Architectural history has many aspects. Ideas and theories, points of view and programmes can have real importance even when, as with the Picturesque and the earlier stages of the Gothic Revival, most of the buildings which derive from them or follow their prescriptions are lacking in individual distinction. Volume of production is also significant; the disproportion between the previous chapter and the four that precede it expresses fairly accurately the difference in the amount of building in the first half of the century belonging, at least by a broad definition, to the rubric of Romantic Classicism and the very much smaller amount—up to 1840 at least and outside England—that can be considered essentially Picturesque or programmatically Neo-Gothic. But the history of architecture must include the history of building as a craft or technic; sometimes the story of technical development is—or has appeared to posterity to be—more important than any other aspect of a particular historical development. Such has been the case until quite lately with the rise of the Gothic in the twelfth century in France; it has also seemed true in varying degree for the nineteenth century to many historians and critics.

The Industrial Revolution induced a parallel but gradual revolution in building methods; even today, after two hundred years, the potentialities of that revolution have not been fully actualized. The technical story, particularly as it concerns the structural use of ferrous metals, first cast iron,^[146] next wrought iron, and then steel, begins well before 1800. There has already been occasion to mention, in passing, technical innovations in various edifices where those innovations had a determinant effect on the total architectural result. But it is worth while, partly for the intrinsic interest of the subject, partly as preparation for subsequent technical developments of great importance later in the nineteenth and in the twentieth century, to go back to the beginning and to recount sequentially the episodes in the rise of iron as a prime building material, as also to touch at least on the concurrent use of other ‘fireproof’ materials and the vastly increased exploitation of glass. This sequence of episodes reaches a real culmination in the fifties with the construction of a considerable number of ‘Crystal Palaces’, first in London and then all over the western world, edifices that were almost entirely of iron and glass.

A marked change in the situation came around 1855. For one thing, it was in that year that Sir Henry Bessemer invented a new method of making steel in quantity so that it could be profitably used for large building components. However, the full architectural possibilities of the use of structural steel were hardly grasped before the nineties. There was also in the fifties an increasingly general realization that unprotected iron was not as fire-resistant^[147] as had hitherto been fondly supposed. Then, too—and perhaps most significantly—a sharp shift in taste at this time, leading to a predominant preference for the massively plastic in architecture, made unfashionable both the delicate membering suitable to iron and the smooth transparent surfaces provided by large areas of glass (see Chapters 8-11).

The technical development of the use of ferrous metals in building continued unbroken beyond the fifties; indeed, most of the quantitative records of the first half of the century, in the way of distances spanned and volumes enclosed, were progressively exceeded in the sixties, seventies, and eighties (see Chapter 16). From the point of view of architecture, however, the story passes more or less out of sight for a generation. To a certain extent metal literally ‘went underground’ as new types of foundations were evolved for taller and heavier buildings; but more generally metal structure was masked with stone or brick, as was first proposed in the forties in England, to provide protection against the adverse effects of extreme heat in urban fires (see Chapter 14). When the use of exposed metal and glass became significant again in the nineties that use was to be a major constituent of general architectural development as it has remained ever since (see Chapters 16, 22, 23, and 25). But down to the 1850s the rise of iron and glass is best considered as a separate story.

This story is not confined to the most advanced countries. The tall, slim columns used by Wren in 1706 to support the galleries in the old House of Commons seem to have been of iron^[148]; but short ones, introduced in 1752, can still be seen in the kitchen of the Monastery of Alcobaça in Portugal, and a very early use of iron beams was in the Marble Palace at Petersburg built by Antonio Rinaldi (1709-94) in 1768-72. The main line of development, however, was undoubtedly English, French, and American. Definitely dated 1770-2 were the iron members supporting the galleries in St Anne’s, Liverpool.

A much more notable and better publicized use of iron followed shortly after this when metal replaced masonry for the entire central structure of the Coalbrookdale Bridge in Shropshire. This was begun in 1777 by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard (?-1777) with the active co-operation of Abraham Darby III, an important local ironmaster.^[149] Darby’s Coalbrookdale Foundry cast the iron elements that were needed and the bridge was completed in 1779. Pritchard was an architect, and architects played a more important part in the story of the early development of iron construction than is generally realized. Soon, however, the importance of special problems of statics to which such construction gave rise and, above all, the need to measure accurately the strength of various components required the expert assistance of civil engineers, and often the engineers came to build on their own without the collaboration of architects.

At this point the story crosses the channel to France.^[150] There Soufflot, the very technically minded architect of the Paris Panthéon—one of the edifices with an account of which this book began—assisted by his pupil Brébion, provided in 1779-81 an iron roof over the stair-hall^[151] that he built to lead up to the Grande Galerie of the Louvre. In the next few years two rather obscure French architects, Ango and Eustache Saint-Fart (1746-1822), were occupied, respectively, with the introduction of iron framing and of ‘flower-pot’ (i.e. hollow-tile) elements supported on timber framework to produce more or less fireproof types of floors. Over the years 1786-90 the great French theatre architect J.-V. Louis (1731-1800), horrified by the recurrent fires at the Palais Royal, combined these two ideas when he designed the roof of the new Théâtre Français in Paris.

Now the main line of advance returns to England. In 1792-4 Soane avoided timber altogether in the fireproof vaults of his Consols Office at the Bank of England, using nothing but specially made earthenware pots; he also covered the twenty-foot oculus in the central vault with a lantern of iron and glass (Plate 3). The architectural qualities of this interior have already been stressed. Even more important for later architecture, however, although effectively invisible, had been the adoption just before this of French principles in a calico mill at Derby and the West Mill at Belper, both begun in 1792. These were planned and carried out by the millowner-engineer William Strutt (1756-1830) who used specially designed iron stanchions throughout carrying timber beams and, in the top storey only, ‘flower-pot’ vaults between the beams such as Saint-Fart had first introduced, but flat brick vaults or ‘jack-arches’ elsewhere.

Other mills soon followed. The first to have iron beams as well as stanchions seems to be the Benyons, Marshall & Bage flax spinning mill in St Michael’s Street, Shrewsbury. This was built in 1796-7 from the designs of Charles Bage (1752-1822) a friend and correspondent of Strutt. The much-publicized Salford Twist Company’s cotton mill at Salford of 1799-1801, designed and built by Boulton & Watt of steam-engine fame—they knew Bage’s mill since they had installed his steam-engine—was according to present evidence the second^[152] to be erected with a complete internal skeleton of iron. By 1800, then, a system of fire-resistant construction using cast-iron stanchions and cast-iron beams, carrying what are sometimes called ‘jack-arches’ of brick, had been established in the world of English mill-building. By 1850 such construction was in use in Britain for almost all high-grade building. The system was significantly modified, however, after about 1845 by the substitution of rolled—that is wrought—iron beams, as proposed by Sir William Fairbairn (1789-1874),^[153] since cast-iron ones had proved dangerously brittle.

It is not necessary here to do more than sketch out the steps by which the new iron skeleton structure became generally accepted. In 1802-11 James Wyatt introduced it in the Castellated New Palace that he built at Kew for George III, an edifice of which little is otherwise known since it was demolished in 1827-8. In line with this curious conjunction of technical and stylistic innovation, already noted in Schinkel’s somewhat later cast-iron Gothic monument of 1819-20 in Berlin, is Porden’s profuse use of iron for the Gothic traceries and balustrades at Eaton Hall^[154] in Cheshire in 1804-12, as also by Hopper in the even more ornate Gothic Conservatory at Carlton House in London in 1811-12 (Plate 60B).

Isolated columns of iron appeared in many edifices from the 1790s on. The most notable extant examples, perhaps, are those in the kitchen and in several of the rooms that were added by Nash to the Royal Pavilion at Brighton in 1818-21 (Plate 58A). His ‘Chinese’ staircases of 1815-18 there are entirely of decorative pierced ironwork and the framing of his big onion dome is also of metal, although of course invisible. From the early use of iron columns for gallery supports in churches, increasingly general by the early 1800s, there shortly developed the aspiration to exploit iron still more extensively in such edifices. In three churches that Rickman and the ironmaster John Cragg built in Liverpool, St George’s, Everton, and St Michael’s, Toxteth Road, both begun in 1813, and St Philip’s, Hardman Street, completed in 1816, the entire internal structure is of iron. At St Michael’s the new material is not restricted to the interior but appears on the outside as well. Rickman’s increasing archaeological erudition and that of his contemporaries soon limited the use of iron in Gothic churches, however; by Pugin and the Camdenians it was rigidly proscribed. Structural elements of iron in churches of any architectural pretension became acceptable again only in the fifties (see Chapter 10).

Turning to what long remained the most notable field of metal construction, bridge building,^[155] one finds a rapid increase in the numbers and the spans of English metal bridges from the mid 1790s on. In Shropshire, where the first iron bridge and the first all-iron-framed factory had been built, one of the greatest English engineers, Thomas Telford (1757-1834),^[156] built the Buildwas Bridge with a span of 130 feet in 1795-6. At the same time the much longer and handsomer metal arch of the Sunderland Bridge in County Durham was rising to the designs of Rowland Burdon. He was assisted, it appears, by certain ideas supplied by Thomas Paine (1737-1809), better known for his political writings than as a technician, who had had some association with bridge-building in America. Burdon was a Member of Parliament and neither an architect nor an engineer. Telford, however, though not professionally trained as an architect, had worked for Sir William Chambers as a journeyman-mason on Somerset House in his youth; throughout his career he built masonry toll-houses and even, on occasion, modest churches in a competent if rudimentary Romantic Classical vein.

In connexion with his work on the Bridgewater Canal and on the road system of the Scottish Highlands, Telford designed and built innumerable bridges, the majority of them of stone. But some of his later iron bridges, more skilfully devised technically and more graceful visually than the Buildwas Bridge, deserve mention here. On the Waterloo Bridge of 1815 at Bettws-y-Coed in Wales he used an openwork inscriptional band and floral badges rather than architectural detail to give elegance and even richness to a modest cast-iron arch. A longer and simpler bridge of similar design but unknown authorship built in 1816 still spans the Liffey in Dublin.

The same year as the Waterloo Bridge, at Craigellachie, amid austere Scottish mountains, Telford bridged the Spey with a plain latticed iron arch. But it is worth noting that he elaborated the masonry abutments as battlemented towers in a wholly Picturesque way (Plate 59). For the Menai Bridge, built in 1819-24 between North Wales and Anglesey, Telford used a new principle in metal construction, suspending his roadbed from metal chains (Plate 58B). This was a principle of great antiquity already exploited with success in America.^[157] Telford’s masonry towers at the Menai Bridge are of extremely elegant Romantic Classical design, tapered like Egyptian pylons and pierced with delicate arches. In the twin bridge to this at Conway, also in North Wales, the close proximity of the Edwardian castle led him to provide Castellated towers. In a still later arched bridge at Tewkesbury of 1826 the latticed metalwork itself has the cuspings of Gothic tracery.

The Menai Bridge remains the longest of its type in the British Isles. I. K. Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol, for which he won the competition in 1829, but which was begun only in 1837, has already been mentioned because of the Egyptian detailing proposed for the piers. This bridge was finally completed only in 1864 by W. H. Barlow (1812-92) using the materials of Brunel’s earlier Hungerford Suspension Bridge in London. Of early arched metal bridges there are very many and by all the leading English engineers of the first half of the century: John Rennie (1761-1821), I. K. Brunel (1806-59), George Stephenson (1781-1848) and his son Robert (1803-59), as well as Telford. The new railways, from the early thirties on, required even more bridges than the canals constructed by the previous generation.

In France Napoleon’s engineers built two arched iron bridges across the Seine. L.-A. de Cessart (1719-1806) designed before 1800 and Delon in 1801-3 executed the Pont des Arts, the first French bridge of iron, and Lamandé completed the Pont du Jardin du Roi in 1806.^[158] Neither is comparable in span or in logic of design to the earlier English examples, thus reversing the pre-eminence which the French had held as bridge-builders so long as masonry was used. The much later Pont du Carrousel in Paris, built by A.-R. Polonceau (1788-1847) in 1834-6, was considerably superior to these Napoleonic examples, though hardly epoch-making. But already in 1824, just as Telford’s Menai Bridge was completed, Marc Séguin (1786-1875) was spanning the Rhône near Tournon with a suspension bridge hung on wire ropes^[159] instead of chains.

From the early forties Séguin’s cable principle was developed much further in America in bridges at Wheeling, W. Va., Pittsburgh, Penna., and Cincinnati, Ohio, by the German immigrant John A. Roebling (1806-69). Those at Wheeling^[160] and Cincinnati are still in use. The more dramatically sited Niagara Falls Bridge of 1852, which attracted world-wide attention when it was new, is no longer extant (Plate 60A); its success, however, led to Roebling’s being commissioned to build the famous Brooklyn Bridge^[161] in New York. Begun by him in 1869 and completed by his son Washington A. Roebling (1837-1926) in 1883, this is still one of the principal sights of New York. It is sad to record that work in the caissons sunk for the foundations of the piers killed the designer.

Bridges are at the edge of the realm of architecture. Fairly early, moreover, they came almost entirely under the control of men without architectural training or standards—Roebling, for example, was such a one. Ordinary buildings, all of iron or with much use of iron, are more significant as the century proceeds, both in France and in England. Hopper’s Carlton House Conservatory (Plate 60B) has been mentioned. In 1809 the architect F.-J. Belanger (1744-1818), a pupil of Brongniart, replaced the domed wooden roof of the Halle au Blé in Paris, added in 1782 by J.-G. Legrand (1743-1807) and J. Molinos (1743-1831), with one of metal. The Marché de la Madeleine, designed by M.-G. Veugny (1785-1850) possibly as early as 1824 but not built until 1835-8, was apparently all of metal internally; its masonry exterior, however, was quite conventional. Already in 1835, in the fish pavilion which formed part of his rather Durandesque Hungerford Market in London, Charles Fowler had outstripped this in the direct and elegant use of light metal components, here with no surrounding shell of masonry at all.

Some further Continental examples of the use of iron in the late twenties and thirties deserve mention at this point. Alavoine—at whose suggestion Duc’s Bastille Column, begun in 1831, was made of metal, though the metal is bronze not iron—designed in 1823 a flèche 432 feet tall to rise over the crossing of Rouen Cathedral in the form of an openwork cage of iron. Begun in 1827 and interrupted in 1848, this was finally completed by the younger Barthélémy (Eugène, 1841-98) and L.-F. Desmarest (1814-?) in 1877. In 1829-31 Fontaine roofed the Galeried’Orléans, which he built across the garden of the Palais Royal, with iron and glass. This structure, now destroyed, was more prominent and also much wider than most of the many passages and galeries^[162] with glass roofs that had been built in Paris and elsewhere in France from the 1770s on. The most impressive extant French example is the Passage Pommeraye in Nantes, built by Durand-Gasselin and J.-B. Buron (?-1881) in 1843; in this the circulation moves upwards from one end to the other through three storey-levels. A modest Milanese example of 1831, the Galleria de Cristoforis by Andrea Pizzala (?-1862), might be mentioned here also, as it was the local prototype for the greatest of all these characteristic nineteenth-century urban features, Mengoni’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele begun in the sixties (Plate 75B). Of the many early nineteenth-century ones that remain in other European cities, the Galerie Saint-Hubert in Brussels, built by J.-P. Cluysenaer (1811-80), a pupil of Suys, in 1847, is one of the largest and best maintained. Warren’s Providence Arcade in Providence, R.I., has been mentioned earlier.

Related to the galeries, and sometimes also so-called, were the large Parisian enterprises of this period that were really early department stores. The Bazar de l’Industrie, built by Paul Lelong (1799-1846) in 1830, had a large glass-roofed and iron-galleried court of the sort that was to be continued in Parisian department stores down into the present century (see Chapter 16). Even larger and bolder were the similar courts in the department store known as the Galeries du Commerce et de l’Industrie, built by Grisart and Froehlicher in the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle in 1838, which has already been mentioned for its richly arcaded Renaissance façades (Plate 62A). Shop-fronts of iron were also frequent in Paris^[163] by this time. Thus in France, as in England and America, the use of iron was closely associated with structures for business use, but more usually with sales emporia than with office buildings (see Chapter 14). Such, however, were not unknown in England and America, though they were generally less extensive and made less use of glass-roofed courts.

Glass held in wooden frames had for some time been extensively employed for greenhouses. How early iron began to be substituted for wood is not clear, and not perhaps of much consequence.^[164] Hopper’s ornately Gothic Conservatory of iron and glass at Carlton House in London, demolished in the twenties, has been mentioned several times already (Plate 60B). In 1833, at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Charles Rohault de Fleury (1801-75) built a very large and handsome iron greenhouse without any stylistic decoration. The structure of the square pavilions was as transparent and rectilinear as the interior framework of Veugny’s slightly later market seems to have been, and the ranges between were covered, just as so many wooden greenhouses had been, with transparent roofs rising in two quadrants. At Chatsworth in Derbyshire the Great Conservatory was built in 1836-40 by the 6th Duke of Devonshire’s gardener, Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-65), possibly with some minor assistance from Decimus Burton. This quite outclassed the largest earlier greenhouse, the Anthaeum at Brighton, designed in 1825 and built in 1832-3 for the horticulturist Henry Phillips, with a dome of iron and glass 160 feet in diameter which collapsed before it was quite completed. The Chatsworth conservatory was a still larger rectangle, 227 feet by 123 feet, with the exterior rising in a double cusp like the side ranges of Rohault’s Paris greenhouse—or, for that matter, like the section of the Anthaeum. The columns and beams here were of iron, but the great arched principals of the ‘nave’ and the ‘aisles’ were of laminated wood and four-foot long panes of glass were held in wooden sashes arranged in a ridge-and-furrow pattern. A particular invention of Paxton’s, whose name was given to such roofs, was the hollowing out of the wooden members at the base of the furrows to serve as gutters.

Decimus Burton’s still extant Palm Stove at Kew, carried out by the contracting engineer Richard Turner of Dublin in 1845-7, with rounded ends and a higher central area, is more bubble-like than Paxton’s because of the absence of ridges and furrows on its continuously glazed surface (Plate 67A). But both these great greenhouses were among the most striking monuments of their Early Victorian day and were never exceeded later in elegance though often in size. French rivals, long since destroyed, were the Jardins d’Hiver in Lyons and Paris of 1841 and 1847 by Hector Horeau (1801-72), the latter a rectangle 300 by 180 feet and 60 feet tall.

With the thirties begins the story of a new building type, the railway station,^[165] in whose sheds the mid century was to realize some of the largest and finest examples ever of ‘ferrovitreous’, or iron-and-glass, construction. The structures utilizing iron thus far mentioned have been of two sorts, some, such as bridges, markets, greenhouses, etc., with only subsidiary masonry elements, if any at all; others, examples of mixed construction with metal providing only the internal skeleton or the roof. Railway stations were generally—and before the fifties always—examples of mixed construction, but of a rather special sort. The iron and glass portions, that is the sheds, and the masonry portions are likely to be merely juxtaposed, not truly integrated. Such a masonry frontispiece as Hardwick’s Euston Arch in London of 1835-7 had no connexion at all with the functional elements of the station behind—here by Robert Stephenson—although Euston was an extreme case. But a happy co-ordination of the masonry and the iron-and-glass portions of stations was rarely achieved anywhere.

Of the earliest railway station, that at Crown Street in Liverpool of 1830, nothing remains; it was in any case a very modest structure.^[166] Of its successors at Lime Street the present station is the fourth on the site. Even the ‘Arch’ at Euston, the next major station to be built, is now gone, despite the strenuous efforts of the Victorian Society and others in Britain and overseas to save this symbolic portal to the Victorian Age. However, the first station at Temple Meads in Bristol, which was built by Brunel in 1839-40, is physically intact, though supplanted in present-day use by a larger and later one. Castellated as regards the masonry block in front, the shed here is equally medievalizing; for its roof is of timber, not of iron, and based on the fourteenth-century hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall in London, whose width it exceeds by a few feet only.

Of the once far finer Trijunct station at Derby, built in 1839-41, the last portions of Francis Thompson’s brick screen have finally been destroyed; the three original sheds provided by Robert Stephenson, with Thompson’s collaboration on the detailing, were each 56 feet wide in comparison to the 40-foot width of Stephenson’s earlier ones at Euston (Plate 62B). The tie-beam roof had much of the graceful directness and linear elegance of Rohault’s greenhouse or Veugny’s market.

More and more, the use of iron was being generally accepted as a technical necessity in the forties. At Buckingham Palace Blore, in adapting one of Nash’s side pavilions as a chapel for Queen Victoria in 1842-3, used visible iron supports just as Nash had done so long before in the interiors of the Brighton Pavilion for her uncle. Yet generally the use of iron in important masonry structures in the thirties and the early forties was quite invisible, being confined to the floors and the substructure of the roofs. In 1837-9 C.-J. Baron (1783-1855) and Nicolas Martin (1809-?), for example, provided a complete iron roof above the vaults of Chartres Cathedral, a work of very considerable scale and technical elaboration that provided the immediate prototype for the iron roof of Gau’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, designed in 1840 and begun in 1846. At the Houses of Parliament, the actual construction of which started only in 1840, Barry capped the whole with iron roofs—the external iron plates are actually visible, of course, but the fact of their being of iron is rarely recognized. Fireproof floors built according to various French and English patent systems were increasingly thought necessary in all high-grade construction. Queen Victoria’s Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, constructed without the aid of an architect by the builder Thomas Cubitt, had them throughout, as did many other well-built country houses of the forties, at least in the passages and stair-halls.

Here and there in the commercial buildings of this decade the iron skeleton used inside came through to the exterior, as it had on one of Rickman’s Liverpool churches a generation earlier. A small office building at No. 50 Watling Street in London, with visible iron supports and lintels in the upper storeys but with brick corner piers and brick spandrels, was a case in point, probably dating from early in the decade. By 1844 Fairbairn was recommending in a report that fireproof construction should be used in all warehouses. Increasingly this was done in Lancashire and, before long, elsewhere; Fairbairn himself had introduced it ten years earlier in the Jevons Warehouse on the New Quay in Manchester.

Closely associated with the development of iron construction is the development of prefabrication; indeed, the parts of an elaborate iron edifice, such as a bridge or a greenhouse, are necessarily prefabricated and merely assembled at the site. From the early forties, and perhaps even before that, lighthouses were frequently erected in ironmasters’ yards in Britain, disassembled, shipped to Bermuda or the Barbadoes, and then reassembled. In 1843 John Walker of London provided a prefabricated palace for an African king and, by the end of the decade, prefabricated warehouses and dwellings of iron were being supplied to gold-diggers in California and emigrants to Australia in very considerable quantity. A look at the prefabricated houses of the 1940s will perhaps explain why almost none of these ancestors of a century earlier seems to have survived, at least in recognizable form. None the less, the advance of prefabrication remains a notable technical—though hardly architectural—achievement of the 1840s and 1850s.

To the mid and late forties belong several splendid examples of mixed construction in various countries that not only represent technical feats of a high order but are also fully architectural in character. Some are by architects, others by teams of architects and engineers working in close collaboration. In building the Britannia Bridge,^[167] which crosses the Menai Strait near Telford’s Menai Bridge, the Derby Trijunct team of Stephenson and Thompson in 1845-50 utilized with great success the rectangular tubes built up of wrought-iron plates that Fairbairn, the consulting engineer, recommended (Plate 61). The Holyhead railway line still passes through these tubes. The masonry entrances and the tall towers, taller than they need have been because of Stephenson’s original intention to use suspensory members for additional support to his rigid tubes, were superbly detailed by Thompson. Contemporaries called them Egyptian, but the design has already been noted as fully consonant with Romantic Classicism though quite devoid of Grecian elements. At least the sculptor John Thomas’s pairs of gigantic lions at the entrances are Nubian!

At the London Coal Exchange^[168] built in 1846-9 in Lower Thames Street, the City Corporation’s architect Bunning arrived at no such complete co-ordination of masonry and metallic design as did Stephenson and Thompson on the Britannia Bridge. The masonry exterior consists of two palazzo blocks set at a fairly sharp angle to one another and loosely linked by a very Picturesque round tower, free-standing in its upper stages. Behind all this the dome of the interior court can barely be glimpsed. Inside this court, however, no masonry at all is visible; one sees only an elegant cage of iron elements rising to the glazed hemisphere above (Plate 63). The metal members are richly but appropriately detailed, and there is even more appropriate decorative painting by Sang in such panels as are not glazed.

In France two monuments of comparable distinction have already been mentioned, Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève of 1843-50 and Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est of 1847-52 (Plate 22B). Unfortunately the original shed of the latter, with arched principals of 100-foot span, was taken down when the station was doubled in size in the present century. Inside the library a central row of iron columns of somewhat Pompeian design—that is, resembling the slender, metallically scaled members seen in Pompeian wall paintings—still carries the two barrel roofs on delicately scrolled arches of openwork iron (Figure 14). Since the masonry walls with their ranges of window arches are visible all round, the effect produced is less novel than in the iron-and-glass court of the Coal Exchange; but Labrouste achieved much greater integration between interior and exterior (Plate 21). The Dianabad in Vienna, built by Karl Etzel in 1841-3, had a fine iron roof; the circular bracing of the iron principals, a frequent motif in large openwork members of cast iron at this time, was most appropriate to the Rundbogenstil detailing of the masonry walls (Plate 66B).

Monferran’s cast-iron dome on St Isaac’s in Petersburg, completed about 1842, has already been mentioned (Plate 27A). This was rivalled before very long by several American examples,^[169] most notably Walter’s enormous dome, built in 1855-65, above the Capitol in Washington (Plate 82A). Baroque in silhouette and rather Baroque in detail also, this may have encouraged—along with the rising taste for elaborately plastic effects of which it was itself a notable expression—the increasingly common practice of casting the exposed iron elements of American commercial façades in the form of rich Corinthian columns and heavily moulded arches.

Around 1850 cast-iron architecture was coming to its climax everywhere. James Bogardus (1800-74), a manufacturer of iron grinding machinery, not an architect or engineer, began to erect in Center Street in New York in 1848 a four-storeyed urban structure for his own use as a factory with an exterior consisting only of cast-iron piers and lintels. This was one of the earliest^[170] and most highly publicized of the cast-iron fronts which Bogardus and various other ironmasters in New York and elsewhere made ubiquitous in the principal American cities before and after the Civil War. But his earliest completed iron front was that of the five-storey chemist shop of John Milhau at 183 Broadway erected within the year 1848. An extant work by Bogardus, the range of four-storey stores built for Edward H. Laing at the north-west corner of Washington and Murray Streets in New York, was begun in 1849 and finished within two months, well before his own building was completed. These early cast-iron fronts are very logical and expressive in the way the attenuated Grecian Doric columns and flat entablatures are used to form an external frame; but the Laing stores have lost most of the applied ornament that appealed so much to mid-century taste (Plate 67B). Later façades are richer and heavier, generally with Renaissance or Baroque arcading, as has just been noted. For the Harper’s Building in New York built in 1854, which incorporated the first American rolled-iron beams, the architect John B. Corlies provided a design of ornate Late Renaissance character. Curiously enough, in executing this building Bogardus used for the upper four storeys the same castings as in the Sun Building that he had erected in 1850-1 in Baltimore to the designs of R. G. Hatfield (1815-79). To the typical cast-iron fronts of New York,^[171] of which the most extensive and one of the simplest was that of the old Stewart Department Store on Broadway begun in 1859 by John W. Kellum (1807-71), vacated several years ago by Wanamakers and burned during demolition in 1956, one may well prefer the delicacy of a Glasgow example, the Jamaica Street Warehouse^[172] of 1855-6, or a remote Far Western department store like the Z.C.M.I. of 1868 in Salt Lake City, rivalling amid the Rocky Mountains those of Paris. Neither of these is the work of architects.

Great Britain and Europe saw few all-iron façades. This was in large part because the danger of their collapse when exposed to the extreme heat of urban conflagrations, a danger made real to Americans only by the fires of the seventies in Boston and Chicago, was appreciated very early. Yet it was not in America but in Britain that the greatest masterpieces of iron construction of the fifties were built. The succeeding turn of the tide against the visible use of iron also had its origins in Britain, not in America where the material had early become so tediously ubiquitous.

In 1850 Paxton was completing at Chatsworth a relatively small new greenhouse to protect the Victoria regia, a giant water-lily imported from Africa by the Duke of Devonshire. With its arcaded walls of iron and glass and its flat ridge-and-furrow roof, this seemed to Paxton to provide a suitable paradigm for the vast structure^[173] needed by May 1851 to house the Great Exhibition, the first international exposition, which was scheduled to open at that time. The Commissioners of the Exhibition had held an international competition that produced several extremely interesting ferrovitreous projects, notably an Irish one by Turner, Burton’s collaborator at Kew, and a French one by Hector Horeau. Rightly or wrongly, all of them were rejected, and the Commissioners’ own Building Committee, including the chief architectural and engineering talents of the age, then produced a project of their own. Reputedly in large part the work of the engineer Brunel and the architect T. L. Donaldson (1795-1885), this manifestly impractical scheme, a sort of Rundbogenstil super-railway-station intended to be built of brick—the project actually provided the inspiration for Herholdt’s Central Station in Copenhagen of 1863-4, or so it would appear—was already out for bids when Paxton presented in July 1850 his own scheme based on the Chatsworth Lily House. Published in the Illustrated London News and offered with a low alternative bid by the contractors Fox & Henderson, this was accepted and—with much significant modification—erected in the incredibly short space of nine months.

Inside this vast structure, with its tall central nave, galleried aisles, and arched transept, Paxton and his engineer associates, Sir Charles Fox (1810-74) and his partner Henderson (to the two of whom a considerable part of the credit must go), created unwittingly a new sort of architectural space. So large as in effect to be boundless, this space was defined only by the three-dimensional grid of co-ordinates which the regularly spaced iron stanchions and girders provided (Plate 64). These elements, designed for mass-production, and also in such a way that they could be disassembled as readily as they were assembled, had a new sort of mechanical elegance towards which the design of metal components had hitherto been moving only very gradually. The character of the casting process made it only too easy to impose on cast-iron elements all sorts of more or less inappropriate decorative treatments from Gothic to Baroque; only rarely had stylistic detail been successfully reinterpreted, as by Bunning in the Coal Exchange, in terms of the fat arrises and broad radii that are suitable to the material and to the particular method of its production. Even at the Crystal Palace a few touches of ornament provided by Owen Jones (1806-89), who was also responsible for the highly original and rather Turneresque colour treatment, suggest the gap—and, alas, it was in the 1850s a widening gap—between the technicians’ and the architects’ ambitions for iron.

Contemporaries had no words for what the Crystal Palace offered. Even today, when the aesthetic possibilities of the new sort of space it contained as well as the technical advantages of its method of assembly from mass-produced elements have been more generally explored, it is not easy to describe Paxton’s and Fox & Henderson’s achievement despite the remarkably complete documentation that exists. The space inside the tall transept (an afterthought designed to allow the saving of a great elm), arched on laminated wooden principals, was more readily appreciated in its day than that in the long nave, because it was more familiar. It is not surprising, therefore, that when the Crystal Palace was disassembled and rebuilt in 1852-4 at Sydenham, where it lasted down to its destruction—ironically by fire—in 1936, the entire nave was arched although with principals of openwork metal rather than of laminated wood.

The Crystal Palace’s structural vocabulary—though not, alas, the quality of its space—can be appreciated in the Midland Station at Oxford, built by Fox & Henderson with identical elements in 1852. There one can still see how the new methods enforced a modular regularity more rigid than that of Romantic Classicism and also encouraged a tenuity of material quite unknown to the Neo-Gothic as executed in masonry. Thus the visual result ran doubly counter to the rising fashions in architecture in the fifties (see Chapters 9 and 10). Within five years of the moment when the Crystal Palace was greeted with such general—though never universal—acclaim the climactic moment of the early Iron Age was already over. In those few years, however, Crystal Palaces rose in many other major cities. The finest was perhaps that built in Dublin in 1852-4 by Sir John Benson (1812-74) with its bubble-like rounded ends; the least successful that in New York^[174] of 1853 by G. J. B. Carstensen (1812-57), the founder of the Tivoli in Copenhagen, and Charles Gildemeister (1820-69). The prompt destruction of this last by fire was a fearful early warning of the limitations of iron construction unsheathed by masonry. The burning of Voit’s Glaspalast of 1854 in Munich, like that of the Sydenham Palace, occurred in our own day, as also the similar end of the Paleis voor Volksvlijt in Amsterdam, which was built by Cornelis Outshoorn (1810-75) in 1856.

The prestige of iron construction was never higher than in the early fifties. For Balmoral Castle, not yet rebuilt in its final form, the Prince Consort ordered in 1851 a prefabricated iron ballroom by E. T. Bellhouse of Manchester modelled on the houses for emigrants to Australia by Bellhouse that the Prince had seen at the Great Exhibition. In the Record Office in London, begun by Pennethorne in this same year, even more iron was used for the internal grid of separate storerooms and for the window-sash than in the great mill that Lockwood & Mawson built for Sir Titus Salt at Saltaire in Yorkshire in 1854. The internal structure of this last represented another major contribution by Fairbairn. Characteristically, however, the detailing of the external masonry of the Record Office is more or less Tudor, if rather crude and over-scaled, while that of the Saltaire mill is picturesquely Italianate.

In two new London railway stations, both happily extant, these years produced the chief rivals to the Crystal Palace. At King’s Cross, planned by the architect Lewis Cubitt in 1850 and built in 1851-2, the two great arched sheds somewhat resembled technically the transept of the original Crystal Palace, their principals having been of laminated wood. These had eventually to be replaced in 1869-70 with the present steel principals which are, however, still held by Cubitt’s original cast-iron shoes. The masonry block of the station on the left, or departure, side is undistinguished but fairly inconspicuous. The great glory of the station is the front, with its two enormous stock-brick arches that close the ends of the sheds towards the Euston Road (Plate 66A). The idea had been Duquesney’s at the Gare de l’Est, but here there is no irrelevant Renaissance detail, only grand scale and clear expression of the arched spaces behind.

Paddington Station, built in 1852-4, has no such grand exterior, being masked at the southern end by the Hardwicks’ Great Western Hotel. The engineer Brunel here called in the architect M. D. Wyatt (1820-77) as collaborator, and for the metal members of the shed Wyatt devised ornamentation which—as Brunel specifically requested—is both novel and suited to the materials (Plate 65). There is a slightly Saracenic flavour both to the stalagmitic modelling of the great stanchions and to the wrought elements of tracery that fill the lunettes at the ends and even run along the sides of the great elliptically-arched principals. But the detailing of these, if unnecessarily elaborate, is certainly quite original and not inappropriate to the materials or to the complex spatial effects of the three great parallel sheds crossed by two equally tall transepts. The cool spirit of Cubitt’s station recalls that of earlier Romantic Classicism; the richer forms of Paddington are related to the rising ‘High’ styles of the third quarter of the century, of whose initiation the Great Western Hotel was one of the earliest indications (see Chapter 8).

By 1853 the craze for iron construction was so great that the Ecclesiological Society, forgetting their Puginian principles—Pugin had died the previous year, but not before issuing a severe critique of the metal-and-glass construction of the Crystal Palace—commissioned their favourite and most ‘correct’ architect, Carpenter, to design for them an iron church. It was not Carpenter’s death two years later but the refusal of the English bishops to consecrate prefabricated structures for permanent use that brought to nothing this interesting project along the lines of Rickman’s and Cragg’s Liverpool churches of forty years earlier. The general flood of prefabrication, now producing all sorts of structures for the Antipodes and other remote areas that still lacked their own building industries, slowed down in 1854, when the demands of the War Office for barracks (on account of the Crimean War) deflected prefabricators from civil production.

In that year, however, Sydney Smirke began one of the last major monuments of cast iron in England, the domed Reading Room in the court of his brother’s British Museum. Awkward in proportion and encased in stacks, this is not to be compared in distinction of design with the Reading Room that Henri Labrouste added to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1862-8^[175] (Plate 69). That superb interior, with its many light domes of terracotta carried on the slenderest of metal columns and arches, is a great advance over his earlier Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (Figure 14). The Reading Room in Paris has no proper exterior, however, any more than does that in London, for it is incorporated in a group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century structures that Labrouste adapted and enlarged (see Chapter 8). Even more striking are Labrouste’s stacks, visible from the Reading Room through a great glass wall, for in them the entire spatial volume is articulated by vertical and horizontal metal elements in a fashion somewhat like the interior of the Crystal Palace. But in the sixties such things were exceptional.

In 1853-8 L.-P. Baltard’s son Victor (1805-74) built the Central Markets^[176] of Paris with the assistance of F.-E. Callet (1791-1854) in a mode much less elegant but still franker, exposing his metal structure outside as well as in, at Napoleon III’s personal insistence. Saint-Eugène, an almost completely iron-built church of Gothic design, was erected in Paris in 1854-5 by L.-A. Boileau (1812-96).^[177] Boileau’s Saint-Paul at Montluçon, Allier, completed in 1863, is a second French example of a cast-iron church, and he made designs for several others. His Notre-Dame-de-France off Leicester Square in London, a modest church of 1868, has been completely rebuilt since the last war.

However, to house the first Paris international exhibition, that of 1855, F.-A. Cendrier (1803-92) and J.-M.-V. Viel (1796-1863), both pupils of Vaudoyer and Lebas, provided in 1853-4 not another Crystal Palace, such as Dublin, New York, Copenhagen, Munich, Amsterdam, and Breslau, among other cities, had built or were building, but an example of mixed construction. The great iron-and-glass arched interiors were all but completely masked externally by a very conventional masonry shell. It was not until the Paris Exposition of 1878 that iron and glass were frankly exposed and decoratively treated on the exterior of such a structure in France (see Chapter 16). The curve of enthusiasm for iron was evidently taking a downward dip; in Britain the Age of Cast Iron came to an end even more suddenly and much more dramatically than in France.

In 1855 Sir Henry Cole, the prime mover of the Great Exhibition of 1851, had to provide on the estate at Brompton, in the part of London now called South Kensington that the Commissioners had just acquired from the proceeds of the Exhibition, temporary housing for the collections that were being formed by the Government’s Department of Practical Art. Having to build in great haste and in war-time, it is perhaps not surprising that Cole employed, properly speaking, neither an architect nor an engineer, but allowed the Edinburgh contracting firm of C. D. Young & Son to design as well as erect the structure subject to some nominal control from the engineer Sir William Cubitt (1785-1861). It was certainly a surprising product of a Government agency devoted to raising the standard of ‘art-manufactures’! Although we can today appreciate some of the practical virtues of this edifice as a Museum of Science and Art, it must be admitted that it was inferior even to the general contemporary run of prefabricated structures to which it belongs technically. Derisively christened the ‘Brompton Boilers’ by George Godwin (1815-88), editor of the Builder, it roused a chorus of disapproval as loud if not as widespread as the Crystal Palace had done of approval five years before.

After this time British and Continental interest in iron construction waned rapidly; for fifteen years or so exposed iron was chiefly exploited in the commercial façades of the United States, themselves now more and more masonry-like in scale and in detailing, as has been noted. Structural steel began to be used here and there from the early sixties, but the serious beginnings of the Age of Steel lay a quarter of a century ahead (see Chapter 14).

At least in England, its principal home, the Age of Cast Iron, so paradoxically interrelated with the Gothic Revival in its very early stages, came to an end in considerable part because of the triumph of the Gothic Revival around 1850 (see Chapter 10). For several decades the characteristic new architectural developments were stylistic rather than technical. Yet it was the later theories—not the practice—of a French medievalist, Viollet-le-Duc, which played a great part in the renewed interest in the frank use of metal on the Continent in the eighties and nineties (see Chapter 16).