The Gothic Revival
was an architectural movement which originated in mid-18th century England.
In the 19th century, increasingly serious and learned neo-Gothic styles
sought to revive medieval forms, in distinction to the classical styles
which were prevalent at the time. The movement had significant influence
throughout the United Kingdom as well as in Europe and North America, and
perhaps more Gothic architecture was built in both the 19th century and 20th
century than had originally ever been built.
In literature, the architectural Gothic Revival and classical Romanticism
gave rise to the Gothic novel genre, beginning with Castle of Otranto (1764)
by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, and inspired a 19th century genre of
medieval poetry which stems from the pseudo-bardic poetry of "Ossian." Poems
like "Idylls of the King" by Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson recast
specifically modern themes in medieval settings of Arthurian romance.
History

The Chesma palace church (1780), St Petersburg is a rare example of the
Russian Gothic style.
Survival and revival
Gothic architecture did not die out completely in the 15th century, but
instead lingered on in on-going cathedral-building projects and the
construction of churches in increasingly isolated rural districts of
England, France, Spain and Germany. In Bologna, in 1646, the Baroque
architect Carlo Rainaldi constructed Gothic vaults (completed 1658) for
the Basilica of San Petronio which had been under construction since
1390; there, the Gothic context of the structure overrode considerations
of the current architectural mode. Similarly, Gothic architecture
survived in an urban setting during the later 17th century, as shown in
Oxford and Cambridge, where some additions and repairs to Gothic
buildings were apparently considered to be more in keeping with the
style of the original structures than contemporary Baroque. Sir
Christopher Wren's Tom Tower for Christ Church College, Oxford
University, and, later, Nicholas Hawksmoor's west towers of Westminster
Abbey, blur the boundaries between what is called "Gothic survival" and
the Gothic revival.

Imitation fan-vaulting in the Gothick Long Gallery at Horace Walpole's
Strawberry Hill
In the mid 18th century, with the rise of Romanticism, an increased
interest and awareness of the Middle Ages among some influential
connoisseurs created a more appreciative approach to selected medieval
arts, beginning with church architecture, the tomb monuments of royal
and noble personnages, stained glass, and late Gothic illuminated
manuscripts. Other Gothic arts continued to be disregarded as barbaric
and crude, however: tapestries and metalwork, as examples. Sentimental
and nationalist associations with historical figures were as strong in
this early revival, as purely aesthetic concerns. A few Britons, and
soon some Germans, began to appreciate the picturesque character of
ruins— "picturesque" becoming a new aesthetic quality— and those
mellowing effects of time that the Japanese call wabi-sabi and which
Horace Walpole independently admired, mildly tongue-in-cheek, as "the
true rust of the Barons' wars." The "Gothick" details of Walpole's
Twickenham villa, "Strawberry Hill," (illustrated, left) appealed to the
rococo tastes of the time, and by the 1770s, thoroughly neoclassical
architects such as Robert Adam and James Wyatt were prepared to provide
Gothic details in drawing-rooms, libraries, and chapels, for a romantic
vision of a Gothic abbey, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire. Inveraray Castle,
constructed from 1746 with design input from William Adam, displays
early revival of Gothic features in Scotland. The "Gothick" style was an
architectural manifestation of the artificial "picturesque" seen
elsewhere in the arts: these ornamental temples and summer-houses
ignored the structural logic of true Gothic buildings and were
effectively Palladian buildings with pointed arches. The eccentric
landscape designer Batty Langley even attempted to "improve" Gothic
forms by giving them classical proportions.

Hartwell Church, Buckinghamshire designed by Henry Keene and completed
in 1755. Described by Pevsner as one of the most important early Gothic
revival churches in England. It is octagonal, and has twin towers.
A younger generation who took Gothic architecture more seriously provided
the readership for J. Britten's series of Cathedral Antiquities, which
began appearing in 1814. In 1817, Thomas Rickman wrote an Attempt... to
name and define the sequence of Gothic styles in English ecclesiastical
architecture, "a text-book for the architectural student". Its long
title is descriptive: Attempt to discriminate the styles of English
architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation; preceded by a sketch
of the Grecian and Roman orders, with notices of nearly five hundred
English buildings. The categories he used were Norman, Early English,
Decorated and Perpendicular. It went through numerous editions and was
still being republished in 1881.
Romanticism and nationalism
French neo-Gothic had its roots in a minor aspect of Anglomanie, starting
in the late 1780s. In 1816, when French scholar Alexandre de Laborde
said "Gothic architecture has beauties of its own," the idea was novel
to most French readers. Starting in 1828, Alexandre Brogniart, the
director of the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, produced fired enamel
paintings on large panes of plate glass, for Louis-Philippe's royal
chapel at Dreux. It would be hard to find a large, significant
commission in Gothic taste that preceded this one, save for some Gothic
features in a handful of jardins à l'anglaise.
The French Gothic revival was set on sounder intellectual footings by a
pioneer, Arcisse de Caumont, who founded the Societé des Antiquaires de
Normandy at a time when antiquaire still meant a connoisseur of
antiquities, and who published his great work on Norman architecture in
1830 (Summerson 1948). The following year Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de
Paris appeared, in which the great Gothic cathedral of Paris was at once
a setting and a protagonist in a hugely popular work of fiction. In the
same year the new French monarchy established a post of
Inspector-General of Ancient Monuments, a post filled in 1833 by Prosper
Merimée, who became the secretary of a new Commission des Monuments
Historiques in 1837. This was the Commission that instructed Eugène
Viollet-le-Duc to report on the condition of the abbey of Vézelay in
1840.
Meanwhile, in Germany, interest in the Cologne Cathedral, which had begun
construction in 1248 and was still unfinished at the time of the
revival, began to reappear. The 1820s Romantic movement brought back
interest, and work began once more in 1824, significantly marking a
German return of Gothic architecture.

Schloss Braunfels
Because of Romantic nationalism in the early 19th century, the Germans,
French and English all claimed the original Gothic architecture of the
12th century as originating in their own country. The English boldly
coined the term "Early English" for Gothic, a term that implied Gothic
architecture was an English creation. In his 1832 edition of Notre Dame
de Paris Victor Hugo said "Let us inspire in the nation, if it is
possible, love for the national architecture", implying that Gothic was
France's national heritage. In Germany with the completion of Cologne
Cathedral in the 1880s, at the time the world's tallest building, the
cathedral was seen as the height of Gothic architecture. In Florence,
the Duomo's façade was demolished in 1587-1588, and stood bare until
1864, when a competition was held to design a new facade suitable to
Arnolfo di Cambio's structure and the fine campanile next to it. This
competition was won by Emilio De Fabris, and work on his polychrome
design and panels of mosaic was begun in 1876 and completed in 1887.
Pugin, Ruskin and the Gothic as a moral force
In the late 1820s, A.W.N. Pugin, still a teenager, was working for two
highly visible employers, providing Gothic detailing for luxury goods.
For the Royal furniture makers Morel and Seddon he provided designs for
redecorations for the elderly George IV at Windsor Castle in a Gothic
taste suited to the setting. For the royal silversmiths Rundell Bridge
and Co., Pugin provided designs for silver from 1828, using the
14th-century Anglo-French Gothic vocabulary that he would continue to
favor later in designs for the new Palace of Westminster (see below)
[1].
In Contrasts (1836), Pugin expressed his admiration not only for mediæval
art but the whole mediæval ethos, claiming that Gothic architecture was
the product of a purer society. In The True Principles of Pointed or
Christian Architecture (1841), he suggested that modern craftsmen
seeking to emulate the style of medieval workmanship should also
reproduce its methods. Pugin believed Gothic was true Christian
architecture, boldly saying "The pointed arch was produced by the
Catholic faith". Pugin's most famous building is The Houses of
Parliament in London, which he designed in two campaigns, 1836 — 1837
and again in 1844 and 1852, with the classicist Charles Barry as his
co-architect. Pugin provided the external decoration and the interiors,
while Barry designed the symmetrical layout of the building, causing
Pugin to remark, "All Grecian, Sir; Tudor details on a classic body".

The National Academy of Design in New York (1863-65), one of many
Gothic Revival buildings modelled on the Doge's Palace
John Ruskin supplemented Pugin's ideas in his two hugely influential
theoretical works, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones
of Venice (1853). Finding his architectural ideal in Venice, Ruskin
proposed that Gothic buildings excelled above all other architecture
because of the "sacrifice" of the stone-carvers in intricately
decorating every stone. By declaring the Doge's Palace to be "the
central building of the world", Ruskin argued the case for Gothic
government buildings as Pugin had done for churches, though only in
theory. When his ideas were put into practice, Ruskin despised the spate
of public buildings built with references to the Ducal Palace, including
the University Museum in Oxford.

G.E. Street's Royal Courts of Justice in The Strand, London, 1882, his
masterwork, proclaim the medieval source of Common Law
In England, the Church of England was undergoing a revival of
Anglo-Catholic and ritualist ideology in the form of the Oxford Movement
and it became desirable to build large numbers of new churches to cater
for the growing population. This found ready exponents in the
universities, where the ecclesiological movement was forming. Its
proponents believed that Gothic was the only style appropriate for a
parish church, and favoured a particular era of Gothic architecture —
the "decorated". The Ecclesiologist, the publication of the Cambridge
Camden Society, was so savagely critical of new church buildings that
were below its exacting standards that a style called the
'archaeological Gothic' emerged, producing some of the most convincingly
mediæval buildings of the Gothic revival. However, not every architect
or client was swept away by this tide. Although Gothic Revival succeeded
in becoming an increasingly familiar style of architecture, the attempt
to associate it with superiority of the high church, as advocated by
Pugin and the ecclesiological movement, was anathema to those with
ecumenical or nonconformist principles. They looked to adopt it solely
for its aesthetic romantic qualities, to combine it with other styles or
look to northern Europe for Gothic of a more plain appearance, and to
consciously choose a quite different style; or in some instances all
three of these as at the ecumenical Abney Park Cemetery for whom the
architect William Hosking FSA was engaged.
Viollet-le-Duc and Iron Gothic
If France had not been quite as early on the neo-Gothic scene, she
produced a giant of the revival in Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. As well as
being a powerful and influential theorist, Viollet-le-Duc was a leading
architect whose genius lay in restoration. He believed in restoring
buildings to a state of completion that they would not have known even
when they were first built, theories he applied to his restorations of
the walled city of Carcassonne and Notre-Dame and Sainte Chapelle in
Paris. In this respect he differed from his English counterpart Ruskin
as he often replaced the work of mediaeval stonemasons. His rational
approach to Gothic was in stark contrast to the revival’s romanticist
origins, and considered by some to be a prelude to the structural
honesty demanded by Modernism.
Throughout his career he remained in a quandary as to whether iron and
masonry should be combined in a building. Iron had in fact been used in
Gothic buildings since the earliest days of the revival. It was only
with Ruskin and the archaeological Gothic's demand for structural truth
that iron, whether it was visible or not, was deemed improper for a
Gothic building. This argument began to collapse in the mid-19th century
as great prefabricated structures such as the glass and iron Crystal
Palace and the glazed courtyard of the Oxford University Museum were
erected, which appeared to embody Gothic principles through iron.
Between 1863 and 1872 Viollet-le-Duc published his Entretiens sur
l’architecture, a set of daring designs for buildings that combined iron
and masonry. Though these projects were never realised, they influenced
several generations of designers and architects, notably Antonio Gaudi.

Gasson Hall on the campus of Boston College in Chestnut Hill,
Massachusetts, by Charles Donagh Maginnis, 1908-1913
The 20th century and beyond

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church (RC), Kensington Church Street, London.
Late neo-Gothic by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, 1954-59.

The Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh
At the turn of the 20th Century, technological developments such as the
light bulb, the elevator, and steel framing caused many to see
architecture that used load-bearing masonry as obsolete. Steel framing
supplanted the non-ornamental functions of rib vaults and flying
buttresses. Some architects used Neo-Gothic tracery as applied ornament
to an iron skeleton underneath, for example in Cass Gilbert's 1907
Woolworth Building skyscraper in New York and Raymond Hood's 1922
Tribune Tower in Chicago. But over the first half of the century,
Neo-Gothic became supplanted by Modernism. Some in the Modern Movement
saw the Gothic tradition of architectural form entirely in terms of the
"honest expression" of the technology of the day, and saw themselves as
the rightful heir to this tradition, with their rectangular frames and
exposed iron girders.
In spite of this, the Gothic revival continued to exert its influence,
simply because many of its more massive projects were still being built
well into the second half of the 20th century, such as Giles Gilbert
Scott's Liverpool Cathedral. In the USA, Charles Donagh Maginnis's early
buildings at Boston College helped establish the prevalence of
Collegiate Gothic architecture on American university campuses. The
Gothic revival skyscraper on the University of Pittsburgh's campus, the
Cathedral of Learning, for example, used very Gothic stylings both
inside and out, while using modern technologies to make the building
taller. Ralph Adams Cram became a leading force in American Gothic, with
his most ambitious project the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New
York (claimed to be the largest Cathedral in the world), as well as
Collegiate Gothic buildings at Princeton University. Cram said "the
style hewn out and perfected by our ancestors [has] become ours by
uncontested inheritance." In addition to Princeton University and Boston
College some of the buildings on West Chester University's campus are
also built in the Collegiate Gothic style. Indeed, Atlanta's historic
Oglethorpe University continues to build in the Collegiate Gothic style
to this day.
Though the number of new Gothic revival buildings declined sharply after
the 1930s, they continue to be built. The cathedral of Bury St. Edmunds
was constructed between the late 1950s and 2005 [2]. In 2002, Demetri
Porphyrios was commissioned to design a neo-Gothic residential college
at Princeton University to be known as Whitman College. Porphyrios has
won several commissions after votes by student bodies [citation needed],
not university design committees, confirming what modernist architects
have suspected: that neo-gothic architecture may be more popular among
the public, in spite of resistance to gothic as a "style" among the
architectural establishment, and cost restraints..
John Vaughan, "Thomas Rickman’s essay on Gothic architecture" from
Paradigm, No 7 (December, 1991)
Further reading
Clark, Sir Kenneth The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste
ISBN 0719502330
Hunter-Stiebel, Penelope, Of knights and spires: Gothic revival in France
and Germany, , 1989 ISBN 0916849059
Summerson, Sir John, 1948. "Viollet-le-Duc and the rational point of view"
collected in Heavenly Mansions and other essays on Architecture.
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