England'.Pugin had been trained in his father's drawing office, a powerhouse of architectural and antiquarian scholarship, where his brillaint draughtmanship developed. In this long and distinguished tradition he found a quite new, and to him causal, connection between art and life. The driving force behind his mission was his deep Catholic faith.
In an age of booming opportunites in print, Pugin's books, pamphlets and journalism established him as an architectural and Catholic controversialist. True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture was published in 1841, when Pugin was 29 years old. In it he presented coherent arguments for the revival of the Gothic style, the case for which he had made pictorially in his sensational book Contrasts, first published in 1836. For Pugin, the Gothic Revival was 'not a style but a principle' and this he laid down in his most influential architectural treatise, True Principles, which introduced functionalist and rationalist as well as moral criteria into architectural discourse, much of it still resonant in the twentieth-century Modern Movement.
An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture appeared two years after True Principles in 1843. Much of his thought in the Apology is on architectural education, and in shuffling off the straitjacket of neoclassical architectural principles Pugin exercised a great influence in mid-Victorian architecture and the applied arts, and in a wider design reform movement. His own house, the Grange, Ramsgate (1843) begins the best and most creative period of Victorian domestic architecture as it was to develop up to 1914.
Though long in influence, Pugin's books were short-lived as publications and neither True Principles nor An Apology were reprinted during his lifetime. True Principles was republished in a new edition in 1853 (the year of Pugin's death), then again at the end of the nineteenth century. Facsimile editions of both works appeared in the mid twentieth century but have been long out of print.
Since the original edition of An Apology is often bound together with True Principles in its 1853 reprint it seems historically appropriate to reissue the two works once again as one volume, but in fascimile of the first edition of each, providing an oppurtunity for the architectural student and the Pugin entusiast to acquire these important source books in a practical inexpensive edition.
The two books are introduced here by the architectural historian and Pugin authority Dr Roderick O'Donnell, whose previous book The Pugins and the Catholic Midlands (9780852445679 £7.99)