Pugin’s Law
Mark Swenarton, 4 December 1980
‘The history of architecture,’ wrote A.W.N. Pugin in 1843, ‘is the history of the world.’ To judge from the three books under review, present-day orthodoxy is something very different. In looking at British architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries, the authors deal, not with the global issues envisaged by Pugin but with the careers of famous (and, in one case, not-so-famous) architects. The history of architecture, we are asked to believe, is the history of the individuals whose names appeared on architectural drawings.
