SAHGB Publications Limited !"#$%&'()*+,,(-."'/' 0"12.34'56(7.'/*+38(-$,, )."39/6(0392$1/91"3+,(-$'1.38:(;.,<(=>(4?@@A5:(BB<(C=DECD= !"F,$'2/G(F86()0-HI(!"F,$9+1$.%'(J$*$1/G )1+F,/(K7J6(http://www.jstor.org/stable/1568805 099/''/G6(@>LC@L?@@M(CC6NN Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sahgb. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. SAHGB Publications Limited is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Architectural History. http://www.jstor.org by ROSEMARY HILL This is the first study devoted to Pugin's small houses. Here 'small' is intended to describe any house which does not aspire, either in scale or style, to the country house or mansion. Where these buildings have been considered before it has been in the context of surveys of Pugin's work in general, or of all of it that was not ecclesiastical.1 He has been considered primarily as a church architect and such was indeed the case for most of his career, but this perception of him has been exaggerated because he wrote little about his secular and domestic work. It was in the later part of his life, when he published less, that his ideas about domestic architecture matured. For reasons of temperament and circumstance Pugin never developed a country house practice. His two most important commissions, Scarisbrick Hall and Alton Towers, were additions to and modifications within pre-existing houses, neither of them very congenial. His unrealized schemes for mansions, such as Dartington Hall and Hornby Castle, do not, moreover, suggest that the country house as a type brought out his talents.' Churches were his first and abiding love. It was largely necessity that drove him to make so many attempts at small domestic buildings in his early career. Pugin, however, did nothing without commitment and the necessity led to considerable invention. His small houses may be divided into three types: the middle-class family house, the presbytery, and the cottage or lodge. It is not possible within a single article to attempt a comprehensive survey of all three. This essay therefore concentrates on the first as being of most consequence. Rather than describing each example in detail it will offer a broadly chronological account, illustrated with relevant examples, of Pugin's development as a domestic architect. The 'smaller detached houses' of the mid-nineteenth century were, as Pugin himself noted, a new and particular feature of 'the present state of society'.3 As the century went on they became ever more prevalent and characteristic of Victorian architecture. In the twentieth century they were ubiquitous. As a type, therefore, they are of more significance than the presbyteries and cottages. These, however, should not be left out of the discussion entirely. Pugin did not think rigidly in terms of building types, but developed his ideas from one commission to the next. The earlier presbyteries and cottages serve to show the course of his thinking about domestic Gothic. The essay will draw on them where relevant. It will illustrate how Pugin dealt with the lack of obvious precedents for a small Gothic house, how he selected, used and rejected certain models and how he came, at his own house, The Grange, Ramsgate (1844), to an idea of modern domestic architecture which had no direct historical precedent and yet was perceived, by himself and his contemporaries, as Gothic. Pugin has often been seen as a man who nailed his colours to the mast with The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecturein 1841, and was thereafter rooted, to the point of bigotry, in a single position. In fact his ideas changed and on some points he 148 ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY 46: 2003 flatly contradicted himself. A careful examination of his writings, published and unpublished, alongside the buildings, shows him moving beyond what is generally thought of as Puginian Gothic and becoming, before most of his contemporaries, a High Victorian. In thus pursuing, for the first time, the question of where Pugin's ideas about the design of houses originated and how he developed them, the article also reassesses his relationship to his immediate predecessors. It suggests that while he reacted against the Picturesque, he was nevertheless a product of it. His small houses are a development, rather than a radical revision, of the domestic architecture of the Regency. They form a bridge between the villas of Nash and the High Victorian parsonages of Butterfield and Scott, and they have implications for the architecture of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Pugin, it is suggested, is part of a continuum, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, which saw first the invention and then the repeated reinvention and rediscovery of the principles of the Picturesque. In some of his theories he was less original than has sometimes been thought, but, as has come to be generally accepted, he anticipated a great deal in later nineteenth-century architecture. I suggest that he looked forward, even further, to M. H. Baillie Scott and beyond. It is with Pugin that the staircase 'living hall', so distinctive a feature of the English house at the turn of the twentieth century, makes its first appearance. The question of his direct influence must remain moot, although it will be worth making some suggestions. Pugin had no formal architectural training, indeed little formal education of any kind. His first ideas about architecture, as about most things, were formed at home by his parents in their sheltered but stimulating household in Bloomsbury. Here his French father, A. C. Pugin (1769-1832), pieced together a freelance living from his extensive connexions among the commercial artists, antiquaries and architects of Regency London. It was a network that took in Pugin Senior's first employer, John Nash, and extended outwards and downwards from Soane and Cockerell to Rudolph Ackermann, who published many of A. C. Pugin's illustrations and designs, to the Cooke family with their gallery in Soho Square, John Britton, W. H. Leeds and dozens of A. C. Pugin's fellow members of the Watercolour Society.4 His early years with Nash and Repton had left A. C. Pugin thoroughly versed in the theories of the Picturesque. His son grew up deeply, if unthinkingly, saturated in them. Like many of his contemporaries he could later use the word 'picturesque' as a term either of praise or condemnation; which it was depended largely on the appearance of a building. While Pugin disliked the whimsical details and materials of Regency architecture - thatch, stucco and Egyptian chimneys - he never questioned the fundamental principles of the Picturesque. Asymmetry, natural planning, the effects of light and the importance of association of ideas were the essence of his own mature work. The few small villas and cottages that his father designed were essays in the Nash- Repton style. A letter to an unnamed correspondent indicates Pugin Senior's methods: Dear Sir ... I hope you will find in the plans and sketches I have done myself the pleasure to send you that I have closely adhered to the size and number of apartmentsyou mentioned ... the dining room is exactly to the proportions you wished, the breadth two thirds of the PUGIN'S SMALL HOUSES 149 length 18 by 12. If you are satisfied with the plan I shall be less anxious concerning the elevations the form of which being a matter of taste and particularfancy we can vary it [sic] at pleasure without varying the ground plan.5 Pugin has been credited with introducing the principle of designing from the plan to the elevations.6 Yet this was axiomatic to Nash, Repton and his own father. It is doubtful whether Pugin would have thought to design a house in any other way. The other theoretical point that Pugin is too often said to have introduced to English architecture is the principle that each part of a building should express its function. This, too, was an idea he had grown up with. It had its origins in the Picturesque and it was, by the 182os, common currency among the antiquarian architects of the Pugins' circle. J. C. Buckler, in 1828, regretting the relative neglect of domestic architecture of the middle ages and explaining the precepts behind the 'harmony of its plan and arrangement' wrote: The characteristicdistinction was produced by the exercise of sound judgment rather than any peculiar skill, and resulted from the excellent adaptationof the constituentparts to the various purposes for which they were required,all the gradations of dignity being as duly marked in the external appearance, as convenience was consulted in internal arrangement.7 Buckler was writing about Eltham Palace, which A.