566. Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin,
Palace of Westminster, also known as the Houses of Parliament,

London, 1836-c. 1860 (United Kingdom)

The Palace of Westminster, as this great complex is more correctly termed, is the seat of the two British Houses of Parliament. It was erected following the destruction of most of the old parliamentary buildings in a great fire in 1834. The chosen style was Perpendicular Gothic of the 15th century, meant to reflect the medieval origins of the English parliamentary system and to harmonise with surviving medieval fragments of Westminster Hall and St. Stephen’s Chapel, as well as neighbouring Westminster Abbey. Barry, a Classicist, produced façades with a regular system of bays; Pugin, a pioneering and committed Gothic Revivalist, found this too repetitive: he once remarked that the Palace was “All Grecian ... Tudor details on a classic body.” Indeed, only a few major elements lend the composition a calculated asymmetry: these include the 98.5 metre Victoria Tower (housing the Parliamentary archives) and the 96.3 metre Clock Tower (often mistakenly referred to as ‘Big Ben,’ which is actually the name of the 14-tonne bell inside it). Pugin toiled endlessly to produce authentically medieval designs for wallpapers, tiled floors, sculptures, stained glass and large-scale furnishings, including the royal thrones and canopies. Comprising about 1100 rooms, the Palace was only fully completed in 1870.