Function And Fantasy Iron Architecture In The Long Nineteenth Century

The introduction of iron – and later steel – construction and decoration transformed architecture in the nineteenth century. While the structural employment of iron has been a frequent subject of study, this book re-directs scholarly scrutiny on its place in the aesthetics of architecture in the long nineteenth century. Together, its eleven unique and original chapters chart – for the first time – the global reach of iron’s architectural reception, from the first debates on how iron could be incorporated into architecture’s traditional aesthetics to the modernist cleaving of its structural and ornamental roles. The book is divided into three sections. Formations considers the rising tension between the desire to translate traditional architectural motifs into iron and the nascent feeling that iron buildings were themselves creating an entirely new field of aesthetic expression. Exchanges charts the commercial and cultural interactions that took place between British iron foundries and clients in far-flung locations such as Argentina, Jamaica, Nigeria and Australia. Expressing colonial control as well as local agency, iron buildings struck a balance between pre-fabricated functionalism and a desire to convey beauty, value and often exoticism through ornament. Transformations looks at the place of the aesthetics of iron architecture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which iron ornament sought to harmonize wide social ambitions while offering the tantalizing possibility that iron architecture as a whole could transform the fundamental meanings of ornament. Taken together, these chapters call for a re-evaluation of modernism’s supposedly rationalist interest in nineteenth-century iron structures, one that has potentially radical implications for the recent ornamental turn in contemporary architecture.

Bringing together fourteen original essays, this collection opens up new perspectives on the architectural history of the nineteenth century by examining the buildings of the period through the lens of 'experience'. With a focus on the experience of the ordinary building user – rather than simply on the intentions of the designer – the book shows that new and important insights can be brought to our understanding of Victorian architecture. The chapters present a range of ideas and new research – some examining individual building case studies (from grand hotels and clubhouses in New York to the parliament buildings of Westminster), and others exploring conceptual questions about the nature of architectural experience, whether sensory or otherwise. Yet they share the premise that the idea of the 'experience of architecture' took on a new and particular significance with the rise of industrial modernity, and they examine what contemporary people – both architects and non-architects – understood by this idea. The insights in this volume extend beyond the study of Victorian architecture. Together they suggest how 'experience' might be used as a framework to produce a more convincingly historical account of the artefacts of architectural history.

The research deals with a question about Architecture and its design strategies, combining historical information and digital tools. Design strategies are historically defined, they rely on geometry, context, building technologies and other factors. The study of Architecture´s own history, particularly in the verge of technological advancements, like the introduction of new materials or tools may shed some light on how to internalize digital tools like parametric design and digital fabrication.

Vilified by leading architectural modernists and Victorian critics alike, mass-produced architectural ornament in iron has received little sustained study since the 1960s; yet it proliferated in Britain in the half century after the building of the Crystal Palace in 1851 - a time when some architects, engineers, manufacturers, and theorists believed that the fusion of iron and ornament would reconcile art and technology and create a new, modern architectural language. Comprehensively illustrated and richly researched, Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain presents the most sustained study to date of the development of mechanised architectural ornament in iron in nineteenth-century architecture, its reception and theorisation by architects, critics and engineers, and the contexts in which it flourished, including industrial buildings, retail and seaside architecture, railway stations, buildings for export and exhibition, and street furniture. Appealing to architects, conservationists, historians and students of nineteenth-century visual culture and the built environment, this book offers new ways of understanding the notion of modernity in Victorian architecture by questioning and re-evaluating both Victorian and modernist understandings of the ideological split between historicism and functionalism, and ornament and structure.

The Dead City unearths meanings from such depictions of ruination and decay, looking at representations of both thriving cities and ones which are struggling, abandoned or simply in transition. It reveals that ruination presents a complex opportunity to envision new futures for a city, whether that is by rewriting its past or throwing off old assumptions and proposing radical change. Seen in a certain light, for example, urban ruin and decay are a challenge to capitalist narratives of unbounded progress. They can equally imply that power structures thought to be deeply ingrained are temporary, contingent and even fragile. Examining ruins in Chernobyl, Detroit, London, Manchester and Varosha, this book demonstrates that how we discuss and depict urban decline is intimately connected to the histories, economic forces, power structures and communities of a given city, as well as to conflicting visions for its future.

The Sayn Foundry in Bendorf, a German town on the Rhine near the Dutch border, is a fascinating example of complex technological thinking. Although the structural detailing is typical of its period (1830), Prussian engineer and iron founder Karl Ludwig Althans used and varied the many architectural and engineering models at hand in a sophisticated and complex building with structural elements that can be read as advertisements, machine parts, religious forms, or simply as building elements. The foundry, which is still standing, is just one of the many projects Peters examines in this broad synthesis of nineteenth-century technological thought and methods of design that form the basis of the modern built world. Through such examples, he traces the growth of technological thinking as one of our culture's chief modes of thought and establishes its primacy over other forms such as scientific or humanistic thinking as the major component of building design.