Industrialisation
Iron, glass and every historical style at once. Cities grow in stone.
Industry brought new materials and new building types – railway stations, factories, market halls and department stores – but architects often dressed them in old styles. Cities grew explosively, from Haussmann’s Paris to Chicago, and towards the end of the century Art Nouveau and National Romanticism sought something of their own.
Historicism chose a style to suit the task: Gothic for churches, Renaissance for banks and museums, Baroque for theatres.
Iron, glass and steel made new structures possible, from the Crystal Palace in 1851 to the Eiffel Tower in 1889.
In Chicago the steel frame and the lift produced the first skyscraper in the 1880s.
Haussmann’s Paris became the model for boulevards and masonry cities all over the world.
Vienna’s Ringstrasse, from 1857, gathered the city’s new monuments along a ring road where the wall had stood.
The parliaments in London and Budapest and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam show how nations built their history in stone.
The housing question gave rise to philanthropic housing, tenement blocks and the idea of the garden city.
Viollet-le-Duc wanted to restore the Middle Ages, Ruskin and Morris to preserve them – a conflict that laid the foundations of heritage conservation.
Around 1900 Art Nouveau sought its forms in nature, and National Romanticism in brick, granite and timber.
Every style at once. In the 19th century architects knew history better than ever before. Archaeology, travel and printed pattern books gave them access to every conceivable style, and they chose according to the building's purpose and what it was meant to signify. Churches became Gothic to connect with medieval piety, banks and museums were given the weight and bourgeois dignity of Renaissance palaces, theatres became Neo-Baroque in order to dazzle. Styles were also mixed freely in what is called eclecticism. Ornament could now be manufactured industrially: cast iron for railings and columns, zinc for roof ornaments, cement stucco for façades, all ordered from catalogues. Historicism can be recognised by the way a modern building, often with a modern structure and technology, has been given a façade that quotes an earlier period, but at a larger scale and with stricter symmetry than its model. Contemporary critics spoke of a confusion of styles and a lack of an idiom of its own. Today we often see great skill in craftsmanship and composition, and the buildings of historicism form the backbone of many European town centres.
The return of the Gothic. The Gothic Revival began as romantic play with ruins and turret rooms in 18th-century England but in the 19th century became a serious matter. The architect Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin argued in his book Contrasts of 1836 that Gothic was the only honest and Christian architecture, and that medieval society had been morally superior to that of industry. When the old Parliament in London burned in 1834, the new Palace of Westminster was built in the Gothic style, to Charles Barry's plan and with Pugin's details, over the period from around 1840 to 1870. In The Stones of Venice the critic John Ruskin praised Venetian Gothic and the freedom of the craftsman. In Germany Cologne Cathedral was completed in 1880 according to medieval drawings, as a national project. Across Europe and North America the Gothic Revival became the style of the church in the second half of the 19th century. Recognise the Gothic Revival by its regularity: proportions and details are often more complete and more symmetrical than in the medieval models, and the brick façades are even and machine-made.
Paris transformed. Under Emperor Napoleon III the prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann rebuilt Paris between 1853 and 1870. Broad boulevards were driven straight through the medieval quarters, lined with uniform five-storey buildings in pale limestone, cast-iron balconies and mansard roofs. Beneath the streets a modern system of sewers and water supply was built, and parks such as the Bois de Boulogne were opened. The rebuilding improved hygiene and traffic, but also drove the poor out of the centre, and the boulevards made it harder to build barricades – motives that have been debated ever since. Charles Garnier's opera house, inaugurated in 1875, became the showpiece of the Second Empire, with a marble staircase and a façade full of sculpture and gilding. The École des Beaux-Arts taught a method of symmetrical plans, clear axes and grand entrances that influenced public buildings all over the world, not least in the United States. Paris became the pattern for the 19th-century metropolis. The boulevards and esplanades of many European capitals bear clear traces of Haussmann.
Iron and glass. While architects debated styles, engineers were building in entirely new ways. The iron bridge over the Severn at Coalbrookdale of 1779 showed that cast iron could span great distances. Joseph Paxton, a gardener who had built glasshouses, designed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851: an enormous hall of cast iron and glass, assembled from factory-made standard parts in a few months. In Paris Henri Labrouste had iron arches carry the reading room of the Sainte-Geneviève Library, and the Exposition Universelle of 1889 showed both the Eiffel Tower, some 300 metres high, and the Galerie des Machines with a span that had no equal. Railway stations, market halls, department stores, glasshouses and arcades were given large glass roofs, often behind a stone façade. In Milan the glass-roofed Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II was built. Market halls, such as Les Halles in Paris from the 1850s, combined façades of brick or stone with roofs of iron and glass. Towards the end of the century came reinforced concrete, which was patented in several systems and would soon transform building fundamentally. Recognise the engineering of the period by riveted girders, slender columns and large, light spaces.
Chicago and the skyscraper. After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 the city was rebuilt quickly, and land prices in the centre rose sharply. Two inventions made it possible to build upwards. The safety passenger lift, which Elisha Otis demonstrated in the 1850s, made the upper floors as attractive as the lower ones. The steel frame meant that the outer wall no longer had to bear loads: it could be hung on the frame like a thin screen. The Home Insurance Building by William Le Baron Jenney, completed in 1885, is often counted as the first skyscraper, even though it was modest in height by today's standards. Buildings of the Chicago School have wide “Chicago windows” with a large fixed central pane and narrow opening sashes at the sides. Louis Sullivan, the most important architect, formulated the idea that form follows function and divided the tall building into a base, a shaft of repeated office floors and a crowning top, as in the Wainwright Building in St Louis of 1891. His ornament of winding plant motifs in terracotta shows that functionalism and ornament were not yet opposites. In New York the Flatiron Building and the Woolworth Building followed, and the skyscraper became the symbol of the modern metropolis.
Factories and mill towns. The factory was the truly new building type of industrialism. In England textile mills were built with several storeys, long rows of windows and frames of cast iron to reduce the risk of fire; the flax mill in Shrewsbury of 1797 is regarded as the first building with a complete iron frame. The factories needed workers, and some industrialists built entire communities. Saltaire in Yorkshire from the 1850s and Port Sunlight near Liverpool from the 1880s had housing, schools and churches provided by the owner, a mixture of care and control. Recognise 19th-century factories by long façades with many identical windows, often round- or segmental-arched, brick in yellow or red tones and sometimes a tower for stairs and a water tank. In recent years many have become offices, homes, museums and colleges.
The railway and the station. The railway transformed both the countryside and the cities. The first major passenger line, between Liverpool and Manchester, opened in 1830, and within a few decades railways covered Europe and North America. The station was a new building type without precedent. It often had two faces: towards the city a monumental façade in some historical style, like a city gate or a palace, and towards the tracks a huge hall of iron and glass where the smoke could rise. At St Pancras in London, opened in 1868, the train shed spans about 73 metres without support, and in front of it stands a Gothic hotel. The Gare du Nord in Paris has a façade with statues representing the cities its lines lead to. The railway also required a common time: local solar times gave way to standard time, in Britain as early as the 1840s. Hotels, parks and new districts grew up around the stations, and in America whole towns were founded along the lines.
Monuments of the nations. In the 19th century new and old nations built their history in stone. After the fire of 1834 Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin designed a new parliament in London in the Gothic style, because it was considered English. The Budapest parliament, completed in 1904, took Westminster as its model. In Vienna the city wall was demolished from 1857 and replaced by the Ringstrasse, where opera, parliament, town hall, university and museums each stand in the style thought to suit their task: Greek antiquity for the parliament, Gothic for the town hall, Renaissance for the university. Pierre Cuypers’s Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, opened in 1885, and Paul Wallot’s Reichstag in Berlin of 1894 are other examples. Cologne Cathedral, unfinished since the Middle Ages, was completed in 1880 as a national monument for the new German Empire. Around 1900 countries on the edges of Europe, such as Finland, Hungary and Catalonia, sought a national style in folk art and the Middle Ages; in the Nordic countries it is called National Romanticism.
Housing for the many. Industrialisation drew people to the cities faster than homes could be built. In Manchester and London working families lived in cramped, damp houses without water or drainage, and Friedrich Engels described the conditions in 1845. In Berlin, following James Hobrecht’s plan of 1862, tenement blocks, the Mietskasernen, were built five storeys high around a series of narrow courtyards. Reformers and philanthropists responded in different ways. From the 1860s the Peabody Trust built blocks of flats for workers in London, and factory owners built their own model villages, such as Saltaire in Yorkshire and Port Sunlight near Liverpool, with schools, baths and churches. Around the turn of the century the cities themselves took over: from the 1890s the London County Council built municipal housing, and co-operative housing associations were formed in several countries. It was the beginning of the housing policy that would shape 20th-century architecture throughout Europe.
The garden city. Around 1900 another idea took shape: that people should live in small houses with gardens, in towns surrounded by greenery. In 1898 the English stenographer Ebenezer Howard described a garden city, a self-contained town with a limited population, surrounded by a belt of farmland, where the land was owned in common. Letchworth, north of London, begun in 1903 and planned by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, became the first, and Hampstead Garden Suburb followed in 1907. Unwin’s houses were set around green courts and winding streets, with English villages as their model. The idea spread quickly: in Germany Hellerau was built outside Dresden, and all over Europe garden suburbs became an answer to the housing shortage. The garden city later became the basis of suburban housing estates and of Britain’s post-war new towns.
Artists' homes and craft. In reaction against factory goods, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement in England sought to restore craftsmanship and joy in work. Philip Webb's Red House, built in 1859–1860 for Morris, became a model: a home in red brick with an asymmetrical plan, in which furniture, wallpapers and textiles were designed as a whole. The movement spread across Europe and gave rise to workshops, schools and societies for the applied arts. In the Nordic countries artists' homes became ideals and models for ordinary people. From the 1880s Carl and Karin Larsson transformed Lilla Hyttnäs at Sundborn into a home with bright colours, simple peasant furniture and textiles, which became widely known through Carl Larsson's watercolours in the book A Home (Ett hem). In 1899 Ellen Key wrote the essay Beauty for All (Skönhet för alla), arguing that beautiful, simple things would enrich life for all classes. In Finland the architects Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen built the studio home Hvitträsk outside Helsinki around 1902–1903, with rough stone, logs and steep roofs. Anders Zorn's farmstead in Mora is another example. These homes made folk tradition, timber and craft an expression of a modern way of life.
Art Nouveau. Around 1890 many wanted to break away from borrowed styles and create an art for their own time. Art Nouveau, known as Jugendstil in Germany and the Nordic countries, Secession in Vienna and Modernisme in Catalonia, sought its forms in nature. Iron was bent like stems, windows were given curved surrounds and decoration wound its way along like plants and waves. Victor Horta's Hôtel Tassel in Brussels of 1893 featured a staircase with iron columns that branch out into tendrils. Hector Guimard's entrances to the Paris Métro around 1900 are just as famous. In Barcelona Antoni Gaudí built the Casa Batlló and worked on the Sagrada Família, and in Glasgow Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed a school of art with austere, tall windows. In the Nordic countries Ålesund in Norway was rebuilt in Art Nouveau after the fire of 1904. Recognise Art Nouveau by gently curved windows and doorways, asymmetry, stylised flowers and animals, rendered façades in pale colours, tiles and stained glass. The style was short-lived but left a large legacy in the cities of Europe, from Brussels and Riga to Barcelona.
Barcelona and Gaudí. In Catalonia Art Nouveau, modernisme, became part of a cultural and political revival. Barcelona grew according to Ildefons Cerdà’s plan of 1859, a grid of blocks with cut-off corners, the Eixample, and along its streets the bourgeoisie built lavish apartment houses. Antoni Gaudí went further than anyone. Casa Batlló, remodelled in 1904–1906, has a façade of tiles and glass that shimmers like water, and Casa Milà, La Pedrera, is an undulating mass of stone with almost no straight walls. Gaudí studied forms with hanging models of chains and weights, in which gravity reveals the ideal arch, and then turned them upside down. From 1883 until his death in 1926 he worked on the Sagrada Família, which is still being built. Lluís Domènech i Montaner designed the Palau de la Música Catalana and the Sant Pau hospital, and Josep Puig i Cadafalch houses with Gothic and Flemish features. Modernisme can be recognised by tiles, wrought iron, mosaics of broken tiles, trencadís, and forms taken from plants, animals and mountains.
The restoration debate. In the 19th century many medieval churches and castles were restored, and the question was how far one could go. The French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc wanted to return buildings to a perfect state they might never have had, and he gave Notre-Dame in Paris and the city of Carcassonne an image of the Middle Ages that we still take for granted. John Ruskin argued the opposite – that one should preserve, not rebuild – and in 1877 William Morris founded a society for the protection of ancient buildings that opposed the scraping away of historical traces. In England, France and Germany cathedrals were rebuilt with new towers and spires after ideal images of the Gothic, and the rebuildings were criticised even at the time, because later additions and the marks of age had been removed. In the early 20th century a more careful approach prevailed. In 1903 the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl wrote about the different values of monuments, among them age value, and the Venice Charter of 1964 established that a restoration should respect the contributions of all periods and that new additions should be distinguishable from the old. The debate laid the foundations of modern heritage conservation.