CHAPTER 7
BUILDING WITH IRON AND GLASS: 1790-1855
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.