Gothic Revival

The revival of medieval Gothic forms, pointed arches, tracery, pinnacles, that began as an antiquarian taste in mid-eighteenth-century England at Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill and became the dominant style for churches, universities and public buildings across the nineteenth century. Augustus Pugin championed it as a moral as well as an aesthetic choice, and its most consequential built expression, the Houses of Parliament at Westminster designed by Charles Barry with Pugin, rebuilt the seat of the British government after the fire of 1834 in the historical language its own founding a few decades earlier had helped make fashionable again.