Praxiteles
Forum Replies Created
- Posts
A.W.N. Pugin
The Royal Mail has issued a special stamp to mark the bicentenary of Pugin’s birth. It is a first class cover in the britons of distinction series:
Architect, designer and advocate of the Gothic style whose commissions included the interiors of the Palace of Westminster. The stamp shows Pugin’s interior of the Palace of Westminster.
from The Daily Telegraph
Isi Metzstein
Isi Metzstein, who has died aged 83, was an influential architect working in the European modernist style of Le Corbusier and the American Frank Lloyd Wright.
(High Altar, College Chapel, St. Peter’s, Cardross)Metzstein worked closely with Andrew MacMillan at the Glasgow firm of Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, and taught at the Glasgow School of Art. Their masterpiece is generally reckoned to be St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross. Completed in 1966, the three-storey concrete ziggurat stood on the banks of the Clyde, a shining tribute to Corbusier. But as well as worldwide acclaim, it also attracted fierce criticism. Some called it “the spaceship”.
The team’s design for St Peter’s exterior was inspired both by Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, completed in 1955, and his monastery at La Tourette, which opened four years later. The interiors at Cardross were panelled in solid wood or veneer, echoing the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Even traditionalist magazines like Country Life praised it, while specialist journals such as Concrete Quarterly found it “a splendidly virile and rugged building”. In 1967 it won Gillespie, Kidd & Coia an award from the Royal Institute of British Architects. But before long there were reports of jammed windows, door handles falling off, the chapel flooding and a series of ominous creaks emanating from the huge beams that soared above the sanctuary.
The building’s descent into disrepair was hastened further when the Second Vatican Council decided to train priests in local communities rather than at seminaries. The building began its slide into ruin. It eventually shut down in 1980 and, after a spell as a drugs rehabilitation centre, was abandoned and vandalised. As its owners and the authorities dithered, the buildings were ransacked, smashed and set ablaze. Polished corridors leading to the glass-sided refectory were wrecked, along with the skylit chapel with its vast granite altar.
The interior was gutted, and it now stands as a monument to decades of abuse and decay. As the Scottish architectural academic Frank Arneil Walker put it in The Buildings of Scotland, “in little more than a generation, God, Le Corbusier and Scottish architecture have all been mocked”.
Israel Metzstein was born on July 7 1928 in the Mitte district of Berlin, to Jewish parents originally from Poland. He was one of five children brought up by their mother after her husband died during a routine operation in 1933.
With war looming in 1939, Britain offered to take a quota of Jewish children up to the age of 17 under the Kindertransport (Child Transport) scheme. Isi, then 11, was sent to Scotland, where he lodged with a family in Clydebank, and later in a Jewish hostel, until being reunited with his mother and siblings.
At 18 he was hired by Gillespie, Kidd & Coia and, with MacMillan, who joined the practice in 1954, he flourished in the atelier system set up by Jack Coia, one of the original partners. Together, Metzstein and MacMillan were given free rein to develop their professional and artistic skills and went on to design many Modernist schools, colleges and churches. The Roman Catholic Church was the practice’s biggest single client.
In 1956 Metzstein and MacMillan started work on the St Paul’s project in Glenrothes, Scotland’s second post-war New Town. Later they designed the red-brick Robinson College, Cambridge; the library at Wadham College, Oxford; and the halls of residence at the University of Hull.
In later life, Metzstein complained about the “disturbing superficiality of current architecture”.
“Recent and current practice,” he wrote, manages “ to dissociate the façade from internal and external obligations.” What he called “highly seductive stretch-wrapping techniques” deprived architecture of “much cultural and historic richness”.
Metzstein taught at the Glasgow School of Art and, as half of the duo fondly known as Andy and Isi, received the RIBA Annie Spink award in 2008 for excellence in architectural education.
Isi Metzstein married Danielle Kahn, who was also of central European Jewish parentage, and had been born in the south of France during the Nazi occupation. They had three children.
Isi Metzstein, born July 7 1928, died January 10 2012
from the Guardian
Pugin, God’s architectAWN Pugin’s book, Contrasts, written in 1836, was the first architectural manifesto, and had a profound influence on the next three generations of urban designers
AWN Pugin, who was born in London on 1 March 1812, was only 24 when he published Contrasts. It was the book that made his name, and was the first architectural manifesto. Prior to that, there had been treatises on building going back to Vitruvius, texts that set out rules for proportion, aesthetics and construction. Contrasts, as its many critics were quick to point out, had little to say on these subjects. What Pugin offered his readers instead was an entire social programme, one which redefined architecture as a moral force, imbued with political and religious meaning. Published on the eve of the Victorian age, Pugin’s polemic was an early rehearsal of a theme that was to echo through the 19th century and return to haunt the 21st: the problems of the modern city.
In 1836, the year of the book’s publication, the question was still new. Men and women had never lived together in such vast numbers before, and as industry developed and drew more workers from the country to the towns, so the mills and factories, warehouses, workhouses and slum terraces spread. Ten years earlier, the Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, in Britain to carry out some discreet industrial espionage, had been horrified by the lack of planning, the “monstrous, shapeless buildings put up only by foremen without architecture” and the potential in these chaotic streets for disorder.
A decade later the British began to understand what Schinkel had meant. The intervening years had seen the first outbreaks of cholera and some of the worst civil unrest in their history. At Bristol, the Bishop’s Palace had been burned down by rioters, and at Nottingham the castle had been destroyed. Pugin’s message was simple: if there is something wrong with our cities, then there is something wrong with ourselves, and society and architecture both need reform. His prescription was a characteristic mixture of the romantic and the pragmatic – a proposal which, at any other moment in history, would have seemed fantastic, but one which caught the brittle mood of the mid-1830s.
Contrasts argued for a revival of medieval, Gothic architecture, and with it a return to the faith and the social structures of the Middle Ages. While the text begged as many questions as might be expected of such a thesis, the pictures were a persuasive exercise in graphic polemic. Each plate took a single urban building type and compared the modern example with its 15th-century equivalent. Thus, a picture of a late-Georgian inn, cobbled together inconveniently from a row of terraced houses and set behind sharp iron railings, sat next to one of the Angel Hotel in Grantham, with its welcoming bow windows and promising beer cellar. London University, founded in the year that the book was released, was represented by King’s College in the Strand. Its neo-classical gateway, squeezed between houses, looked mean beside the mighty front of Christ Church Oxford. The drawings were all calculatedly unfair. King’s was shown from an unflatteringly skewed angle, and Christ Church was edited to avoid showing its famous Tom Tower because that was by Wren and so not medieval. But the cumulative rhetorical force was tremendous.
Pugin had struck at a moment when the architectural establishment was coming under critical scrutiny. The stucco-fronted neoclassicism of the Regency, pilloried in Contrasts, was looking tired. Increasingly, it seemed to represent an age of decadence and waste of public money. John Nash, its most eminent exponent, had died the year before in disgrace, having been unable to account for the huge overspend on Buckingham Palace; a public enquiry had failed to establish the exact cost of George IV’s lavish refurbishment of Windsor Castle. While Pugin was planning Contrasts, this simmering resentment against a closed and self-serving architectural establishment came to a head late one October afternoon in 1834, when the Palace of Westminster caught fire.
The blaze turned out to be the last great show of Georgian London, watched by a vast crowd, which included Pugin and Turner, who painted it. As the Office of Works moved swiftly to bring in one of its architects for the rebuilding, public opinion rebelled.
If there was to be a new seat of government, it should mark a new start for architecture as well as parliament. As the Morning Herald put it: “This time the British people intend to have the choosing of the architects.” The competition designs and the inevitable row that surrounded the final selection of Charles Barry’s Gothic scheme were the context in which Contrasts emerged to popular acclaim.
At the time, however, despite his claims to architectural omniscience, Pugin was little more than a draughtsman. One of his more lucrative jobs had been to provide the decorative details for Barry’s winning Westminster design, and he was to return to work on the Palace from time to time for the rest of his life. Over the years he designed some of its most successful elements, including the interior of the House of Lords. Now, however, the success of Pugin’s manifesto launched him as an architect in his own right, and he set about rebuilding Britain as a Gothic Catholic Christendom.
It was a Quixotic crusade, but one in which he came closer to success than might ever have been expected. By the time Pugin was 30, he had built 22 churches, three cathedrals, three convents, half a dozen houses, several schools and a Cistercian monastery. He carried the battle into the heart of the industrial cities, the ‘”inexhaustible mines of bad taste” at Birmingham and Sheffield, infested with “Greek buildings, smoking chimnies, radicals and dissenters”. St Chad’s, his Birmingham church, built amid the squalor of the gunmakers’ quarter, became England’s first cathedral since Wren’s St Paul’s. At the laying of the foundation stone, Pugin announced that he would not rest until the cathedral bells “drowned out the steam whistle and the proving of the gun barrels”.
Politically he might best be described as conservative radical. He wanted to reform society by returning it to a benign hierarchy, an idealised medievalism, in which each class could look upwards for support, and would accept responsibility for those below them. It was the indifference of the modern city that appalled him. In 1841 he published a second edition of Contrasts, to which he added two new plates that developed the argument beyond individual buildings, to present a whole moral panorama. One showed “contrasted cities”, the other “contrasted residences for the poor”. In the first, the medieval city, with its graceful spires and safe, defensive walls, sat beside its modern equivalent, the walls broken down, the spires ruinous and the horizon dominated by kilns and factories. Its point was simple enough: that we build most solidly in the areas of life in which we invest most of ourselves. The contrasted residences of the poor made a subtler case for the relationship between architecture and ideas.
Here Pugin compared a monastic foundation of the Middle Ages, where monks fed and clothed the needy, grew food in the gardens – and in the fullness of time gave the dead a decent burial – with a panopticon workhouse where the poor were beaten, half starved and sent off after death for dissection. Each structure was the built expression of a particular view of humanity: Christianity versus Utilitarianism. Again he hit home. The workhouses, created under the New Poor Law, troubled many Victorian consciences. To the rising generation of architects, these images acted as a call to arms. George Gilbert Scott remembered being “awakened” by Pugin to the possibilities for architecture to deliver human dignity.
Ten years later, at the Great Exhibition, Pugin was able to offer the public some answers to the questions that Contrasts had raised. To furnish his buildings he had designed a complete range of Gothic furnishings, sacred, secular and domestic, and many of them available to order at relatively modest prices. Seen together in the Crystal Palace, his plain flat-pack tables, colourful dinner plates and ceramic garden seats, arranged beside stained glass and vestments, held out a vision of the good life in the modern city – one that combined God with hearth and home, and was deeply appealing to the mid-Victorian mind.
The Great Exhibition should have been Pugin’s moment of triumph, but by the time it opened he was fatally ill and disillusioned. He had been in some ways too influential for his own good. Imitators, many cheaper, and all of them easier-going, had poached much of his architectural practice. His work for Barry at Westminster had become a poorly paid treadmill. By a sad irony, the last design he ever made, in January 1852, was destined to be his most famous. It was for the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster. Days later he lapsed into psychosis, and died in September, aged 40.
The clock tower remains his most prominent memorial; but his more important legacy is in the solid civic centres of Victorian towns, the urban churches, local schools and middle-sized family houses built by the next three generations of architects, who had been inspired by Contrasts to try and bring humanity and coherence to the city.
• Rosemary Hill’s God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain is published by Penguin.
The Lenten Veil of Freiburg-im-Breisgau Cathedral
Some paragraphs from Fr Joseph Braun’s Die Liturgischen Paramente, 2nd ed., 1924 (translated by Greg Kollmorgen) . After discussing the current rules for veiling Crosses and images during Passiontide, Fr Braun writes (p. 233 ff.):
To be distinguished from the Passion veils is the large Lenten veil, which has stayed in use here and there in Sicily and Spain, at some places in Westphalia, as well as in the cathedral of Freiburg im Breisgau. It is a cloth which is hung up during Lent at the entrance to the choir. It is most often white or violet and remains until the Litany is sung on Holy Saturday. The Congregation of Rites has declared the use of this Lenten veil to be admissible on 11 May 1878 (decr. auth. n. 3448).
History
Whereas according to current Roman use Crosses and images are only veiled during Passiontide, in the Middle Ages the common thing was to cover them right at the start of Lent, be it from the Terce of the Monday after the first Sunday of Lent, be it – although less frequently – already from Ash Wednesday. Here and there the veiling was even done on Septuagesima. Moreover, not only Crosses and images were withdrawn from the view of the faihtful by means of veils, but also reliquaries and chandeliers, and even evangeliaries whose covers were ornamented with pictorial representations were sometimes veiled. […]
The custom of veiling Crosses and images during Lent is apparently not of Roman, but of Gallican origin. It was already known in Gaul in the 7th century, as we can see from St. Audoenus’s († 683) biography of St. Eligius (II, 41). “Mos erat, ut diebus quadragesimae propter fulgorem auri vel nitorem gemmarum operiretur tumba (s. Eligii) velamine linteo urbane ornato holoserico”, [NLM: “It was custom that on the days of Lent the tomb (of St. Eligius) was covered with a linen veil finely ornamented in pure silk, because of the refulgence of the gold and the splendour of the gems.”] we read in the same. For Italy the custom is not attested until around the year 1000 […]. In the later Middle Ages the veiling of Crosses and images during Lent or at least Passiontide was universally common.
As material for the veils which covered Crosses, images, reliquaries etc. chiefly white linen was used in the Middle Ages. […] Coloured or painted veils for Crosses and images are encountered less commonly in the inventories. […]
The custom to hang up a veil in front of the altar during Lent is already attested in the “consuetudines” of Farfa, then soon after by Aelfric of Winchester and Lanfranc of Canterbury, and at the beginning of the 12th century by Honorius and Rupert of Deutz. Initially, it was probably only observed in cathedral, monastery and collegiate churches. In the later Middle Ages, however, we also find it in parish churches. It was perhaps least extended in Italy. In modern times, the Lenten veil fell more and more into disuse, and today it is, as said before, only rarely used. Furthermore, it mostly does not serve, as originally, to veil the altar and the priest; for this purpose it is normally not large enough any longer. Rather, it is now almost only an indication that Lent has begun.
The veil was ordinarily hung up after compline of the First Sunday of Lent and remained until after compline of the Wednesday of Holy Week. In parish churches it hung between nave and choir, and in collegiate and monastic churches between choir (presbytery) and altar. It was drawn back on Sundays, feasts of twelve or nine lessons, at funerals corpore praesente and on certain solemn occasions like e.g. holy orders, the vesting of novices and similar occasions. Only the veil of the high altar was drawn back then, however, not those of the side altars. For not infrequently, a Lenten veil was hung up in front of these, too. On ordinary days the veil was either not drawn back at all during Mass, or just for the Elevation, and here and there also between Gospel and Orate fratres. Practice in this respect was rather varied according to local custom.
As for the material, the Lenten veils, in Germany also called hunger veils, were mostly made of linen […], but there were also those made of silk. […] In the later Middle Ages, it was popular to embroider, paint or imprint the Lenten veils with scenes from sacred history, especially those of the Passion. […] The enormous Freiburg Lenten veil from the year 1612 already mentioned shows a large Crucifixion as its main image. Magnificent Lenten veils with a wealth of biblical scenes are also at Zittau and in Gurk cathedral. […]
Symbolism
The veiling of Crosses, images etc. during Lent and Passiontide was done because these times had the character of penance and grief, and therefore decoration in the church was deemed inappropriate. The veiling of the Crosses, moreover, may have its reason in the fact that until the 12th century the representations of the Crucifixus showed not so much the Passion of the Godman, but his Triumph on the Cross. Likewise, the great Lenten veil was doubtlessly introduced with regard to the character of grief and penance proper to Lent. The veiling of the Holy of Holies – i.e. the altar – meant in a way a partial exclusion from the cult, which was to remind clerics and laymen alike, in the time of penance, more manifestly of their sinfulness and to impel them to cultivate a truly penitent disposition.
Of course, over time other meanings were additionally attributed to some of these customs, which is easily understandable given the medieval predilection for mystical speculation. In the veiling of Crosses, images and other decoration of the church was thus symbolised the contumely, weakness and humiliation, which in the Passion of the Lord veiled, as it were, His Godhead and divine Power. The veil however, which was hung before the altar, was associated to a multiple symbolism. It was called a memory of the veil of the Old Testament, which dived the Holy of Holies from the Holy and was rent asunder at the death of the Lord. It was seen as an image of the starry heavens which separate material and spiritual world and veil from us the sight of the heavenly fatherland and the glorified Saviour. It was interpreted as the veil with which Moses covered his face, whose resplendence the people could not bear, or as the spiritual shell of the old service of the Law, which still enfolds the hearts of the Jews and prevents them from grasping the clear meaning of the Law. The taking away of the veil at Easter, then, was to signify that Christ now again stands before us in the unveiled splendour of His eternal glory, that He has opened up the heavens for us and taken away the blindness of the heart from us, which had made it impossible for us to understand the mystery of His Passion.
A.W.N. Pugin
Pugin trail highlights his legacy in Birmingham and beyond
The bicenentary of one of Britain’s Victorian designers and architects is being celebrated with a trail and exhibition of his work in Birmingham.
Augustus Pugin, born in London in 1812, worked on many buildings and churches in the West Midlands.
Many of his works can still be appreciated today, such as St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham.
The Birmingham Pugin Trail, launched on his birthday, 1 March, will highlight his work in the city.
It has been created by the Pugin Society and Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.
Significant to city
One of Pugin’s most famous works outside of the West Midlands is the interior of the Palace of Westminster and its clock tower in which Big Ben hangs.
He re-built it with the architect Charles Barry and their relationship began in 1835 when they began building and designing King Edward’s School in New Street, Birmingham.
Places of interest on the trail include St Chad’s Cathedral and Bishop’s House, which were both completed in 1841.
The cathedral was the first Catholic cathedral to be built in the UK since the Reformation.
Antiques and ceiling lights
Pugin collected antiques and provided the cathedral with some original medieval furnishings, which include the 15th Century German Canons’ stalls and the pulpit.
The Bishop’s House was demolished in 1960 and some of the contents were sold. One of the Gothic ceiling lights was once owned by the singer Cher and was part of her home in Malibu.
Pugin designed many of the stained glass windows at Erdington Abbey Councillor Martin Mullaney, cabinet member for leisure, sport and culture, said: “There is a wealth of works by Augustus Pugin on display in Birmingham and this fascinating trail and exhibition will reveal just how significant the city was to him.
“I have no doubt that admirers of Pugin both locally and from across the country will be delighted by the breadth of work that is on show.”
Pugin and Hardman
Another stop on the trail is Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, which has objects designed by Pugin on display, including the rood screen from St John’s Church in Staffordshire, letters from Pugin and documentation of items for the Houses of Parliament.
The trail also explores the work and friendship between Pugin and John Hardman & Co, who produced metalwork and stained glass in the Jewellery Quarter.
There will be an exhibition at the Museum of the Jewellery Quarter called Entwined: Pugin and Hardman, which runs from 17 March – 26 January 2013.
Pugin and Hardman worked together on the interior of the Houses of Parliament and the design drawings will be part of the exhibition.
Cheadle in Staffordshire will also be marking the bicentenary of Pugin’s birth with a series of events over 12 months.
North Staffordshire features 14 Pugin buildings.
A.W.N. Pugin Bicentenary
from The Irish Times 3 March 2012
Celebrating the legacy of an august architect
Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Jimmy Deenihan opened an exhibition of drawings to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin at the Irish Architectural Archive, on Merrion Square, on Thursday evening. “We owe a debt of gratitude to Pugin,” the Minister said, referring to the fact that the architect built St Mary’s Cathedral in the minister’s home county of Kerry.
However, a leading expert on Pugin, Dr Roderick O’Donnell – who has written a new book on Pugin to accompany the exhibition – told me that, in his view, “Killarney Cathedral was wrecked in the 1970s by Bishop Eamon Casey, who had the building completely ripped out.”
Prof Alistair Rowan, who lectured in the history of art at UCD and then UCC, was there with his wife, Ann Martha Rowan. The chairman of the archive, Michael Webb, was accompanied by his wife, Melissa, who is the chairwoman of Trinity Association and Trust.
Who we spotted Historian Dr John Maiben Gilmartin; Graham Hickey of Dublin Civic Trust; Simon Williams of the Trinity Foundation; antiques dealer Roxane Moorhead; conservation architect Kevin Blackwood
What we drank Wine
From the Osservatore Romano, 3 March 2012
Bicentenario della nascita dell’architetto inglese Augustus Welby Pugin
Romantico e profeticoby Roderick O’Donnell
Con O’Connell e Newman contribuì a far uscire dalle catacombe i cattolici anglofoni del XIX secolo
Il duecentesimo anniversario della nascita di Augustus Welby Pugin (su di lui chi scrive ha pubblicato il libro The Pugins and the Catholic Midlands [Gracewing 2002]), il 1° marzo 2012, viene ricordato in Inghilterra e in Irlanda con la celebrazione di sante messe, la presentazione di libri, mostre e conferenze a Dublino, Birmingham, Cheadle, Nottingham e Ramsgate.A dispetto del nome, che ricorda l’antichità pagana romana, Pugin fu uno dei più importanti convertiti alla religione cattolica del movimento romantico del XIX secolo. Come architetto e disegnatore caratterizzò la rinascita cattolica, rendendola per metà romantica — con un ritorno all’ideale di una Chiesa non toccata dalla Riforma protestante e dalla Rivoluzione francese — e per metà profetica, assicurando che i cattolici nel mondo anglofono potessero, almeno attraverso le loro chiese, sfidare il giogo sotto il quale li tenevano le diverse istituzioni protestanti. La sua eredità architettonica è presente in Inghilterra e in Irlanda, in Canada, in Australia (specialmente in Tasmania) e negli Stati Uniti.
Pugin fu educato dal padre nella tradizione del rilievo, per mezzo di misurazioni e di disegni, degli edifici e delle opere d’arte medievali. Era un eccellente disegnatore e trascorreva settimane e mesi in giro per l’Inghilterra e per il continente alla ricerca di quelle che definiva “autorità” per la rinascita dello stile gotico. Un intero libro di schizzi del viaggio a Norimberga del 1838 verrà pubblicato questa settimana dall’Irish Architectural Archive per accompagnare la mostra (aperta fino al 4 maggio) di Dublino «Celebrating Pugin».
Ancor prima di aver creato il suo primo edificio, una casa per se stesso, nel 1835, anno in cui si convertì al cattolicesimo, Pugin era diventato un’autorità nell’arte e nell’architettura medievali. Nel 1843 aveva già costruito 35 chiese, comprese cinque cattedrali, due delle quali in Irlanda. Ben due volte aveva proposto una serie di disegni importanti per la ricostruzione, da parte dell’architetto sir Charles Barry, del palazzo di Westminster a Londra, e a partire dal 1844 disegnò gran parte dei dettagli architettonici interni, delle decorazioni e del mobilio. Realizzò anche un progetto per la parte alta della torre campanaria, il famoso Big Ben, considerato oggi in tutto il mondo il simbolo della Gran Bretagna.
La sua seconda casa, St Augustine’s Grange a Ramsgate (1842-1844), divenne il modello per la riforma delle abitazioni del ceto medio del XIX secolo, poiché con esso si passava dalle file di case a schiera alle villette singole, facendo di lui il padre della periferia.
Pugin, però, era interessato più al lavoro per la Chiesa che a quello per lo Stato. A Ramsgate costruì e finanziò la chiesa di St Augustine (1843-1852), donata poi alla diocesi alla sua morte. S’inseriva nella tradizione dei mastri muratori medievali, i quali costruivano per la gloria di Dio e della Chiesa, firmando i suoi progetti non come “architetto” ma come “muratore”. Cercò dei patrocinatori e trovò un modello perfetto nel pio e generoso XVI conte di Shrewsbury, nel produttore di oggetti in metallo John Hardman e nel vescovo Thomas Walsh, realizzando per e con loro la prima cattedrale cattolica in Inghilterra dopo la Riforma, St Chad’s a Birmingham (1839-1841). Sosteneva che il suo «stile di architettura a punta [fosse] totalmente differente da qualsiasi costruzione “protestante”. Chiunque capirebbe a prima vista che questa è una chiesa cattolica». E di fatto lo era, con la schietta espressione della sua architettura in mattoni e con la facciata occidentale a doppia guglia, la navata centrale, le navate laterali e la profonda abside.
Ancor più cattolici erano gli splendidi interni, per i quali Pugin donò una statua tedesca della Vergine con Bambino, il conte un pulpito e il leggio — tutte opere d’arte del XV secolo — e John Hardman la transenna con il crocifisso (nel 1967 il vescovo demolì la transenna e vendette il leggio al Metropolitan Museum of Art di New York). Pugin supervisionò la progettazione e la realizzazione delle vetrate, gli schemi per la pittura del soffitto e delle pareti, l’encausto delle mattonelle per il pavimento, i lavori di ebanisteria e le parti metalliche per l’arredamento, i metalli preziosi per gli arredi sacri, i tessuti e i lini per i paramenti.
Il ventinovenne Pugin era già in grado di dominare la complessa decorazione che avrebbe poi caratterizzato il suo lavoro nel palazzo di Westminster.
La trionfale conclusione di tutto ciò fu la deposizione delle reliquie di san Chad, a lungo tenute nascoste dai cattolici dopo la Riforma e ora ospitate in un reliquiario nel baldacchino dell’altare maggiore, il tutto realizzato in base ai suoi disegni.
Più caratteristiche rispetto alle cattedrali furono le chiese parrocchiali di Pugin, delle quali St Giles, a Cheadle, nello Staffordshire (1840-1846) rappresenta l’apogeo, generosamente finanziata dal conte di Shrewsbury e costruita con la bellissima arenaria rossa della tenuta di Shrewsbury dagli artigiani della tenuta stessa. Qui la cultura delle cose antiche di Pugin, le sue forme architettoniche e la brillantezza decorativa mantengono un perfetto equilibrio, costituendo una delle più importanti opere dell’arte romantica. Il suo ritorno alla chiesa parrocchiale inglese dell’epoca di re Edoardo i (1297-1327) è «perfetto», come disse egli stesso, «un modello per tutti i bravi “uomini”», sia patrocinatori, sia architetti. I visitatori erano spinti a inginocchiarsi dalla sua intensità, poiché entrarvi era come entrare in un Libro d’Ore miniato medievale, Porta coeli, come esclamò Newman dinanzi al tramezzo della cappella del Santissimo Sacramento.
Pugin fu un importante liturgista e riformatore del culto, anticipando gran parte dell’impeto e del dogmatismo del movimento liturgico. Il suo libro The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture (1843) costituisce un vademecum della sua visione del rinnovamento liturgico. Ritornò alle fonti, analizzando chiese medievali, libri liturgici e commentari, paramenti e arredi d’altare. Eliminò i tabernacoli dagli altari maggiori, introdusse i leggii, il canto gregoriano e illustrò un messale inglese-latino. Censurò il minimalismo liturgico della messa letta e incoraggiò la messa solenne con canti gregoriani e i vespri rispetto alla benedizione.
La competenza architettonica e liturgica di Pugin si rivelò fin troppo bella per il clero che doveva confrontarsi con la realtà di città come Birmingham e, dopo la restaurazione della gerarchia in Inghilterra nel 1850, venne contestato apertamente da un gruppo legato a Wiseman, il cardinale arcivescovo di Westminster, il che fa pensare che poteva essere morto due anni dopo come un uomo abbattuto.
Di fatto, la morte prematura di Pugin nel 1852, a soli quarant’anni, diede inizio a una sua rivalutazione; come scrisse un giornale anglicano, l’«Ecclesiologist»: «abbiamo perso il genio architettonico più illustre e originale del nostro tempo». Le cattedrali di Enniscorthy e di Killarney in Irlanda, la cui costruzione era stata interrotta a causa della carestia, furono completate dal suo primo seguace irlandese, J. J. McCarthy, il “Pugin irlandese”. Questi aggiunse la cappella al grande St Patrick’s College a Maynooth (1845-1849) di Pugin.
Il figlio dello stesso Pugin, Edward, continuò il lavoro e costituì una partnership irlandese responsabile per la cattedrale di St Colman, a Cobh (1859-1919). John Denny, il suo addetto ai lavori a Cheadle, e l’architetto W. W. Wardell (il quale affermò che la sua conversione era merito di Pugin) arrivarono in Australia, dove Wardell avrebbe realizzato due cattedrali: St Patrick’s, a Melbourne (1858-1938), e St Mary’s, a Sydney (iniziata nel 1868 e infine completata nel 2000). Già negli anni Quaranta del diciannovesimo secolo Pugin aveva inviato modelli lignei di nuove chiese, insieme a paramenti “modello”, calici e altri oggetti liturgici, con il vescovo Robert William Willson, primo vescovo di Hobart, in Tasmania, dove si trovano importanti chiese nello stile di Pugin. Per lui Pugin e Hardman fusero un calice inviato dal Papa e lo rimodellarono in stile gotico.
Dall’Irlanda provenivano anche giovani seguaci che poi avrebbero avuto carriere straordinarie come architetti di chiese negli Stati Uniti: Patrick Keely, architetto della cattedrale della Holy Cross a Boston (1866-1875), e Jeremiah O’Rourke. Per costruire la cattedrale del Sacred Heart a Newark, nel New Jersey (iniziata nel 1899 ma completata solo nel 1952), il sacerdote committente e O’Rourke girarono l’Inghilterra e l’Irlanda alla ricerca del «Pugin più anziano».
Quando Pugin si convertì al cattolicesimo nel 1835, egli e tutti gli altri cattolici delle isole britanniche, chiamavano “cappelle” i loro umili luoghi di culto. Questa cittadinanza di seconda categoria derivava da secoli di persecuzione e di emarginazione dei cattolici nel mondo anglofono. Attraverso la sua architettura e la sua decorazione delle chiese, Pugin per lo meno rendeva le persone principi nelle proprie chiese. Nell’omelia in occasione della consacrazione della chiesa di St Mary a Derby, realizzata da Pugin, Wiseman identificò l’edificio come «il vero passaggio dalla cappella all’architettura sacra tra noi». Pugin era una di quelle persone che, come Daniel O’Connell, “il Liberatore”, e il beato John Henry Newman, fecero uscire i cattolici anglofoni del XIX secolo dalle catacombe per portarli alla luce.
Pugin: the man who made the Steam Age medieval
At the bicentenary of that Victorian whirlwind, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, there’s real cause for celebration.By Christopher Howse
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02142/grange_2142777b.jpgRamsgate, which, thanks to St Augustine, gave Christianity to the English, and, thanks to the plumbing, gave typhoid to Queen Victoria, is now convulsed in celebration of the 200th birthday of the most influential architect of the 19th century, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.
Pugin was Ruskin and Brunel rolled into one. Like Ruskin he climbed over cathedral roofs and up teetering ladders to capture in pencil the details of the Middle Ages. Like Brunel he did things, day and night: visiting, writing, arguing, building, pushing on, short of money, short of backers and always short of time. His motto was En avant. “The impression left upon my mind,” wrote a future associate, “was as if a fire engine had passed me.”
He lived at such a rate that he seemed to burst through the surface of the world as if through a drumskin. From solid land, he launched out into the ever restless sea in his own boat, the Caroline. From reality, he launched into stage illusion at Covent Garden. By force of character he dressed the Age of Steam as the Gothic Age, and he kept the pressure in the boiler of his brain so high that, having outlived two and half wives, he died mad himself, aged 40.
Pugin got going before he quite knew what was to be done. He couldn’t write a sentence without a mistake in spelling or grammar, but he wrote a million sentences in carriages, in vestries, in ships, in inns, in trains (which he took to avidly), in daylight and lamplight, haste post haste and reply by return. He told the world that only Gothic would do before he half understood Gothic idiom. He committed a thousand solecisms only because his imagination blew up details that his pencil had traced from medieval originals, and produced ideal buildings, such as the Deanery or St Marie’s College, which by 1834 existed fully formed on paper before Pugin had ever built a house.
He got it into his head that because Gothic architecture had historically been Catholic, then Catholic architecture ought to be Gothic. A Neo-Classical church was to him a pagan temple. It was an attitude that amused and exasperated John Henry Newman, who knew Rome, to which Pugin had made one hurried visit, where only a single Gothic church had ever been built amid its scores in the Classical mode. But it was not by building Catholic churches that Pugin exerted most influence.Because of him, St Pancras station, finished 16 years after his death, was to have pointed arches, like the cathedrals of old. The pagan Neo-Classicism of King’s Cross was old hat now to advanced Victorian taste. For Pugin had invented a style fit for the Victorian polity. When we see the Queen open Parliament, she sits on the throne designed by Pugin, on a carpet of his design, in the chamber of his design in the Palace of Westminster, design by Charles Barry, but with Pugin’s constant aid. Even the clocktower for Big Ben bears strong resemblance to one designed by him for Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire.
There is also a domestic side to Pugin that is very winning. He made buildings for use and houses to be lived in. The house he built himself at Ramsgate, the Grange, with its one entrance for both family and servants, and its staircase-hall for a parlour, is safe in the hands of the Landmark Trust. Next to it stands St Augustine’s church, built at his own expense unhampered by patrons’ whims. Outside, it is of dark, vitreous, knapped flint. The tile-floored interior has, like his house, one space opening into another. “There in stone, oak, iron and glass,” wrote his pupil J H Powell, “the inner spirit of his genius lives – Faith and Truth.”
And today there’s good news for this, Pugin’s cherished project. After years of uncertainty, when it was hard to find the church open, St Augustine’s has raised enough money to keep the roof on, and under the custodianship of Fr Marcus Holden is set fair to preserve Pugin’s legacy, defended by the Pugin Society, while working as the living church he meant it to be. The icing on the birthday cake is the rescue of some Pugin works of art put up for sale by the neighbouring monastery, which has moved to a smaller site. Seven fine pieces of altar-ware were withdrawn from auction this month and will be used at St Augustine’s.
In the church stands a font with an exuberant wooden spire-cover once displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was Pugin’s triumph there that pushed him over the edge. In that vast crystal showroom of everything modern – looms and iron pianos, brewer’s vats and reaping machines – nothing caught the eye of the time more than Pugin’s Medieval Court, dominated by the font and a huge stove, cased in Minton tiles and protected by wrought iron so that it looked like a saint’s shrine. There were textiles, glass, wallpaper and ceramics – all sure to make any Victorian villa truly Medieval. “He has marvellously fulfilled his own intention,” declared the Illustrated London News, “of demonstrating the applicability of medieval art in all its richness and variety to uses of the present day.”
Reacting from this burst of energy, Pugin was prostrated. “I am sure it was brought on,” he wrote in a letter, “by that detestable amount of Paganism & debasement in that exhibition.” Later in the year, he wrote to his metalworker: “I know it is all over with me, but I will draw for you till the break up as they coil up ropes till the ship strikes.” He drifted in and out of lucidity in his last six months, but his hurried brain found time to have laundry lists printed to save his wife work in writing them out each time. He was never happier than in his own house with the women and children he loved.Pirchner Orgelbau Steinach-am-Brenner
Here are some examples of the instruments built by this company -including two Chororgel (epistle and Gospel sides) for the Cathedral of Salzburg:
http://www.orgelbau-pirchner.com/english/werkverzeichnis.htm
Pirchner Orgelbau Steinach-am-Brenner
This is an organbuilder with whom Praxiteles has has contact. The firm both restors and builds fine quality instruments at very reasonable prices.
Kenneth Jones Organ Builders
Circa the present owner and managing director:
http://www.kennethjonesorgans.com/content/DEREK%20BYRNE%20PROFILE.pdf
Kenneth Jones Organ Builders
Kenneth Jones Organ Builders
@derekbyrne wrote:
It would be best to do ones homework before spouting about foreign firms.
Tut tut ! I think we dropped a semiquaver here: mine was an interrogative statement and not an indicative one.
A.W.N. Pugin
‘Gothic for Ever’: A.W.N. Pugin, Lord Shrewsbury and the Rebuilding of Catholic England
Michael Fisher
ISBN 978-1-904965-36-7
A.W.N. Pugin (1812-1852) was the foremost propagandist of the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, whose aim was the restoration of the ancient splendours of the Catholic Church. Turning this vision into reality required a wealthy and influential patron, and Pugin found one in John Talbot (1787-1852), sixteenth earl of Shrewsbury and England’ s leading Catholic layman. Impressed by PuginÕs talent and enthusiasm, and by his devotion to the Church, Lord Shrewsbury provided Pugin with the means and the opportunities he needed, in and around his ancestral Staffordshire estate Ð Alton Towers. The Pugin/Shrewsbury partnership was arguably the most successful and creative of its kind in Victorian Britain, drawing the attention of scholars, artists and architects from all over the country and from overseas. The buildings themselves, and the close relationship between earl and architect, and their wider significance in the context of the Gothic and Catholic Revivals, are examined in detail in this book which has been published to mark the 200th anniversary of Pugin’s birth.
‘This remarkable and significant book is a major contribution to Pugin studies and a fitting contribution to the commemoration of the bicentenary of Pugin’s birth in 2012.’ – The Most Reverend Bernard Longley, M.A., S.T.L., Archbishop of Birmingham
‘A remarkable insight into the dynamic relationship between A. W. N. Pugin and his patron John Talbot, the sixteenth earl of Shrewsbury, creators of Victorian Gothic.’ – Paul Atterbury
‘If you want to discover how great Pugin was, and how much the Church and the Gothic Revival owe to him, this is an essential study’ – Anthony Symondson SJ
‘This handsome book will add greatly to the pleasure of a visit to north Staffordshire’ – Alexandra Wedgwood
Staffordshire-born Michael Fisher has had a lifelong interest in the work of Pugin in his home county. A history graduate of Leicester University and former Research Scholar at Keele, he is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. His publications include Pugin-land (2002), Hardman of Birmingham, Goldsmith and Glasspainter (2008), and Alton Towers: Past and Present (2009), and he has written articles for Country Life. He was an adviser to Time Team in their TV production of Pugin: God of Gothic (2006), and appeared in the programme. He is a member of the Fabric Committee of St Chad’s Cathedral, Birmingham, and of the Alton Towers Heritage Committee. Ordained as an Anglican priest in 1979, he is based at the twelfth-century church of St Chad, Stafford.
Cavan church gets bell tower and spire- 140 years later
A County Cavan church has finally got a bell tower and spire, 140 years later than originally planned.
The tower and spire are part of a €1m restoration project on the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Kingscourt, which was reopened by Bishop Michael Smith of Meath. The project also included the renovation of the roof, major upgrading of electrical and mechanical systems, the restoration of stained glass windows, the provision of disabled access routes and the cleaning and repointing of the stonework.
Stained glass windows, one of them designed by famous artists Evie Hone depicting the Apparition at Fatima and two sets from Harry Clarke Studios, were also refurbished.
Parking facilities have been enhanced and closed-circuit broadcast system installed which will allow the relay of services through the parish website.
When the church was designed by William Hague, one of the leading architects of his time, the intention was that a bell tower and steeple would be included but they were never finished.
Hundreds of parishioners attended the rededication service, at which Fr Padraig McMahon, who is a native of Kingscourt, said a lot had happened since the doors of the church opened 140 years ago.
“We can only imagine the cares and concerns that have occupied the minds and hearts of those who have prayed here during world and civil wars, during depressions, recessions and times of plenty,” he remarked. One thing has remained constant, which is God’s presence; stones and slates are mere materials that stand around us.”
“It takes faith and trust to turn them into a place of prayer and into a house for God’s people,” he said.
The design team for the refurbishment was headed by local architect Niall Smith and the main contractor was firm from nearby Beauparc.
Fratelli Ruffatti
And here is a list of organs built by them:
Fratelli Ruffatti.
Her we can learn somethingof the philosophy and outlook of the Ruffatti company.
http://www.ruffatti.com/history_philosophy.htm
