Gothic Revival architecture

Gothic Revival began as a picturesque experiment in mid-1700s England. From 1749 Horace Walpole rebuilt Strawberry Hill outside London with battlements, turrets, and a deliberately irregular silhouette, and wrote The Castle of Otranto (1764) in the same house: the style and the Gothic novel share a birthplace. The 19th century made it a moral program. Augustus Pugin argued in Contrasts (1836) that Gothic reflected a purer society, John Ruskin followed with The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and the ecclesiological movement insisted Gothic was the only proper style for a parish church. When the Palace of Westminster was rebuilt after the 1834 fire, Charles Barry’s Gothic design won, with Pugin supplying the details.

You recognize the style by pointed arches around doors and windows, steep gables, towers, finials, lancet windows with tracery, and large story-telling stained glass. The forms are borrowed from medieval Gothic of roughly 1250-1500, but the buildings are modern: industrial production made Gothic detail cheap to repeat, sometimes even in cast iron. Keep the split in mind on the street: Gothic is the medieval original, Gothic Revival its 19th-century echo.

The revival traveled. Viollet-le-Duc restored Notre-Dame and Carcassonne in France, work on Cologne Cathedral’s medieval fabric resumed in 1842 and finished in 1880, and in North America church and campus Gothic carried on deep into the 20th century.

Fashion turned in the 1880s and 1890s, and by the 1930s Victorian architecture was broadly condemned. The founding of the Victorian Society in 1958 marked the turn back, and Strawberry Hill itself, restored at a cost of 9 million pounds, reopened to visitors in 2010.