Pugin the Functionalist

Nikolaus Pevsner ( The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design ) quotes Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, writing in 1841: “There should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety . . . The smallest detail should . . . serve a purpose, and construction itself should vary with the material employed” (9).

The source of that quotation occasions some surprise, because “the hook which he started with this clarion call The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture , the fact that his principal purpose was not a plea for functionalism but for the Gothic Revival as the expression of a Catholic Revival, even the fu't that he argued extremely intelligently the functional aspect of the Gothic style, of buttresses, of rib-vaults and so on” (10).

Pugin “was read by the Gothicists, but he was also read by the Functionalists. For such existed among the mid-nineteenth century writers and thinkers. Gottfried Semper in Germany, with his explanation of the applied or decorative arts as conditioned by materials and techniques, was one of them. He had lived in London as a refugee in the years 1851-5, and must have been in contact with the small group of architects, artists and administrators responsible for the preparation, the success and the ruthless criticism of the Great Exhibition of 1851” (10).

Semper and others started a journal of design, explicitly applying Pugin's principles to “matters of craft and industrial art. Pugin had objected to carpets where one walks ‘upon highly relieved foliage,' the Journal now insisted that carpets should keep to ‘a level or low plane,' that wallpapers should convey ‘the proper impression of flatness.'” and in a more general way, that ‘the first consideration of the designer should be perfect adaptation to intended use' and that every object ‘to afford perfect pleasure must be fit for the purpose and true in its construction'” (10).

It's a strange twist of architectural history: Modernism inspired by Gothic revival.