He was an artist, designer, architect, critic & writer whose work most people will know because his patterns are all over the Palace of Westminster. It's 200 years since he was born.
We went to Birmingham, where they have a 'Pugin Trail' & saw his work in the Cathedral, the Art Museum & the Jewellery Quarter. There is lots more up there but you can only do so much in a day.
Pugin believed in decoration & the beautification of the world around us as a force for good - a social force that could improve the lives of people who were struggling in the newly industrialised cities of the 1830s & 40s. Decoration was a moral issue.
He used pattern on pattern on pattern; any individual pattern is not particulary complex in it's own right, but there are so many of them used together that the surface of the building as a whole becomes immensely rich & complex - pattern filled.
Pugin believed in the honesty of the structure; so you didn't hide the structure of anything - you worked with it. As long as you did that, & the structure was visible you could decorate it as much as you liked. He uses a sort of 'piping' to emphasise the edges of the structure of the surfaces & buildings he's designing for.
What struck me about the emphasis on the delineation of the structure of everything, including imagery is that a lot of the stuff is actually quite cartoon like. After all, that's what you do in a cartoon. And then as a rider to that, of course the images in a church were used to tell stories to an illiterate public - so they were 'cartoons', a sort of graphic novel across the walls & windows of the building.
