4 - Gothic Architecture and Urban Modernity

Summary

Gothic architecture has often been positioned as antithetical to urban modernity. In Contrasts: or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day; Shewing the Present Decay of Taste (1836), A. N. W. Pugin lays out the view that European Gothic was the pinnacle of Christian architecture and, in a related way, of unified social order, in contrast to the degraded and fragmented modern city. Before the English Reformation, it was ‘the faith, the zeal, and, above all, the unity, of our ancestors, that enabled them to conceive and raise those wonderful fabrics that still remain to excite our wonder and admiration’, but once ‘schism’ and ‘avarice’ took over, ‘the spell was broken, the Architecture itself fell with the religion to which it owed its birth, and was replaced by a mixed and base style’. For Pugin, the restoration of Gothic architecture must be accompanied by ‘a restoration of the ancient feelings and sentiments that motivated’ its creators, otherwise ‘all that is done will be a tame and heartless copy’. Similarly, at the end of Volume 1 of The Stones of Venice, which has celebrated Venetian Gothic, Ruskin argues that for city-dwellers, the function of architecture should be ‘to tell us about nature’, but that this is no longer possible in London, dominated by ‘grim railings and dark casements, and wasteful finery of shops, and feeble coxcombry of club-houses’. Ruskin contends that ‘the fresh winds and sunshine of the upland’ that true Gothic is able to evoke is always ‘better than the choke-damp of the vault, or the gas-light of the ball-room’, which define the modern city. As Barry Bergdoll observes, ‘the notion that Gothic was associated with England's glorious past and cherished institutions was established as early as 1741’, generating a form of Gothic nationalism that would later spread across much of Europe, alongside an attempt to ‘craft identity through nostalgia for a lost “natural” community’.