Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin ( PEW-jin; 1 March 1812 – 14 September 1852) was an English architect, designer, artist and critic with French and Swiss origins. He is principally remembered for his pioneering role in the Gothic Revival style of architecture. Among his best-known work is the interior and clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, the meeting place of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Pugin designed many churches in England, and some in Ireland and Australia. He was the son of Auguste Pugin, and the father of Edward Welby Pugin, Cuthbert Welby Pugin, and Peter Paul Pugin, who continued his architectural and interior design firm as Pugin & Pugin.
Pugin was the son of the French draughtsman Auguste Pugin, who had immigrated to England as a result of the French Revolution and had married Catherine Welby of the Welby family of Denton, Lincolnshire, England. Pugin was born on 1 March 1812 at his parents' house in Bloomsbury, London, England. Between 1821 and 1838, Pugin's father published a series of volumes of architectural drawings, the first two entitled Specimens of Gothic Architecture and the following three Examples of Gothic Architecture, that not only remained in print but were the standard references for Gothic architecture for at least the next century.
As a child, his mother took Pugin each Sunday to the services of the fashionable Scottish Presbyterian preacher Edward Irving (later the founder of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church), at his chapel in Cross Street, Hatton Garden, Camden, London. Pugin quickly rebelled against this version of Christianity: according to Benjamin Ferrey, Pugin "always expressed unmitigated disgust at the cold and sterile forms of the Scottish church; and the moment he broke free from the trammels imposed on him by his mother, he rushed into the arms of a church which, pompous by its ceremonies, was attractive to his imaginative mind".
Pugin learned drawing from his father, and for a while attended Christ's Hospital. After leaving school, he worked in his father's office, and in 1825 and 1827 accompanied him on visits to France. His first commissions independent of his father were for designs for the goldsmiths Rundell and Bridge, and for designs for furniture of Windsor Castle from the upholsterers Morel and Seddon. Through a contact made while working at Windsor, he became interested in the design of theatrical scenery, and in 1831 obtained a commission to design the sets for the production of the new opera Kenilworth at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. He also developed an interest in sailing, and briefly commanded a small merchant schooner trading between Great Britain and Holland, which allowed him to import examples of furniture and carving from Flanders, with which he later furnished his house at Ramsgate in Kent. During one voyage in 1830, he was wrecked on the Scottish coast near Leith, as a result of which he came into contact with Edinburgh architect James Gillespie Graham, who advised him to abandon seafaring for architecture. He then established a business supplying historically accurate carved wood and stone detailing for the increasing number of buildings being constructed in the Gothic Revival style, but the enterprise quickly failed.
In 1831, at the age of 19, Pugin married the first of his three wives, Anne Garnet. She died a few months later in childbirth, leaving him a daughter. He had a further six children, including the future architect Edward Welby Pugin, with his second wife, Louisa Burton (or Button), who died in 1844. His third wife, Jane Knill, kept a journal of their marital life, from their marriage in 1848 to Pugin's death, which was later published. Their son was the architect Peter Paul Pugin.
Following his second marriage in 1833, Pugin moved to Salisbury, Wiltshire, with his wife, and in 1835 bought one-half of an acre (0.20 ha) of land in Alderbury, about one and a half miles (2.4 km) outside the town. On this, he built a Gothic Revival-style house for his family, which he named St Marie's Grange. Of it, Charles Eastlake said "he had not yet learned the art of combining a picturesque exterior with the ordinary comforts of an English home".
In 1834, Pugin converted to Catholicism and was received into it the following year.
British society at the start of the 19th century often discriminated against dissenters from the Church of England, although things began to change during Pugin's lifetime, helping to make Pugin's eventual conversion to Catholicism more socially acceptable. For example, dissenters could not take degrees at the established universities of Oxford and Cambridge until 1871, but the University of London (later renamed University College London) was founded near Pugin's birthplace in 1826 with the express purpose of educating dissenters to degree standard (although it would not be able to confer degrees until 1836). Dissenters were also unable to serve on parish or city councils, be a member of Parliament, serve in the armed forces or be on a jury. A number of reforms across the 19th century relieved these restrictions, one of which was the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829, which allowed Catholics to become members of Parliament.
Pugin's conversion acquainted him with new patrons and employers. In 1832 he made the acquaintance of John Talbot, 16th Earl of Shrewsbury, a Catholic sympathetic to his aesthetic theory and who employed him in alterations and additions to his residence of Alton Towers, which subsequently led to many more commissions. Shrewsbury commissioned him to build St Giles Catholic Church, Cheadle, Staffordshire, which was completed in 1846, and Pugin was also responsible for designing the oldest Catholic Church in Shropshire, St Peter and Paul Church, Newport.
In 1836, Pugin published Contrasts, a polemical book which argued for the revival of the medieval Gothic style, and also "a return to the faith and the social structures of the Middle Ages". The book was prompted by the passage of the Church Building Acts of 1818 and 1824, the former of which is often called the Million Pound Act due to the appropriation amount by Parliament for the construction of new Anglican churches in Britain. The new churches constructed from these funds, many of them in a Gothic Revival style due to the assertion that it was the "cheapest" style to use, were often criticised by Pugin and many others for their shoddy design and workmanship and poor liturgical standards relative to an authentic Gothic structure.
Each plate in Contrasts selected a type of urban building and contrasted the 1830 example with its 15th-century equivalent. In one example, Pugin contrasted a medieval monastic foundation, where monks fed and clothed the needy, grew food in the gardens – and gave the dead a decent burial – with "a panopticon workhouse where the poor were beaten, half-starved and sent off after death for dissection. Each structure was the built expression of a particular view of humanity: Christianity versus Utilitarianism." Pugin's biographer, Rosemary Hill, wrote: "The drawings were all calculatedly unfair. King's College London was shown from an unflatteringly skewed angle, while Christ Church, Oxford, was edited to avoid showing its famous Tom Tower because that was by Christopher Wren and so not medieval. But the cumulative rhetorical force was tremendous."
In 1841 he published his illustrated The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, which was premised on his two fundamental principles of Christian architecture. He conceived of "Christian architecture" as synonymous with medieval, "Gothic", or "pointed", architecture. In the work, he also wrote that contemporary craftsmen seeking to emulate the style of medieval workmanship should reproduce its methods.
In 1841 he left Salisbury, having found it an inconvenient base for his growing architectural practice. He sold St Marie's Grange at a considerable financial loss, and moved temporarily to Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, London. He had already purchased a parcel of land at West Cliff, Ramsgate in Kent, where he proceeded to build for himself a house, The Grange, and at his own expense, a church dedicated to St Augustine, after whom he thought himself named. He worked on this church whenever funds permitted it. His second wife died in 1844 and was buried at St Chad's Cathedral, Birmingham, which he had designed.