If Pugin were alive

there would be no doubt that he would be loud and clear against the proposed "restoration" of the sanctuary of St Colman's Cathedral in Ireland which he designed.

He hated classical architecture as modern. What would he have said about today's buildings. Unlike classical buildings that tend to be of one piece, gothic buildings grow and change organically over centuries. Chartres Cathedral is the one gothic building of the Middle Ages that was built in one generation. Pugin's buildings of their nature are built as an intrinsic unity but this imposition of a sanctuary is no organic change. This unatural change in architecture is mirrored in modernist philosophy and theology. Unnatural and novel and of no intrinsic merit.

The planning application has now been blocked. See also the picture galleries.