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. 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).