Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
More and more, the use of iron was being generally accepted as a
technical necessity in the forties. At Buckingham Palace Blore, in
adapting one of Nash’s side pavilions as a chapel for Queen Victoria in
1842-3, used visible iron supports just as Nash had done so long before
in the interiors of the Brighton Pavilion for her uncle. Yet generally
the use of iron in important masonry structures in the thirties and the
early forties was quite invisible, being confined to the floors and the
substructure of the roofs. In 1837-9 C.-J. Baron (1783-1855) and Nicolas
Martin (1809-?), for example, provided a complete iron roof above the
vaults of Chartres Cathedral, a work of very considerable scale and
technical elaboration that provided the immediate prototype for the iron
roof of Gau’s Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, designed in 1840 and begun in
1846. At the Houses of Parliament, the actual construction of which
started only in 1840, Barry capped the whole with iron roofs—the
external iron plates are actually visible, of course, but the fact of
their being of iron is rarely recognized. Fireproof floors built
according to various French and English patent systems were increasingly
thought necessary in all high-grade construction. Queen Victoria’s
Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, constructed without the aid of an
architect by the builder Thomas Cubitt, had them throughout, as did many
other well-built country houses of the forties, at least in the passages
and stair-halls.
Here and there in the commercial buildings of this decade the iron
skeleton used inside came through to the exterior, as it had on one of
Rickman’s Liverpool churches a generation earlier. A small office
building at No. 50 Watling Street in London, with visible iron supports
and lintels in the upper storeys but with brick corner piers and brick
spandrels, was a case in point, probably dating from early in the
decade. By 1844 Fairbairn was recommending in a report that fireproof
construction should be used in all warehouses. Increasingly this was
done in Lancashire and, before long, elsewhere; Fairbairn himself had
introduced it ten years earlier in the Jevons Warehouse on the New Quay
in Manchester.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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