Voiceover: We're looking across the River Thames
at the Houses of Parliament in London.
Voiceover: It's tempting to think that this
was built hundreds of years earlier than it was.
It was built in the early Victorian era.
Voiceover: There was a great fire in 1834
and it burned down the old palace that had been here
and there was a competition that was held
for designs for a new building.
The competition had the stipulation that
the new structure had to be designed in
one of two historical styles.
It had to either be Gothic or it could be Elizabethan.
That is, from the time of Shakespeare.
Voiceover: There was something like 97 entries
to the competition and the vast majority
were in the Gothic style so that's why
this looks like it was built hundreds of years before.
It's in the style of the Gothic
which dates from the late medieval period.
Voiceover: The competition was won
by an architect who's name is Charles Barry
with the assistance of Augustus Pugin,
who's responsible for the interior designs
as well as the stained glass
and some of the exterior decorative forms.
Voiceover: Pugin was known for his love of the Gothic,
for his belief in the Gothic as the right
and true moral style of architecture
and also style of architecture that
was associated with Englishness.
This is why the competition stipulated
it needed to be Elizabethan or Gothic.
We think about the Gothic as French,
but in England in the 19th century,
the Gothic was English.
Voiceover: I think it raises the issue
why was the 19th century so fascinated
with reviving older architectural styles?
What was that about and, of course,
the reason has to do with industrialization
with the new modern world
and the way that that unsettled people.
Voiceover: Well, the modern era seemed ugly,
a period of factories and steam engines.
It seemed like there was nothing beautiful about it.
When they looked at the past,
they saw the beautiful architecture of the Gothic period.
They looked at the classical paths
and they saw beauty,
but when they looked around them,
they didn't see beauty.
They saw the industrial world.
Voiceover: This was now a period when
you could buy cheaply made goods
for the first time and the old systems
of handicraft had been replaced.
People had moved from the country
where people had learned through apprenticeship
traditions of making things,
but now things were being produced by factories
and it was an unsettling period
so I think it's natural that people looked back
to historical styles, especially a building like this
which was meant to be the seat of government.
Voiceover: And is still today the seat of government.
This is where the House of Commons meets.
This is where the House of Lords meets.
This building represents the Parliamentary system
so you're right, it had to really speak of tradition.
Voiceover: But it really speaks of a kind of falsehood.
This is not the Gothic.
It is a modern invention.
In fact, the building itself uses
quite a number of modern innovations
in its constructive techniques.
It's an enormous building on a concrete bed,
certainly not a medieval tradition,
concerned with ventilation.
In fact, the central tower was added to the design
in order to help support ventilation in the building
and so this building really is
a product of the 19th century.
Voiceover: Architectural historians call this
the Gothic Revival and the Gothic really did
stand for a kind of Victorian fantasy,
a 19th century fantasy, of medieval
artisan craftsmanship, of a time of really
taking care in making things by hand,
and so we look at this and we just see
an architectural style, but it's a style
that's really associated with very specific values
that the Victorians were trying to return to.
Voiceover: And, in fact, Pugin,
one of the two architects who worked on this building,
published a book called Contrasts,
which paired the modern and the medieval worlds
and the modern world did not come out well.
It was a deeply moralizing book that
looked at the way in which medieval society
was full of moral virtue but the modern society
had squandered that, so for example,
there was one famous plate that showed
the modern city where the skyline was
dominated by factories and smokestacks
versus the medieval city where the landscape
was dominated by church steeples,
that is, by a reverence for God, a kind of moral center.
Voiceover: Comparison between a world
guided by faith that he imagined
was the medieval Gothic world
and a world guided by hunger for money.
He's drawing very stark contrasts,
but the Victorians loved to do that.
They loved to compare the old medieval world of faith
with the new modern quest for money and fortune.
Voiceover: And so it's important for us to
understand a building like this
within that Victorian context.
Let's get back to the building itself.
We see this magnificent exterior that
just spans the edge of the River Thames
and we can see this reference back to
the medieval style of the perpendicular Gothic
and, in fact, it was very self consciously
based on the Chapel of Henry VII
in this late Gothic style that we know as the perpendicular.
It's just at the east end of Westminster Abbey,
which is the building that is just behind this one
and here we can see these large windows
and emphasis on the rectiliner,
on the vertical, on tracery and lacework.
Voiceover: We can see that each window
has had its top tracery work
that divides the glass up,
almost like a filigree of fact.
The architect is really maximizing the window space
and this is a feature of the high Gothic.
Voiceover: Barry had traveled extensively
and really loved the classical tradition,
even though he's building here in this faux Gothic.
But if you look closely,
you can see Barry's interest in the classical.
Look at the regularity of this facade.
Look at the sense of rhythm and balance.
And it's really only the exterior decorative forms
that refer to the Gothic style
because the building as a whole is laid out
with a kind of symmetry regularity that
is really at odds even with the conception
of the Gothic from the 18th and 19th centuries
where the idea of the picturesque,
the idea of the organic,
the idea of the asymmetrical was so important.
Voiceover: So we could say that this is,
in some ways, a classical building
with a Gothic skin on it.
Voiceover: Nevertheless or perhaps
because of this, the Houses of Parliament
is just such an extraordinary example
of the 19th century's concern for historical style.
Voiceover: And an interest in avoiding
confronting the modern.