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.