Gods Architect [Hardcover]

Rosemary Hill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 2, 2007

Pugin was one of Britain's greatest architects and his short career one of the most dramatic in architectural history. Born in 1812, the son of the soi-disant Comte de Pugin, at 15 Pugin was working for King George IV at Windsor Castle. By the time he was 21 he had been shipwrecked, bankrupted and widowed. Nineteen years later he died, insane and disillusioned, having changed the face and the mind of British architecture. Pugin's bohemian early career as an antique dealer and scenery designer at Covent Garden came to a sudden end with a series of devastating bereavements, including the loss of his first wife in childbirth. In the aftermath he formed a vision of Gothic architecture that was both romantic and deeply religious. He became a Catholic and in 1836 published Contrasts, the first architectural manifesto. It called on the 19th century to reform its cities if it wanted to save its soul. Once launched, Pugin's career was torrential. Before he was 30 he had designed 22 churches, three cathedrals, half a dozen extraordinary houses and a Cistercian monastery. For eight years he worked with Charles Barry on the Palace of Westminster creating its sumptuous interiors, the House of Lords and the clock 'Big Ben' that became one of Britain's most famous landmarks. He was the first architect-designer to cater for the middle-classes, producing everything from plant pots to wallpaper and early flat-pack furniture. "God's Architect" is the first full modern biography of this extraordinary figure. It draws on thousands of unpublished letters and drawings to recreate his life and work as architect, propagandist and romantic artist as well as the turbulent story of his three marriages, the bitterness of his last years and his sudden death at 40. It is the debut of a remarkable historian and biographer.

Editorial Reviews

Review

a very remarkable book about a very remarkable man A.N. Wilson A magnificent biography, as sumptuous and intricate as anything Pugin built John Carey as the readable biography of a most protean and brilliant man, it is worthy of the best of his buildings Colm Toibin An excellent and detailed biography Peter Ackroyd --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Rosemary Hill is a writer and historian and a trustee of the Victorian Society. She has published widely on 19th and 20th century cultural history and sits on the editorial board of the London Review of Books. From 2004-05 she was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Group (August 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0713994991
• ISBN-13: 978-0713994995
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,930,704 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Pointless Biography of Pugin, April 26, 2010

By 

Roberto (Portsmouth, OH USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (Hardcover)

God's Architect: Rosemary Hill's Pointless Biography of Augustus Pugin, V.P.

God's Architect (Yale UP, 2009) is a monumental work of scholarship, but because it lacks a unifying thesis or central point, Rosemary Hill's sprawling 600-page, fifteen-years-in-the-making biography of the nineteenth century English architect Augustus Pugin (1812-1852) is, in the final analysis, unfortunately, a failure. The closest thing to a central thesis that she offers, the closest thing to an explanation of Pugin's extraordinary life and career, is her speculation that he contracted syphilis, possibly before he was out of his teens, and that it was that disease that underlay many of his physical and mental problems and that led finally to his insanity and death, at the age of forty.

Hill had the sense not to marry her biography to syphilis; at best, or at worst, God's Architecture only flirts with it. She does not mention syphilis until page 151, and not again until page 257, but she returns to the subject near the end, on page 492 and again on page 598, in the Epilogue, when she has no other explanation for Pugin's extraordinary life and work to fall back on.

If there is no point to Hill's biography, there was, quite literally, to Pugin's life and career. He was a practitioner and champion of what he preferred to call Pointed architecture. One of his most important books was The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841). He said he converted to Catholicism as a result of his study of Pointed architecture. Hill's failure to take into account and adequately explain Pugin's lifelong commitment to and obsession with Pointed architecture is the Achilles' heel of God's Architect.

In making light of the titles and honors he never was awarded, in spite of his important contributions in architecture and the applied arts, Pugin once quipped that the only letters he was ever likely to have after his name were V.P., which he made clear stood for "very pointed." But Hill did not explain his "very pointed" quip, either in her biography or when she was asked directly about it in an interview with The Guardian.

Hill is good at showing Pugin's contributions to architecture and the applied arts, and conversely in showing how egotistical and obtuse he could be, but not why he was so crazy about Pointed architecture. Pugin believed Pointed architecture had been the means to his salvation by pointing , literally and figuratively, toward heaven and Catholicism. Syphilis may or may not have killed Pugin, but Pointed architecture is what he lived for.