Pugin: A Gothic Passion.

In 1994, the Pearson Company sponsored an exhibition of A. W. N. Pugin's work at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This beautiful book is published in conjunction with the exhibition and bears the same title, Pugin: A Gothic Passion. The title is surely apt, for this architect's devotion to the Gothic Revival was nothing less than a passion, one strengthened by a convert's zeal for Roman Catholicism. The two - architecture and religion - were inseparable for Pugin, who customarily referred to Gothic architecture as Christian architecture, by which he meant pre-Reformation Catholic architecture. But, then, he was impassioned in all his endeavors; he was passionate about boats, and, judging by his three marriages and eight children, he was passionate in another way as well. He was not a man to do things by halves.

Passion alone accounts for the extraordinary productivity of his short life (181-252). Close to the end of it he claimed to have done the work of a hundred years in forty. This book provides a record of those …