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]).
PART TWO
185O-19OO
CHAPTER 8
SECOND EMPIRE PARIS, UNITED ITALY,
AND IMPERIAL-AND-ROYAL VIENNA
Many historians, in despair, have merely labelled the period after 1850 ‘Eclectic’ as if earlier periods of architecture—and notably all the preceding hundred years since 1750—had not also been eclectic, although admittedly to a lesser degree. Within the eclecticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there can readily be distinguished the two major stylistic divisions with which Part I has dealt separately (in Chapters [1]-[5] and in Chapter [6], respectively). So also in the fifties, sixties, and seventies two principal camps are discernible among the architects. Their programmes were less clear than in the previous half century, and in one case much less widely accepted internationally. Yet the High Victorian Gothic of England, taken together with the later Neo-Gothic elsewhere, on the one hand, and what may be loosely called the international Second Empire mode on the other, subsume between them a fair part of the more conspicuous architectural production of the third quarter of the century.
Both the Victorian Gothic of this period and the Second Empire mode were ‘high’ phases of style. Perhaps for that reason neither of them controlled, in the way that Romantic Classicism had done in the earlier decades of the century, all or even any very extensive segments of building activity; yet between them they gave colour to a very considerable proportion of it. The obvious stigmata of one or of the other, or even of both—external polychromy and high mansard roofs, respectively—are to be found on such modest things as mills and working-class housing blocks as well as on major public monuments. The High Victorian Gothic first developed in Anglican ecclesiastical architecture and always carried with it a rather churchy flavour—sometimes quite ludicrously, as in the case of Gothic distilleries, Gothic public-houses, and Gothic sewage plants. Continental Neo-Gothic was more largely confined to churches, especially in France. The international Second Empire mode found its inspiration in the grandiose extension of a palace in Paris; something of the Parisian and even the palatial clung to it when it was used—as often in the non-French world—for such things as factories and modest suburban villas.
Both the Victorian Gothic and the Second Empire had definite national homes, yet both were also full of elements of Italian origin. In that respect the High Victorian phase of the fifties and sixties was somewhat analogous to the Germanic Rundbogenstil, as well as being the direct heir of the earlier and more puristic Gothic Revival of the forties in England. Often the Second Empire mode was even more Italianate, since it was in the main but a pompous modulation of the earlier Renaissance Revival. The one had its roots in the Picturesque, but it differed from earlier Picturesque manifestations in being a ‘style’—or very nearly such—not merely the reflection of a point of view. The other had roots not only in Romantic Classicism but also farther back in the High Renaissance and the Baroque; some qualities of those earlier styles were both continued and revived. But neither High Victorian Gothic nor Second Empire were ‘revivals’ in the sense of those of the first half of the century; they lived with a vigorous nineteenth-century life of their own, not one borrowed from the past. In both cases one may more properly say that they had revived.
The Second Empire mode was the heir, or at least the successor, of the last universal style of the western world, the Romantic Classical. Moreover its wide international sway was hardly terminated by the end of Napoleon III’s reign in France any more than its beginning had waited for his enthronement. Concerning that sway it should be noted, however, that considered as a definite ‘style’ the Second Empire mode is very far from characterizing as much of French production in this age as of that in several other countries. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically, its actual initiation may almost be said to have occurred outside France and before the political Second Empire actually began in 1852. In this chapter and the next, certain alternative developments in succession to the earlier Renaissance Revival have been associated with the Second Empire mode, sometimes a bit arbitrarily perhaps, for lack of a more appropriate place to deal with them.