Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin | Houses of Parliament London, England, design

Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin | Houses of Parliament 

London, England, designed 1835

As 19th-century scholars gathered the documentary materials of European history in encyclopedic enterprises, each nation came to value its past as evidence of the validity of its ambitions and claims to greatness. Intellectuals appreciated the art of the remote past as a product of cultural and national genius. A reawakening of interest in Gothic architecture also surfaced at this time, even in France under Napoleon.  The Houses of Parliament have an exterior veneer and towers that recall English Late Gothic style.

In London, when the old Houses of Parliament burned in 1834, the Parliamentary Commission decreed that designs for the new building be either Gothic or Elizabethan. Charles Barry (1795–1860), with the assistance of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–1852), submitted the winning design in 1835. By this time, architectural style had become a matter of selection from the historical past. Barry had traveled widely in Europe, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and Palestine, studying the architecture of each place. He preferred the classical Renaissance styles, but he had designed some earlier Neo-Gothic buildings, and Pugin successfully influenced him in the direction of English Late Gothic. Pugin was one of a group of English artists and critics who saw moral purity and spiritual authenticity in the religious architecture of the Middle Ages and revered the careful medieval artisans who built the great cathedrals.

The design of the Houses of Parliament, however, is not genuinely Gothic, despite its picturesque tower groupings (the Clock Tower, housing Big Ben, at one end, and the Victoria Tower at the other). The building has a formal axial plan and a kind of Palladian regularity beneath its Neo-Gothic detail. Pugin himself said of it, “All Grecian, Sir. Tudor [English Late Gothic] details on a classical body.” (x)