St. Stephen's Chapel, Houses of Parliament by Charles Barry and A.W. Pugin

Robert Furneaux Jordan

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St. Stephen's Chapel, Houses of Parliament by Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin

"Barry could plan, he could organize, he could deal with committees. The high romantic dream that embraced the fretted richness of the late Middle Ages was beyond him. He needed Pugin. Today he would have made him a partner. In fact he picked his brains and treated him as an assistant. The old and bitter Victorian controversy -- ' Who was the real architect of the Houses of Parliament?' -- need not concern us. The architect was Barry, but almost all that is best and most enchanting was Pugin's.

"Had Pugin actually planned the Houses of Parliament we should doubtless have been landed with some lovely but incompetent sequence of conventual cloisters. As it is, the vaulted lobbies, the former Commons Chamber, the thrones and the canopies, and what is perhaps the loveliest room of the nineteenth century, the Peers' Library, are all Pugin's. So also was much of the external detail all that fine Perpendicular panelling, together with the silhouette of the great towers . Of course it was all 'sham Gothic', but those towers, more than anything else, are still symbols of Victorian London" [84-85].

References

Jordan, Robert Furneaux. Victorian Architecture. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1966.

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Last modified 23 November 2004