True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture was first published in 1841, when Pugin was 29 years old. Here he presents coherent arguments for the revival of the Gothic style, the case for which he had made pictorally in his sensational book Contrasts (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.
It is reprinted together with his Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture, first printed in 1843. Much of his thought here 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.
These two seminal books, presented in one volume, are introduced by the architectural historian and Pugin authority Dr Roderick O'Donnell