Context 159 - May 2019

52 C O N T E X T 1 5 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 9 story of the Palace of Westminster that explains Pugin’s rise and fall. Pugin teamed up with Charles Barry and they won the architectural competition to design the new Palace of Westminster. The nation chose gothic over classical Grecian architecture. Pugin worked day and night for Barry, making over 10,000 drawings for the project, and he was the architect of much of the building. He designed the Elizabeth Tower (housing Big Ben) and all of the palace’s interiors. As a consequence of his overwork he frequently lost his eyesight, and his doctors added to his health problems by prescribing mercury. Charles Barry took the glory for the Palace of Westminster, and the fees. Pugin was not invited to the opening ceremony or mentioned in the press reports, yet all his team members and contractors were lavished with praise and press coverage. Pugin was almost written out of history partly because he was not an establishment figure and he was unconventional. He was a Catholic convert, he married three times, had eight children, became bankrupt and spent time in a debtor’s prison. He ended up in Bedlam, the public lunatic asylum where up to 2,000 members of the public would queue up every day to torment the insane. His third wife, Jane, was devoted to him, and dramatically rescued him from Bedlam. Pugin was not just an architect. He designed jewellery, garments, carpets, ceramics and metal work, surrounding himself with craftsmen and builders who brought his designs to life. He ushered in an era of total design with a social conscience. His ideas about authentically expressing the construction of a building are still applied by architects today. Thanks to Pugin’s work on the Palace of Westminster, gothic became Britain’s national style and it was exported around the world. He only lived to be 40, but he crammed in 100 years of work. He showed that industrial Britain could be about more than mass production: it could also be magnificent. Nick Corbett, associate director (heritage) withWSP | Indigo, is the author of Palace of Pugin, published by Transforming Cities. Designs by Pugin for a private house and a shop, showing how old domestic architecture could be applied to modern street buildings FromAda Louise Huxtable’s essay on awarding the 1988 Pritzker Architecture Prize to Gordon Bunshaft and Oscar Niemeyer A lifetime in architecture is both short and long. It is short enough to build a distinguished body of work that is clearly and unmistakably of its own time, with the strengths and weaknesses that this implies, and long enough for the ideals and principles upon which that work was built to go out of style. It does not quite take a lifetime for tastes and beliefs to change. What does not change is the quality of the work, and the passion and predictability with which the present rejects the very recent past. At a time when reputations are seesawing in and out of history, with the modernists heading the list of outs, the selection of Gordon Bunshaft and Oscar Niemeyer for this prize may seem reactionary to some... To fly in the face of fashion, however, by honouring two modernist masters while criticism is focusing on the revealed flaws of the modern movement, is more of a radical than a reactionary act. By suggesting the need to reassess, rather than to reject, the philosophy and practice of the recent past, the intention is to make a revisionist gesture as much as to bestow an overdue honour… Gordon Bunshaft has defined the corporate headquarters building, a structure as important for our commercial culture as the palace and the church were for an earlier royal or religious age, with consummate art and skill. If we demur at the symbolism, we deny reality; it does not make these suave skin skyscrapers and stunning office palazzi less dazzling achievements.