Overview

Who was the bona fide architect of the New Houses of Parliament? Charles Barry (1795-1860), the winner of the Parliamentary competition, or Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-52), the 'ghost' designer, a young Catholic architect and Gothic specialist?After both men died, the controversy over the actual architect of the Houses of Parliament was to become a matter of public dispute, largely stimulated by the directly-opposed claims published by the two men's sons—the architect Edward Welby Pugin (1834-75) and Rev. Alfred Barry (1826-1910), an Anglican clergyman who later became the Bishop of Sydney.The writings of both sons, compiled here in a single volume, reveal to us the whole picture of the controversy over the real authorship of the grandest architectural monument of Victorian Britain and the feverish reactions to it of the nineteenth-century British public, which evince the Victorian democratization of artistic appreciation.

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9781527539440

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This book contains a well indexed introductory chapter describing the origins and the process of the conflict. There is also an overview of the conflicting styles of Neo-Classicism and Gothic Revivalism in the nineteenth century which had a resonance in art and literature, where it provided the leitmotif of Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895). The rest of the book is an exhaustive collection of correspondence and documents, both published and private, concerning the Pugin-Barry dispute. Graham WhitehouseIndependent Researcher; British Association for Victorian Studies Newsletter, Autumn 2020

Author Information

Ariyuki Kondo read Architectural Design at the School of Art and Design of the University of Tsukuba, Japan, before receiving a PhD in Architectural History from the University of Edinburgh, UK, in 2001. After taking up several academic posts in Japan, he has, since 2012, been Professor of History of British Art and Architecture at Ferris University, Japan. He has translated Sir Kenneth Clark's The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste into Japanese, and his publications on the subject of the history of eighteenth- to twentieth-century British art, architecture and design include Robert and James Adam, Architects of the Age of Enlightenment (2012; 2016).

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