degree from Trinity College in 1911. In lieu of formal training he moved to New York in 1884 to apprentice at the architectural firm of Renwick, Aspinwall and Russell (one of its principals, James Renwick, Jr., was the architect of Grace Church and St. Patrick's Cathedral, both in New York City). Goodhue's apprenticeship ended in 1891 when he won a design competition for St. Matthew's in Dallas.

After completing his apprenticeship, Goodhue moved to Boston, where he was befriended by a group of young, artistic intellectuals involved in the founding of the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston in 1897. This circle included Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard University and Ernest Fenellosa of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It was also through this group that Goodhue met Ralph Adams Cram, who would be his business partner for almost 25 years. Cram and Goodhue were members of several societies, including the "Pewter Mugs" and the "Visionists". In 1892-1893 they published a quarterly art magazine called The Knight Errant. The multitalented Goodhue was also a student of book design and type design. In 1896, he created the Cheltenham typeface for use by a New York printer, Cheltenham Press. This typeface came to be used as the headline type for The New York Times.

In 1891, Cram and Goodhue formed the architectural firm of Cram, Wentworth, and Goodhue, renamed Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson in 1898. The firm was a leader in neo-gothic architecture, with significant commissions from ecclesiastical, academic, and institutional clients. When Goodhue left to begin his own practice in 1914, Cram had already earned his dream Gothic commission at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Goodhue had successfully experimented with Byzantine style at the conspicuously-sited St. Bartholomew's Church on Park Avenue in New York City (built on the new platform just above the Grand Central Terminal railyards). Goodhue had an eye for ornament and was not above introducing contemporary images into the carved reredos. In 1915, Goodhue re-interpreted a masterful Spanish Gothic style for the signature buildings on the toylike avenue, El Prado, in Balboa Park for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, for which he was the lead designer.

Eventually, Goodhue's architectural creations became freed of detail and more Romanesque, finally arriving at modern interpretations of gothic design. His work evidences his personal style, and his innovations paved the way for others to transition to modern architectural idioms. He is sometimes credited with the transition to art deco, as in his design for the Nebraska State Capitol building, by dint of which he may be classified as an American Modernist.

Over the course of his career, Goodhue relied on frequent collaborations with several significant artists and artisans. These included sculptor Lee Lawrie and mosaicist and muralist Hildreth Meiere. Their work is central to the aesthetic power and social messages implicit in Goodhue's best work, creating evocative examples of American architecture parlante that suggest a future that never was. Lawrie worked with Cram and Goodhue for the Chapel at West Point, Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Bartholomew's, and the reredos at Church of St. Thomas, and then after Goodhue's independence in 1914, on the Nebraska State Capitol, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, the National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington, D.C., and Christ Church Cranbrook, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the latter after Goodhue's death. Lawrie, Meiere, and "thematic consultant" Hartley Burr Alexander reassembled, in a way, for Rockefeller Center under architect Raymond Hood, who had also worked in Goodhue's office.

Goodhue was neurasthenic (plagued with fatigue and worry) and prone to extreme mood swings. His biographer Richard Oliver reports that he worried about money his whole life, even after achieving success. Goodhue died in New York City and, at his request, was buried at the building he considered his finest, the Church of the Intercession. There, Lawrie created for him a Gothic styled tomb, featuring Goodhue recumbent, crowned by a halo of carvings of some of his buildings. After Goodhue's death, many of his designs and projects were completed by a successor firm, Mayers Murray & Phillip. A significant archive of Goodhue's correspondence, architectural drawings, and professional papers is held by the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University.

FRANCIS GOODWIN

Francis Goodwin (23 May 1784 - 30 August 1835) was an English architect, best known for his many provincial churches in the Gothic revival style, civic buildings such as the first Manchester Town Hall (1819-1834) and Macclesfield town hall (1823), plus country houses such as Lissadell House, County Sligo (1833).

Goodwin was born at King's Lynn, Norfolk, and became a pupil of J. Coxedge of Kensington. He exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1806 an Internal View of St. Nicholas' Chapel, Lynn.
He was also remembered for his allegedly aggressive business methods, particularly in respect of commissions for the so-called "Waterloo churches", constructed after British victory in the Battle of Waterloo, which effectively ended the Napoleonic Wars in 1815; Parliament voted one million pounds to the Church of England to show their gratitude for victory.

CHARLES DONAGH MAGINNIS

Considered the father of American Gothic architecture, Charles Donagh Maginnis was born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland on January 7, 1867. He emigrated to Boston at age 18 and got his first job apprenticing for architect Edmund Wheelwright as a draftsman. In 1900 he became a member of the Boston Society of Architects, serving as its president from 1924 to 1926. Though he worked in a number of styles, Maginnis became a distinguished proponent of Gothic architecture and an articulate writer and orator on the role of architecture in society. His pioneering work both influenced and was influenced by fellow Gothicist Ralph Adams Cram.

With Timothy Walsh, he formed what would become one of the leading architectural firms in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1909, Maginnis & Walsh won the competition to build the new campus of Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. The collegiate Gothic design was deemed "the most beautiful campus in America" by The American Architect magazine and established the firm's reputation in collegiate and ecclesiastical architecture. Maginnis & Walsh went on to design buildings at over twenty-five colleges and universities around the country, including the main buildings at Emmanuel College, the chapel at Trinity College and the law school at the University of Notre Dame. Moreover, the design of Gasson Tower at Boston College is considered a predecessor of the dominant towers of collegiate Gothic campuses such as Harkness Tower at Yale University and the chapel tower at Duke University by Horace Trumbauer of 1930-35.

In the Boston area, he also built the church of St. Catherine of Genoa in Somerville, Massachusetts and St. Aidan's Church in Brookline, Massachusetts where he was a parishioner along with the Kennedy family and other prominent Irish-Americans. St. Aidan's, the location of the christening of John F. Kennedy, has since been closed and converted into housing. Among his other designs are the chancel at Trinity Church in Boston's Copley Square and the high altar at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.

From 1937 to 1939 Maginnis held the office of President of the American Institute of Architects. In 1948 the Institute presented him with the Gold Medal for "outstanding service to American architecture," the highest award in the profession. He received honorary degrees from, among others, Boston College, Harvard, Holy Cross, Notre Dame and Tufts. He died in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1955.

The Charles D. Maginnis archives and the Maginnis & Walsh archives are housed at the Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections at Boston College. The Maginnis & Walsh collection at the Boston Public Library contains work of the architectural firm from 1913 to 1952.

BENJAMIN MOUNTFORT

Benjamin Woolfield Mountfort (13 March 1825-15 March 1898) was an English emigrant to New Zealand, where he became one of that country's most prominent 19th century architects. He was instrumental in shaping the city of Christchurch. He was appointed the first official Provincial Architect of the developing province of Canterbury. Heavily influenced by the Anglo-Catholic philosophy behind early Victorian architecture he is credited with importing the Gothic revival style to New Zealand. His Gothic designs constructed in both wood and stone in the province are considered unique to New Zealand. Today he is considered the founding architect of the province of Canterbury.

Early life

Mountfort was born in Birmingham, an industrial city in the Midlands of England, the son of perfume manufacturer Thomas Mountfort and his wife Susanna (née Woolfield). As a young adult he moved to London, where he studied architecture under the Anglo-Catholic architect Richard Cromwell Carpenter, whose medieval Gothic style of design was to have a lifelong influence on Mountfort. After completion of his training, Mountfort practised architecture in London. Following his 1849 marriage to Emily Elizabeth Newman, the couple emigrated in 1850 as some of the first settlers to the province of Canterbury, arriving on one of the famed "first four ships", the Charlotte-Jane. These first settlers, known as "The Pilgrims", have their names engraved on marble plaques in Cathedral Square, Christchurch, in front of the cathedral that Mountfort helped to design.

New Zealand

In 1850 New Zealand was a new country. The British government actively encouraged emigration to the colonies, and Mountfort arrived in Canterbury full of ambition and drive to begin designing in the new colony. With him and his wife from England came also his brother Charles, his sister Susannah, and Charles' wife, all five of them aged between 21 and 26. Life in New Zealand at first was hard and disappointing: Mountfort found that there was little call for architects. Christchurch was little more than a large village of basic wooden huts on a windswept plain. The new emigré's architectural life in New Zealand had a disastrous beginning. His first commission in New Zealand was the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in Lyttelton, which collapsed in high winds shortly after completion. This calamity was attributed to the use of unseasoned wood and his lack of knowledge of the local building materials. Whatever the cause, the result was a crushing blow to his reputation. A local newspaper called him:
… a half-educated architect whose buildings… have given anything but satisfaction, he being evidently deficient in all knowledge of the principles of construction, though a clever draughtsman and a man of some taste.

Consequently, Mountfort left architecture and ran a bookshop while giving drawing lessons until 1857. It was during this period in the architectural wilderness that he developed a lifelong interest in photography and supplemented his meagre income by taking photographic portraits of his neighbours. Mountfort was a Freemason and an early member of the Lodge of Unanimity, and the only building he designed during this period of his life, in 1851, was its lodge. This was the first Masonic lodge in the South Island.

Return to architecture

In 1857 he returned to architecture and entered into a business partnership with his sister Susannah's new husband, Isaac Luck. Christchurch, which was given city status in July 1856 and was the administrative capital of the province of Canterbury, was heavily developed during this period. The rapid development in the new city created a large scope for Mountfort and his new partner. In 1858 they received the commission to design the new Canterbury Provincial Council Buildings, a stone building today regarded as one of Mountfort's most important works. The building's planning stage began in 1861, when the Provincial Council had grown to include 35 members and consequently the former wooden chamber was felt to be too small.

The new grandiose plans for the stone building included not only the necessary offices for the execution of council business but also dining rooms and recreational facilities. From the exterior, the building appears austere, as was much of Mountfort's early work: a central tower dominates two flanking gabled wings in the Gothic revival style. However the interior was a riot of colour and medievalism as perceived through Victorian eyes; it included stained glass windows, and a large double-faced clock, thought to be one of only five around the globe. The chamber is decorated in a rich, almost Ruskinesque style, with carvings by a local sculptor William Brassington. Included in the carvings are representations of indigenous New Zealand species.

This high-profile commission may seem surprising, bearing in mind Mountfort's history of design in New Zealand. However, the smaller buildings he and Luck had erected the previous year had impressed the city administrators and there was a dearth of available architects. The resultant acclaim of the building's architecture marked the beginning of Mountfort's successful career.

Mountfort's Gothic architecture

The Gothic revival style of architecture began to gain in popularity from the late 18th century as a romantic backlash against the more classical and formal styles which had predominated the previous two centuries. At the age of 16, Mountfort acquired two books written by the Gothic revivalist Augustus Pugin: The True Principles of Christian or Pointed Architecture and An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture. From this time onwards, Mountfort was a disciple of Pugin's strong Anglo-Catholic architectural values. These values were further cemented in 1846, at the age of 21, Mountfort became a pupil of Richard Cromwell Carpenter.

Carpenter was, like Mountfort, a devout Anglo-Catholic and subscribed to the theories of Tractarianism, and thus to the Oxford and Cambridge Movements. These conservative theological movements taught that true spirituality and concentration in prayer was influenced by the physical surroundings, and that the medieval church had been more spiritual than that of the early 19th century. As a result of this theology, medieval architecture was declared to be of greater spiritual value than the classical Palladian-based styles of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Augustus Pugin even pronounced that medieval architecture was the only form suitable for a church and that Palladianism was almost heretical. Such theory was not confined to architects, and continued well into the 20th century. This school of thought led intellectuals such as the English poet Ezra Pound, author of The Cantos, to prefer Romanesque buildings to Baroque on the grounds that the latter represented an abandonment of the world of intellectual clarity and light for a set of values that centred around hell and the increasing dominance of society by bankers, a breed to be despised.

Whatever the philosophy behind the Gothic revival, in London the 19th-century rulers of the British Empire felt that Gothic architecture was suitable for the colonies because of its then strong Anglican connotations, representing hard work, morality and conversion of native peoples. The irony of this was that many of Mountfort's churches were for Roman Catholics, as so many of the new immigrants were of Irish origin. To the many middle-class English empire builders, Gothic represented a nostalgic reminder of the parishes left behind in Britain with their true medieval architecture; these were the patrons who chose the architects and designs.

Mountfort's early Gothic work in New Zealand was of the more severe Anglican variety as practised by Carpenter, with tall lancet windows and many gables. As his career progressed, and he had proved himself to the employing authorities, his designs developed into a more European form, with towers, turrets and high ornamental roof lines in the French manner, a style which was in no way peculiar to Mountfort but was endorsed by such architects as Alfred Waterhouse in Britain. On the other hand, the French chateaux style was always more popular in the colonies than in Britain, where such monumental buildings as the Natural History Museum and St Pancras Station were subject to popular criticism. In the United States, however, it was adopted with huge enthusiasm, with families such as the Vanderbilts lining 5th Avenue in New York City with many Gothic chateaux and palaces.

Mountfort's skill as an architect lay in adapting these flamboyant styles to suit the limited materials available in New Zealand. While wooden churches are plentiful in certain parts of the USA, they are generally of a simple classic design, whereas Mountfort's wooden churches in New Zealand are as much ornate Gothic fantasies as those he designed in stone. Perhaps the flamboyance of his work can be explained in a statement of principles he and his partner Luck wrote when bidding to win the commission to design Government House, Auckland in 1857:

...Accordingly, we see in Nature's buildings, the mountains and hills; not regularity of outline but diversity; buttresses, walls and turrets as unlike each other as possible, yet producing a graduation of effect not to be approached by any work, moulded to regularity of outline. The simple study of an oak or an elm tree would suffice to confute the regularity theory.
This seems to be the principle of design that Mountfort practised throughout his life.

Provincial Architect

enlarged several times until it was renamed a cathedral. It was eventually replaced in 1901 by the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament, a more permanent stone building by the architect Frank Petre. Mountfort often worked in wood, a material he in no way regarded as an impediment to the Gothic style. It is in this way that many of his buildings have given New Zealand its unique Gothic style. Between 1869 and 1882 he designed the Canterbury Museum and subsequently Canterbury College and its clock tower in 1877.

Construction on the buildings for the Canterbury College, which later became the University of Canterbury, began with the construction of the clock tower block. This edifice, which opened in 1877, was the first purpose built university in New Zealand. The College was completed in two subsequent stages in Mountfort's usual Gothic style. The completed complex was very much, as intended, an architectural rival to the expansions of the Oxbridge Colleges simultaneously being built in England. Built around stone courtyards, the high Victorian collegiate design is apparent. Gothic motifs are evident in every facade, including the diagonally rising great staircase window inspired by the medieval chateau at Blois. The completed composition of Canterbury College is very reminiscent of Pugin's convent of "Our Lady of Mercy" in Mountfort's home town of Birmingham, completed circa 1843, a design that Mountfort would probably have been familiar with as a boy. It is through the College buildings, and Mountfort's other works, that Canterbury is unique in New Zealand for its many civic and public buildings in the Gothic style.

George Gilbert Scott, the architect of Christchurch Cathedral, and an empathiser of Mountfort's teacher and mentor Carpenter, wished Mountfort to be the clerk of works and supervising architect of the new cathedral project. This proposal was originally vetoed by the Cathedral Commission. Nevertheless, following delays in the building work attributed to financial problems, the position of supervising architect was finally given to Mountfort in 1873. Mountfort was responsible for several alterations to the absentee main architect's design, most obviously the tower and the west porch. He also designed the font, the Harper Memorial, and the north porch. The cathedral was however not finally completed until 1904, six years after Mountfort's death. The cathedral is very much in the European decorated Gothic style with an attached campanile tower beside the body of the cathedral, rather than towering directly above it in the more English tradition. In 1872 Mountfort became a founding member of the Canterbury Association of Architects, a body which was responsible for all subsequent development of the new city. Mountfort was now at the pinnacle of his career.

By the 1880s, Mountfort was hailed as New Zealand's premier ecclesiastical architect, with over forty churches to his credit. In 1888, he designed St John's Cathedral in Napier. This brick construction was demolished in the disastrous 1931 earthquake that destroyed much of Napier. Between 1886 and 1897, Mountfort worked on one of his largest churches, the wooden St Mary's, the cathedral church of Auckland. Covering 9000 square feet (800 m²), St Mary's is the largest wooden Gothic church in the world. The custodians of this white-painted many-gabled church today claim it to be one of the most beautiful buildings in New Zealand. In 1982 the entire church, complete with its stained glass windows, was transported to a new site, across the road from its former position where a new cathedral was to be built. St Mary's church was consecrated in 1898, one of Mountfort's final grand works.
Outside of his career, Mountfort was keenly interested in the arts and a talented artist, although his artistic work appears to have been confined to art pertaining to architecture, his first love. He was a devout member of the Church of England and a member of many Anglican church councils and diocese committees. Mountfort's later years were blighted by professional jealousies, as his position as the province's first architect was assailed by new and younger men influenced by new orders of architecture. Benjamin Mountfort died in 1898, aged 73. He was buried in the cemetery of Holy Trinity, Avonside, the church which he had extended in 1876.

Evaluation of Mountfort's work

available in Europe were conspicuous by their absence. When available they were often of inferior quality, as Mountfort discovered with the unseasoned wood in his first disastrous project. His first buildings in his new homeland were often too tall, or steeply pitched, failing to take account of the non-European climate and landscape. However, he soon adapted, and developed his skill in working with crude and unrefined materials.

Christchurch and its surrounding areas are unique in New Zealand for their particular style of Gothic architecture, something that can be directly attributed to Benjamin Mountfort. While Mountfort did accept small private domestic commissions, he is today better known for the designs executed for public, civic bodies, and the church. His monumental Gothic stone civic buildings in Christchurch, which would not be out of place in Oxford or Cambridge, are an amazing achievement over adversity of materials. His hallmark wooden Gothic churches today epitomise the 19th-century province of Canterbury. They are accepted, and indeed appear as part of the landscape. In this way, Benjamin Mountfort's achievement was to make his favoured style of architecture synonymous with the identity of the province of Canterbury. Following his death, one of his seven children, Cyril, continued to work in his father's Gothic style well into the 20th century. Cyril Mountfort was responsible for the church of "St. Luke's in the City" which was an unexecuted design of his father's. In this way, and through the daily public use of his many buildings, Mountfort's legacy lives on. He ranks today with his contemporary R A Lawson as one of New Zealand's greatest 19th century architects.

GEORGE FELLOWES PRYNNE

George Halford Fellowes Prynne was born on April 2, 1853 at Wyndham Square, Plymouth, Devon. He died on May 7, 1927.

He was the designer of many parish churches in England, mostly in the southeast and southwest, and almost always on a grand scale of high-church Gothic revival. He also did much restoration work, and in all is said to have been involved in over 200 buildings.

Prynne was the second son of the Reverend George Rundle Prynne and Emily Fellowes. He studied at St. Mary's College, Harlow. He went on to Chardstock College, and thence to Eastman's Royal Naval academy at Southsea. He was student at the Royal Academy in 1876 and 77-78.
He was particularly noted for his screen work. Examples of his screens can be found at the following churches.

AUGUSTUS WELBY NORTHMORE PUGIN

Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (March 1, 1812-September 14, 1852) was an English-born architect, designer and theorist of design now best remembered for his work on churches and on the Houses of Parliament. He was the son of a French draughtsman, Augustus Charles Pugin, who trained him to draw Gothic buildings for use as illustrations in his books. This was the key to his work as a leader of the Gothic revival movement in architecture. Pugin became an advocate of Gothic architecture, which he believed to be the true Christian form of architecture. He attacked the influence of 'pagan' Classical architecture in his book "Contrasts", in which he set up medieval society as an ideal, in contrast to modern secular culture. A fine example of his work in this regard is the church of St Giles in Cheadle, Staffordshire.

After the burning of the Palace of Westminster in 1834, Pugin was employed by Sir Charles Barry to work on the new Parliament buildings in London. He converted to Roman Catholicism, but also designed and refurbished Anglican as well as Roman Catholic churches throughout the country and abroad. His views, as expressed in works such as True Principles of Christian Architecture (1841) were highly influential.

Other works include the interior of St Chad's Cathedral and Oscott College, both in Birmingham.
Pugin produced a "mediæval court" at the Great Exhibition of 1851, but died suddenly after a mental collapse.

Slightly less grand than the above - are the railway cottages at Windermere Station in Cumbria. Believed to date from 1849, and probably some of the first houses to be built in Windermere, the terrace of cottages was built for railway executives. One of the fireplaces is a copy of one of his in the Palace of Westminster. He was the father of E.W. Pugin and Peter Paul Pugin, who continued their father's architectural firm as Pugin and Pugin, including several buildings in Australasia.

Early years

Augustus Northmore Welby Pugin was the son of an émigré French architect who came to England to escape the Revolution. His father, Augustin Pugin (originally de Pugin), a French Protestant of good family, worked in the fashionable "gothick" taste of the late eighteenth century. In England he got work as designer and illustrator of books on Gothic architecture and decoration compiled by the architect John Nash. He also kept a number of pupils whom he trained, together with his son, in architectural drawing. Every summer this little school went on trips to sketch Gothic remains here and in France. In this way the younger Pugin accumulated a wealth of detailed knowledge about the Gothic style from an early age. At his father's death in 1832 Pugin was able to carry on the illustrated series that his father had begun.

The young Pugin received his elementary education as a day-boy at Christ's Hospital, better known as the Blue-coat School. Pugin had shown a precocious talent for design and at the age of 15 went to work for the London furniture-makers Morel & Seddon, designing furniture in "gothick" style for Windsor Castle. At the same time he was involved, as a freelance designer, in making drawings of furniture and metalwork for other London firms. At 17 Pugin set up his own small business, supplying furniture and ornamental carved work for houses throughout the United Kingdom. After an initial success the business failed in 1831. During this period Pugin was also designing for Covent Garden Theatre, notably the staging for Sir Walter Scott's "Kenilworth" adapted as a ballet.

In 1833 he was working with Sir Charles Barry on designs for King Edward's School, Birmingham. This collaboration was followed in 1835-6 by detailed designs for Barry's entries in the competition to build the new Houses of Parliament. 1835 was a major turning point in Pugin's career. His book "Gothic Furniture in the Style of the fifteenth Century" was published, showing a new understanding of medieval techniques of construction. In the same year he built his first house, St. Marie's Grange, Salisbury, and most importantly, converted to Catholicism. While still a delicate youth he became intensely fond of the sea, had a smack of his own, did some small trading in carrying woodcarvings from Flanders, and was shipwrecked off Leith in 1830. This love of the sea was strong in him to the end of his life.

Marriage and conversion

In 1831 he married Ann Garnett, and shortly afterwards was imprisoned for non-payment of rent. He then opened a shop in Hart Street, Covent Garden, for the supply of architects' drawings and architectural accessories. The venture, however, did not succeed. His wife died in childbirth 27 May 1832. In 1833 he married Louisa Burton who bore him six children, among whom were the two who successively carried on his business, the eldest, Edward (1834-1875), (E.W. Pugin) and the youngest, Peter Paul (1851-1904). Both received from the pope the decoration of the Order of St. Sylvester. After his second marriage he took up his residence at Salisbury, and in 1834 embraced the Catholic faith, his wife following his example in 1839. Of his conversion he tells us that the study of ancient ecclesiastical architecture was the primary cause of the change in his sentiments, by inducing him to pursue a course of study, terminating in complete conversion. He never swerved in his fidelity to the Church, notwithstanding the bitter trials he experienced. In 1835 he bought a small plot of ground at Laverstock, near Salisbury, on which he built for himself a quaint fifteenth-century-style house, St. Marie's Grange.

Pugin the man

Pugin was somewhat below the middle stature and rather thick-set, with long dark hair and grey eyes that seemed to take in everything. He usually wore a sailor's jacket, loose pilot trousers, a low-crowned hat, a black silk handkerchief thrown negligently round his neck, and shapeless footwear carelessly tied. His form and attire suggested the seaman rather than a man of art. A voluble talker both at work and at table, he possessed a fund of anecdote and a great power of dramatic presentation; and when in good health overflowed with energy and good humour. And if sometimes his language was vigorous or personal, he was generous and never vindictive. Inured to industry from childhood, as a man he would work from sunrise to midnight with extraordinary ease and rapidity. His short thick hands, his stumpy tapering fingers, with the aid of a short pencil, a paid of compasses and a carpenter's rule, performed their delicate work even under such unfavourable circumstances as sailing his lugger off the South Coast. Most of his architectural work he entrusted to an enthusiastic builder whom he had known as a workingman at Beverley. He trained the workmen he employed, and was in turn idolized by them. In his home at Ramsgate he lived with the regularity and abstemiousness of a monk, and the intellectual eagerness of a student. His benevolence made him everywhere the father of the poor.
Architecture did not take up his entire attention at The Grange; from the tower of the house Pugin would watch for ships aground off the Goodwin Sands. He would put out in his wrecker, The Caroline, to rescue the ships and cargo. The salvage money he gained from these rescues brought him a tidy supplement to his income from architecture.

Scarisbrick Hall

By 1836 Pugin had formulated his ideas on architecture, and in that year he published "Contrasts", which was virtually his manifesto as a Catholic, Gothic, architect. In it he set out to prove that "the degraded state of the arts in this country is purely owing to the absence of Catholic feeling", and that the Gothic style of architecture was the only one appropriate for a Christian country to adopt. Classical architecture, he argued, was irredeemably pagan and unsuited to express christian social values. "Contrasts" brought Pugin's ideas to a wide audience, and as the new champion of Catholic architecture he was rapidly taken up by Catholic patrons including Charles Scarisbrick. In 1836 he designed the roofed stone garden seat at the north side of Scarisbrick Hall, and also the fireplace in the Great Hall. On 24 April 1837 he noted in his diary "Began Mr. Scarisbrick's house."

Pugin began work on Thomas Rickman's existing west wing, to which he added the library bay window, the garden porch and north west turret, as well as external and internal decoration. Also in 1837 he designed the south front of the Hall; although this was further embellished when built.
The problems of planning the building were considerable, as it was the client's wish to preserve the old part of the Hall, and any new work had to take this into account. Pugin's solution was to provide a north-south and east-west corridor connecting the old and new parts of the Hall on both ground and first floors. The problem of lighting these corridors was solved with masterly ingenuity; Pugin put skylights over the east-west corridor and a glazed turret over the point where the corridors crossed. He then made the upper corridor floor half the width of the one beneath and introduced superbly carved bracket supports between which light could fall into the lower corridor. True to his own code, he had made an awkward problem into a feature of the building.

In 1838 Pugin proceeded to design the north elevation and this was followed by the Clock Tower in 1839. This has since been replaced with a more spectacular tower by E.W. Pugin (his son), but the original appears in the carved view of the Hall on the main staircase at Scarisbrick. It apparently had a steeply pitched roof over the clock stage, and was the proto-type for the clock-tower of the Houses of Parliament.

Drawings of 1840 show Pugin working on the windows of the Great Hall, and designing the series of attractive and humorous carvings that ornament the bosses on its exterior. This vast room was planned as a Banqueting Hall, and so the bosses all show scenes concerned with eating and drinking. In the same year Pugin made designs for the main staircase and staircase roof. The previous lack of this apparently vital feature would not have disturbed Charles Scarisbrick's comfort, as there are two spiral staircases leading from the Oak Room and the north Library in the West Wing to his bedroom suite above.

In 1841 Pugin was engaged in designing the leaded windows of the Library. There are a range of very attractive geometric patterns in the leading of casements at Scarisbrick. The original effect must have been rich, as they were finished with gilding.

After this there comes a gap in the dated drawings. Pugin's work was in demand from other clients, and although he continued to work at Scarisbrick until at least 1845, the first impetus was gone and Charles Scarisbrick's generosity seems to have been wearing thin. From 1844 onwards Pugin was involved in the tremendous task of designing the interior decoration and furniture for the new Houses of Parliament. He was also keeping up his own busy architectural practice and finding time to write more books. Once asked why he kept no clerk to help him, Pugin replied: "Clerk, my dear sir, clerk, I never employ one. I should kill him in a week." Instead, Pugin wore himself out, and died in 1852.

In such a short life it is remarkable that Pugin had managed to influence the course of architecture and design so strongly. Through his writings he could justly claim that he had "revolutionised the taste of England." At Scarisbrick Hall he had been given his first real opportunity to put his ideas into practice, and the result must have justified Charles Scarisbrick's expectations completely.

St. Mary's College, Oscott

In 1837 he made the acquaintance of the authorities of St. Mary's College, Oscott, where his fame as a writer had preceded him. He found there men in sympathy with his ideas about art and religion. The president, Rev. Henry Weedall, was so impressed by him, that he accepted his services for the completion of the new chapel and for the decorations of the new college, which was opened in 1838. He designed the apse with its effective groinings, the stained glass of the chancel windows, the decorated ceiling, the stone pulpit, and the splendid Gothic vestments. He constructed the reredos of old wood-carvings brought from the Continent, he placed the Limoges enamels on the front of the super-altar, he provided the seventeenth-century confessional, altar rails, and stalls, the carved pulpit (from St. Gertrude's, Louvain), the finest in England, as well as the ambries and chests of the sacristy (see "The Oscotian", July, 1905). He built both lodges and added the turret called "Pugin's night-cap" to the tower. Above all he inspired superiors and students with an ardent enthusiasm for his ideals in Gothic art, liturgy, and the sacred chant. Tradition points out the room in which on Saturday afternoons he used to instruct the workmen from Hardman's, Birmingham, in the spirit and technic of their craft. The president appointed him professor of ecclesiastical antiquities (1838-44). While at the "Old College" he gave his lectures in what is now the orphans' dining-room, and at the new college in a room which still bears in the inscription "Architectura". This association with one of the leading Catholic colleges in England afforded him valuable opportunities for the advancement of his views.

Palace of Westminster

Much discussion has arisen concerning the claims of Pugin to the credit of having designed the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. The old Palace of Westminster had been destroyed by fire in 1834; plans for the new buildings were invited, and those of Charles Barry (afterwards Sir Charles) received the approval of the Commissioners from among some eighty-four competitors. The first stone of the new erection was laid in 1840 and Queen Victoria formally opened the two houses in 1852. At the outset Barry called in Pugin (1836-37) to complete his half-drawn plans, and he further entrusted to him the working plans and the entire decoration (1837-52). Pugin's own statement on the subject is decisive: Barry's great work, h