I continue my discussion of Pugin’s Contrasts.

The operative word in the full title of Contrasts is noble. Pugin showed his readers illustrations of medieval buildings designed to comport with the nobility, the dignity, of the human beings who resided in them and worked in them. But he did not confine himself to the architecture of single buildings. Contrasts is about more than architecture; it’s about a way of life, Christian life. Pugin wanted entire towns to comport with the nobility, the dignity, of the human beings who resided in them, worked in them, and worshipped in them.

Although Pugin did not write a narrative that accompanied the contrasting pairs of drawings in Contrasts, he did write narrative in “Appendices” to Contrasts. Turning to the text in these Appendices that is most pertinent to land use, we find Pugin’s description of the role of monasteries prior to their destruction during the English “Reformation.” The monasteries, he wrote, were centers of learning, with schools, and with libraries filled with books the monks had personally copied. The monasteries also contained housing for the elderly, and “through their boundless charity and hospitality[,] the poor were entirely maintained.” The monasteries were “dedicated to God, and… had been the support of the religious, the learned, and the poor, for so many centuries.” Pugin wants his readers to learn what England lost, so he quantifies this for them. He writes that Henry VIII dissolved 90 colleges, 100 homes for the poor, and 645 monasteries (with their lodging for the poor).[i] Pugin provides a lengthy description of one such monastery, Durham Abbey, particularly its guest-hall. The guest-hall provided lodging for guests and for poor, elderly women, and the monastery had a school for poor children. Food was provided for all.[ii]

What Pugin wrote about monasteries in England for the hundreds of years before the English “Reformation” of 1500 A.D. was equally true throughout the Christian world following the legalization of Christianity. Immediately after Constantine legalized the Christian religion in 313 A.D., with his Edict of Milan allowing Christians to come up from underground, there was a tremendous amount of activity aboveground. Not just churches and monasteries were built. But adjacent to the churches and monasteries there was a development wholly new to the world — buildings devoted to charity: homes for the elderly, for the sick, for travelers, for homeless, for orphans, for widows. Not just in Rome, but wherever there were Christians. In less than 100 years after the Edict of Milan, every city in the Roman Empire had these homes. Witness St. Basil the Great (329-379 A.D.) who, as a priest in Caesarea, in current day Turkey, constructed what was called at that time a “city of charity” (also known as “the Basiliad”) consisting of hospices, hospitals, a leprosarium, a school, and other buildings — with a church as their centerpiece.

Pugin’s “Imaginary Town”  

As I mentioned, most of Pugin’s 17 working years before his untimely death at age 40 were spent as a government subcontractor on the Houses of Parliament or in private sector work designing churches, chapels, convents, and monasteries. What examples do we have from Pugin’s oeuvre of an entire town, or of ensembles of buildings, or of individual buildings for the poor, sick or elderly, that might match his vision in Contrasts? Let’s look at his drawings.

The first such drawing of interest to us is one Pugin labeled “The Imaginary Town.”[iii] It is important to place this 1834 drawing in context. From 1832 to 1836, when Pugin was 20 to 24 years of age, there were four mutually reinforcing processes occurring in Pugin’s mind:

• drawing and drafting his book Contrasts from 1832 to 1836;
• announcing to friends that he would become an architect, that he would practice architecture solely in the field of Gothic architecture; and embarking on a two-year course of self-study that included tours in England and on the Continent;
• investigating Catholicism, to which he converted in June 1835; and
• drawing what he called his “Ideal Schemes” from 1832 to 1834. He drew these for his private use. We today might refer to them as “visionary projects” or “works of the imagination.” He titled these “The Chest,” “The Shrine,” “The Deanery,” “Le Chasteau [The Chateau],” “Chapel of St. Margaret’s,” “St. Marie’s College,” “Designs for Furniture,” and the one of interest to us, “The Imaginary Town.”

The 1834 drawing “The Imaginary Town,” then, is the last of Pugin’s eight “Ideal Schemes.” All of these “Schemes” consist of multiple drawings except the lone 1834 “Imaginary Town.” The “Imaginary Town” shows multiple buildings with an action: an outdoor religious procession traversing a prominent bridge. First, a few words about processions and about bridges.

Outdoor religious processions had been banned from the time of the English Reformation. In his 1834 “Imaginary Town,” at just age 22, he imagined an outdoor religious procession. When he designed convents later in his life, Pugin would provide interior space for processions.[iv] As to the bridge, I found just a single reference to a bridge in all of Pugin’s published writings. It is at the end of this quotation from Pugin’s An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England (1843; italics in orig.):

It must have been an edifying sight to have overlooked [that is, “look out over”] some ancient city raised when religion formed a leading impulse in the mind of man, and when the honour and worship of the Author of all good was considered of greater importance than the achievement of the most lucrative commercial speculation. There stood the mother church, the great cathedral, vast in height, rising above all the towers of the parochial [parish] churches which surrounded her; next in scale and grandeur might have been discerned the abbatial and collegiate churches with their vast and solemn buildings; each street had its temple [that is, church or chapel] raised for the true worship of God, variously beautiful in design, but each a fine example of Christian art. Even the bridges and approaches were not destitute of religious buildings, and many a beautiful chapel and oratory was corbelled out in massive piers over the stream that flowed beneath.[v]

In Part 3, I turn to Pugin’s drawings labeled “topographical drawings.” [A link to Part 1 is here.]

[i] Contrasts, pp. 22-23.

[ii] Contrasts, App. IV.

[iii] It can be viewed in Alexandra Wedgwood, A.W.N. Pugin and the Pugin Family: Catalogues of Architectural Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, p. 155 (1985).

[iv] T. Brittain-Catlin, “A.W.N. Pugin’s English Convent Plans,” J. Society Arch. Historians, pp. 356-77 (Sept. 2006), available online.

[v] Page 36, available online.