Collins/Kaufmann Forum: Martin Bressani, "Architecture as Dramatization: A.W.N. Pugin’s Saint Marie’s Grange"
The talk presents a detailed analysis of British Neo-Gothic architect A.W.N. Pugin’s Saint Marie’s Grange, a house he built for himself near Salisbury in 1835. It contends that Saint Marie’s Grange embodies a need for melodramatic dramatization, tending towards an excessive representation of life which situates its inhabitants within the grandiose terms of a moral battle: not within the domain of realism, as its robust functionalist distinction of building elements has often led commentators to place it, but in the higher domain of truth. The house embodies how, for Pugin, a spiritual reality lies just below the surface of daily life, how gestures within the world of the everyday refer to another, hyperbolic set of gestures implicating the fight between good and evil.