SMALL PRINT:THE ARCHITECT Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin is one of those historical figures who achieved a vast amount in a short life and is thought to have died, at 40, of exhaustion, having been committed to Bedlam for a short time before that.

Pugin not only produced a vast amount of work – designing more than 100 churches in Britain and Ireland as well as Big Ben and parts of the Houses of Parliament – he was also married three times and fell in love twice more (and had eight children). He changed the style of church architecture in these isles, and controversially converted to Catholicism in 1835. He wrote to a friend in 1834: “I feel perfectly convinced the Roman Catholic church is the only true one, and the only one in which the grand and sublime style of church architecture can ever be restored.”

To coincide with the bicentenary of Pugin’s birth, an exhibition of his drawings opens at the Irish Architectural Archive (IAA) today. These drawings (above) are being shown to the public for the first time. As Michael Webb, chairman of the Irish Architectural Archive, writes in the exhibition book: “Pugin was, more than anyone else, responsible for the adoption of the Gothic revival style as the national style of Victorian Britain and so transformed completely architecture in Britain and Ireland.”

One of Pugin’s main Catholic patrons was John Talbot, 16th earl of Shrewsbury, who commissioned one of his most famous buildings, St Giles’ Church in Cheadle, Staffordshire, which was completed in 1846. Pugin also worked on the Talbot family pile at Alton Towers.

Of the many buildings in Ireland that Pugin designed, in counties Kerry, Wexford, Dublin (including the chapel at Loreto Rathfarnham), Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Offaly, some of his best known are the cathedrals at Enniscorthy and Killarney, and the seminary at Maynooth.

Celebrating Pugin is at the Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, until

May 4th