CHAPTER 14
THE RISE OF COMMERCIAL ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA

The line of technical development which runs from the cast-iron-framed textile mills of the 1790s in England to the steel-framed skyscrapers of the 1890s in America seems to posterity a simple and obvious one. But, in fact, various lags and cul-de-sacs make the story long and complex. The most significant technical advances in iron construction of the first half of the century were not in the commercial field, and the account in this chapter is by no means merely a repetition and a continuation of the story of iron construction down to 1855 that has been provided earlier (see Chapter [7]).

The great difference between the Benyons, Marshall & Bage mill of 1796 at Shrewsbury, which initiated metal-skeleton structure, and Sullivan’s Guaranty Building in Buffalo, N.Y., of a century later is that the English mill is purely and simply a technical feat of construction quite without architectural pretension. If not literally anonymous, the mill was certainly the work of a millwright rather than an architect; the skyscraper, on the other hand, is a prime architectural monument of the long period of a century and a half that this book covers, and the masterpiece of one of the greatest and most creatively original designers that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have produced (Plate [119]). But the skyscrapers of the 1890s do represent also the culmination of developments in the field of construction that began with the English mills of the 1790s, even if those developments are far from being the whole story of nineteenth-century commercial architecture. How office buildings were gradually received into the realm of architecture and, by the end of the nineteenth century, had risen so high in that realm that few productions of the 1890s in other fields of building can compare in quality of design with the great early skyscrapers is perhaps more significant for western culture in general than the purely technical aspect of the story. The weaving together of these two strands makes the full story one of the most interesting and complex in the history of nineteenth-century architecture.

Nineteenth-century commercial building need not be very precisely defined. It includes several slightly different sorts of edifices suitable for the needs of business, all consisting of a succession of identical upper storeys subdivided into offices or storerooms, with or without shops or representational premises below. Highly specialized and very lucrative concerns such as banks and insurance companies, to whom prestige of various sorts increasingly appeared a major desideratum, were the first to seek dignity and architectural display by employing architects of established reputation. Such agencies also desired buildings that were fire-resistant quite as much as did contemporary mill-owners. Already in Soane’s earliest work at the Bank of England he emulated, as has been noted, certain French technical advances that had just been employed by Louis in the Théâtre Français in Paris before these advances were first adopted in an English textile mill (see Chapters [1] and [7]). Along Regent Street, around 1820, Nash and others housed less pretentious types of business in structures of mixed character and of less completely fireproof construction. But the premises on the ground floor here generally required very wide shop-windows of the sort that the use of iron supports made possible, even though the upper storeys were still nearly identical with those of domestic terraces.

In Boston in the mid twenties Parris was designing for the streets flanking his Market Hall commercial façades of a much more novel character, using not iron but granite in monolithic posts and lintels to provide a masonry skeleton filled with wide and close-set windows in all the storeys (Plate [112B]).[[295]] In later Boston work of the next two decades in this tradition architects such as Isaiah Rogers and various builders employed iron for internal supports and sometimes also on the exterior at ground-floor level. But the granite ‘skeleton’ front preceded the skeletonized all cast-iron front in America by precisely a quarter of a century.

In England in the forties complete internal skeletons of iron carrying jack arches of brick or tile, hitherto used chiefly in textile mills, were increasingly adopted for superior commercial work, but the characteristic exteriors of commercial buildings[[296]] remained entirely of bearing masonry construction. However, in one case at least, a small block at 50 Watling Street in London which was probably built before 1844, the iron came through to the outer surface in the continuous window-bands of the upper storeys, even though the corner piers and the sections of wall between the storeys were of solid brickwork.

From C. R. Cockerell, titular Architect of the Bank of England after Soane’s retirement in 1833, and other architects such as Hopper, banks and insurance companies in London and other large cities obtained in the thirties and forties distinguished buildings all of masonry. In one especially fine edifice, erected in 1849-50 purely for use as offices, Bank Chambers behind Cockerell’s monumental Branch Bank of England of 1845-8, in Cook Street in Liverpool, he closely approached the directness of trabeated masonry expression of the contemporary Boston architects and builders (Plate [112A]). The fireproof construction was of vaulted masonry throughout, moreover, with iron used only for the skylights over the stair-wells.

For the general character of commercial architecture down to the late fifties, however, A. & G. Williams’s Brunswick Buildings of 1841-2, also in Liverpool, were more significant. In this very large quadrangular block of general offices they followed the palazzo model provided by Barry’s newly completed Reform Club almost as closely as George Alexander had already done in his Bath Savings Bank the year before. The palazzo mode soon became the favourite one for imposing commercial architecture in Britain and, before long, in the United States as well.[[297]] With its regular rows of good-sized windows and its special prestige of having housed a commercial aristocracy in Renaissance times, this had certain aspects of suitability, both real and symbolical, to the needs of business-men. It also had serious disadvantages which soon led to a gradual modulation away from the earlier formulas of design.

The wide spacing of the windows demanded by correct palazzo precedent was awkward for offices requiring that maximum of natural light which was so readily provided by Parris and others in their granite buildings in Boston and by the unknown designer of 50 Watling Street in London. Therefore windows were soon much enlarged and also set closer together. Sometimes, moreover, as in a large cotton warehouse built in Parker Street in Manchester in 1850 by J. E. Gregan (1813-55), the increasingly heavy frames were applied only to every other opening. Properly, such ‘palaces’ ought not to be more than three storeys high, but the rapidly rising value of good sites in urban business districts made it ever more desirable to carry office buildings to four and five storeys like the terrace houses of the period.