History of

Aft

New Technology
and Architectural
Form, I851-90

Detail of 116b

The iron 'problem'

By 1850 iron was interwoven in the fabric of daily life at every scale,
from mass-produced decorative embellishments of apartment houses
and commercial buildings to train sheds that welcomed the 'iron horse'
to the gates of the city [ 100]. Yet Qyeen Victoria's opening on 1 May
1851 of the glass and iron hall hosting the 'Great Exhibition of the
Works of Industry of All Nations'-the first of some 40 'Universal
Exhibitions' in the second halfof the century by which the competitors
in global industrialization sought to contain an expanding world of
both knowledge and trade under a single roof-also inaugurated debates over the 'new' material and over relations of art to industry.
Technologically Joseph Paxton's (18o3-65) 'Crystal Palace' [101]-as
the satirical Punch dubbed it- offered little more than refinements of
technology developed in greenhouses, including those designed in the
preceding decade by Decimus Burton at Kew and Paxton himself at
Chatsworth, and in the youngest generation of railway sheds, notably
London's King's Cross Station (L ewis Cubitt, 1851-52), Paris's Gare de
l'Est (Duquesny, 184{52) [see 121 ], and Munich's Hauptbahnhof
(Bi.irklein, 1849). Iron had not been confined to gardens or the working
edge of cities. Already in 1829 Percier and Fontaine, style-makers in
Parisian architecture for over two decades, introduced iron skylights
into the Palais Royal with their Galerie d'Orleans, a late addition to
those shopping arcades by which light, pedestrian shoppers, and commercial capital penetrated the dense heart of cities.
The Crystal Palace
But the Crystal Palace demanded attention in a new way. Its scale was
daunting. At a symbolic 1,851 feet (564 m) long it enclosed an unprecedented 18 acres-and even mature trees-in an enclosure free of internal walls. The breathtaking speed of its assembly-in a mere 9 months
6,024 cast-iron columns and 1,245 wrought-iron girders were manufactured, delivered, and assembled-was spectacular even for Victorians
207

101

100
Aerial view of King's Cross and
St Pancras stations, London
Unprecedented as building
types, train stations
challenged architects aiming
to design buildings that could
communicate f unction and
fulfil monumental
expectations even for
utilitarian programmes.
Conceived as new city gates,
stations were given every
conceivable form from Cubiti's
frank expression of the shed
itself as a monumental
triumphal arch to Scott's use
of north German Gothic,
borrowed from medieval town
halls, for the hotel which fronts
St Pancras Station [82).

regularly appraised of the country's new engineering feats in the pages

of the illustrated press. Yet it was less the record-breaking statistics
than the pretensions of this unadorned building to the status of a representational monument which made it the object of vociferous debate.
Set amidst greenery in Hyde Park, within view of royal residences and
London's smartest districts, the prefabricated building, the largest to
date, was a monument on display. Even while the architectural profession on both sides of the Channel debated how the laws of history or of
nature might serve as guides to the vexing dilemma of how the nineteenth century could invent a style indelibly its own, unprecedented
crowds were fl.ocking to what The Times of London heralded as the
embodiment of'an entirely novel order of architecture, producing, by
means of unrivalled mechanical ingenuity, the most marvellous and
beautiful effects'. 1 No less compelling than questions of whether the
Crystal Palace deserved a place in the architectural canon was the spectacle of the globe's production: over IOo,ooo objects from Britain and
rival industrialized nations of Europe as well as from the vast 'new'
world that colonization and trade had opened up, from China and
India to the Caribbean, filled the nave and transepts ofPaxton's show208 NEW TECHNO L OGY AND ARCHITECTURA L FORM, 1851- 90

Crystal Palace, 1851

The first monumental building
constructed principally of
factory-produced parts, the
Crystal Palace was
subsequently taken down and
re-erected at Sydenham,
where Paxton made it the
centrepiece of a landscaped
park and various architects
collaborated to create a
museum of civilization within
by creating full-sca le
architectural mock-ups to
represent the different styles
of historical architecture. The
building was lost to a fire in
1936.

case, destined to have an impact not only on exhibition buildings but

on an emergent mass consumer culture. In the wake of Chartism, economic depression, and public anxiety over the 'Condition of Britain',
which had rocked the country in the r84os, and with fresh memories of
revolutions that had swept the continent in 1848-49, Victoria and
Albert presided over a dazzling demonstration of Britain's place as
standard bearer of the march of industry and prosperity.
An eyewitness, Lothar Bucher, Prussian newspaper correspondent,
summed up just what it was that gave pause to architects grappling
with issues of architectural form and values in modern society: 'In contemplating the first great building which was not of solid masonry
spectators were not slow to realize that here the standards by which architecture had hitherto been judged no longer held good.' Because of
the relatively narrow structural module adopted- a mere 8 feet (2.4
m)-and the extraordinary thinness of the members, the interior offered 'a delicate network of lines without any clue by means of which
we might judge their distance from the eye or the real size ... Instead of
moving from one wall at one end to that of the other, the eye sweeps
along an unending perspective which fades into the horizon. We cannot tell if this structure towers a hundred or a thousand feet above us, or
whether the roofis a fiat platform or built of ridges, for there is no play
of shadows to enable our optic nerves to gauge the measurements ... all
materiality is blended into the atmosphere'.2
Boullee [39b] could only dream of simulating nature's atmosphere
and stimulating emotions through kinaesthetic experience, but Paxton
created unprecedented visual effects even while his attention was focused elsewhere, on honing his extraordinary supple kit of parts to
meet a tight budget and schedule. With a last-minute sketch Paxton
eliminated not only the 245 designs entered earlier in competition-including that of French architect Hector Horeau [102]-but the selected project by the engineer I. K. Brunei with its great dome of sheet
iron. Now he worked furiously to craft a complete architectural system.
THE CRYSTAL PALACE

209

--

102 Hector Horeau

~---

Proposal for covering the

projected Avenue de !'Opera,

c.l862
Afervent advocate of vast
covered spaces of iron and
glass as remedies for the ills of
the modern city, Horeau took
up the prophetic role of glass
and iron architecture first
advanced by Saint-Simonians.
The technology of the Crystal
Palace, for which he had bid
unsuccessfully, could foster a
whole new vision of urban
space, such as this proposal
for the boulevard projected to
terminate in the new Opera
[see 1271.

H ollow cast-iron members served not only as structural uprights but as

a drainage system, while the much-vaunted ridge and furrow roof design channelled water at the same time as it created tracks for small
iron carts used by the roof glaziers to insert thousands of glass panes
into the iron frame [103] . T he C rystal Palace was at once assembly line
and finished product; not surprisingly Paxton's profits derived both
from his fees and from the new patents registered for his design.
Yet the visual effects were not entirely an unconscious byproduct of
Benthamite utilitarianism, for the fitting-out of the interior was entrusted to H enry Cole, who for rsyears had been formulating strategies
to forge new alliances between art, commerce, and industry through
periodicals, associations, and a series of tuition-free schools of design
in Britain's manufacturing cities. Cole turned to fellow explorers of
fundamental laws of forms to make the Crystal Palace a veritable ad-

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2!0 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM, r851 - 90

Glaziers' wagons at the Crystal

Palace
Paxton masterm inded both
the design of the Crystal
Palace and its assembly-line
production, including
adaptations of narrow-gauge
railways used in mines to run
along the metal members of
his famous ridge and furrow
roof design installing the precut glass panes (see detail
above). For the first t ime the
spectacle of building as a
factory system rather than a
craft-bound skill was available
prominently in the national
capital.

THE CRYSTAL PALAC E

2II

vertisement for the quest for a new industrial art. Painting the girders
in turn with the three primary colours alternating with white, the
Welsh architect Owen Jones explored the scientific chromatics of
Michel-Eugene Chevreul's Of the Law if Simultaneous Contrasts if
Colours (1839) to enhance the atmospheric haze, an effect contemporaries associated with the paintings of]. M. W. Turner, himself an advocate of simulating optical effects rather than imitating natural
appearances. The whole was treated with that abstraction and flatness
subscribed to by nearly all mid-century design reformers, those apprenticed in Gothic Revival architectural offices and those tutored in
the government's schools of design.
Truthful to materials, honestly expressive of its structural principles, and-with the exception of difficulties in controlling interior
temperature-admirably suited to its purpose, the Crystal Palace
seemed the fulfilment of those ethical laws of architecture Pugin
sought to extract from the Gothic and which the Ecclesiologists and
Ruskin, in his Seven Lamps ifArchitecture, had also preached. Yet the
Gothic Revivalists were in resounding agreement that Paxton's building set a dangerous precedent. 'Crystal Humbug' and the 'most monstrous thing ever imagined' exclaimed Pugin. Yet Pugin himself gave
vivid demonstration of the potential of machine production harnessed
to principles of historical form in the 'Medieval Court', an influential
display of his own designs for ecclesiastical metalwork manufactured
by Hardman of Birmingham, the very city that supplied Paxton's iron
girders. Although 'lost in admiration at the unprecedented internal effects of such a structure', The Ecclesiologistfelt compelled to draw a line
in the sand: 'the conviction ... has grown upon us, that it is not architecture; it is engineering of the highest merit-but it is not architecture'.3 Ruskin agreed: 'mechanical ingenuity is not the essence of either
painting or architecture, and largeness of dimension does not necessarily involve nobleness of design. There is assuredly as much ingenuity
required to build a screw frigate, or a tubular bridge as a hall of glass;all these are works characteristic of the age; and all, in their several
ways, deserve our highest admiration; but not admiration of the kind
that is rendered to poetry or art.' 4 In 'The Nature of Gothic', the central chapter of his influential Stones if Venice, Ruskin formulated his
compelling critique of industrial and commercial capitalism in the afterglow of the Crystal Palace, taking as his theme the rise and fall of the
mercantile Venetian Republic.
Paxton is never mentioned in 'The Nature of Gothic', but Ruskin
drew a vivid portrait of the dangers of the factory system to the dignity
and freedom of individuals which he took as the most pertinent lesson
to be drawn from the prefabricated palace. He advanced his arguments
in appreciation of a different 'central building of the world', the fourteenth century Doge's Palace in Venice, celebrating not only the way an
212 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM, 1851-90

104 Charles Downe

Working drawing for Paxton's
Crystal Palace
The precision assembly of the
Crystal Palace, as much
machine as building with its
systems of working parts for
ventilation, required a set of
precise working drawings to
guide on-site work.

amalgam of Roman, Lombard, and Byzantine influences had left a

legible portrait ofVenetian civilization at its apogee, but the fact that
the variously designed column capitals bore testimony to the diversity
of nature and the multitude of individual workmen pursuing their
craft. Every stone confirmed the central mantra of Ruskin's 'political
economy of art', namely 'the value of the appearance oflabour upon architecture'.5 The Doge's Palace not only encapsulated the seven ethical
lamps of architecture that Ruskin had defined, including the capacity
to serve as the repository of civilization's memory and thus be a school
of morals and culture; it served as the springboard for an impassioned
THE C RYSTAL PALACE 213

105 Ruskin
Fondaco dei Turchi, Venice,

1853
In exquisite watercolours the
author of TheStonesofVenice
captured not only the passage
of light over a building's
surface but celebrated the
visible traces of human and
natural history. The
encrustation of different styles
bore witness to the march of
human time even as the
weathering and decay
provided a rich patina on the
palette of materials, a vibrant
example of Ruskin's call for
architecture as a repository or
lamp of memory.

Deane and Woodward's Oxford Museum

Even as Ruskin was putting the finishing touches to The Stones of
Venice, plans were afoot for a building he hoped would be the apotheosis of his conviction that architecture should elevate and educate both
its makers and its public. In 1853 Oxford University announced a competition for designs for a new museum building to accommodate the
great expansion in scientific teaching; research rather than tutorials
would be central to 'new' branches oflearning. The selection ofDeane
and Woodward as architects [99] meant that Ruskin's influence would
permeate the building, which rose over the next 7 years in counterpoint
to the project entrusted to the Cole circle to re-equip the Crystal Palace
in its new location at Sydenham as a museum of civilization. The symmetrical Venetian Gothic fa<;ade with its stout central tower was a veritable billboard for the suitability of Gothic for secular design, but the
demonstration went beyond exterior image as the museum's chief promoter and Ruskin's friend, Henry Acland, Regis Professor of
Medicine, set out to craft a museum whose didactic mission was contained as much in its building fabric as in its collections. In the years before Darwin published On the Origin ofSpecies (1859)-one of the first
public debates over Darwin's theories would take place in the museum's
lecture hall-the Oxford Museum simultaneously celebrated God's
presence in all things and mankind's capacity to order and penetrate
nature's abundant diversity. Under the chisels of the O 'Shea brothers,
brought over by Woodward from Ireland, the window and door frames
were to be rich in naturalistic ornament, a modern evocation ofthe medieval cathedral fa<;ades Ruskin celebrated as stone bibles [ 106].

condemnation of the modern factory system which had transformed

the English landscape in less than two generations [76]:
We have much studied and much perfected, oflate, the great civilized invention of the division oflabour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:-Divided into mere segments of
men-broke into small fragments and crumbs oflife ... And the great cry that
rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than the furnace blast, is all in
very deed for this,-that we manufacture everything there except men; we
blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to
brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters
into our estimate of advantages. 6

In place of the system of working drawings [ 104] by which Paxton

assured virtually flawless manufacture and assembly, Ruskin advocated
roughness and imperfection- not simply as elements of the Burkean
sublime but as voices for the labouring hand and individual mind
'which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her
children'. 7 'All cast and machine work is bad, as work ... it is dishonest',8he inveighed in 'The Lamp ofTruth'. The architect should 'work
in the mason's yard with the men'.9 Stone alone he felt could develop
the patina ofhistory and take its place in the legible landscape [ 105].

214 N EW TECHNOLOGY AND ARC HITECTURAL FORM, 1851-90

106
James O'Shea carving a jamb
of a first-floor window ofthe
University Museum, Oxford,

c.l860
Using leaves as ornamental
models, the O'Shea brothers
realized the didactic realism
that Ruskin advocated as a
vital role of public
architecture. In contrast to the
mechanization of construction
[cf. 103Jthese Irish workmen
were rare survivors of a
disappearing craft, expressing
their own identity in the
framework of another's
design. Tellingly, the work was
never completed.

DEANE AND WOODWARD'S OXFORD MUSEUM

215

107
Central Court of Oxford
Museum
Thegreat glass and iron shed
of the Oxford Museum
provided a flexible exhibition
space and was deliberately left
open at the rear for future
expansion, acknowledgment
that the systematic
classification of the world's
natural history was an openended research. Few spaces
speak more compellingly of
the emergence of organic
analogies between the

structure of nature and the

quest for architectural style
than this great hall of
skeletons.

The museum's fa<;ade would bristle with carvings of the flora and fauna
of the earth, even as the polychromatic fa<;ades and interior arcades
comprised a built-in collection of geological specimens. These were
arranged to help the student remember the latest systems of classification-the stone piers, for instance, classed by mineral type with igneous rocks on the ground floor and sedimentary specimens above.
Here was a demonstration not only of Ruskin's principle 'that all art
employed in decoration should be informative, conveying truthful
statements about natural facts', 10 but of his conviction that 'all architectural ornamentation should be executed by the men who design, and
should be of various degrees of excellence, admitting and therefore exciting the intelligent cooperation ofvarious classes ofworkmen'. 11 Even
today much of the exterior ornamentation remains uncarved, a
poignant reminder of the struggle facing the pre-industrial crafts in the
capitalist world of survival of the fittest.
In the astonishing glass and iron courtyard [107]-required by the
competition brief-the Oxford Museum took up the challenge of the
industrial age most clearly. Here was proof, in the words of The
Building News, of the 'applicability of Crystal Palace architecture
Gothicised'. 12 The design and manufacture were contracted to F. A.
Skidmore of Coventry, an ironmaster in the circle of the
Ecclesiologists. In an r854lecture, 'On the Use of Metals in Church
Building and Decoration', Skidmore critiqued Paxton's mute utilitarianism, arguing that iron could be hammered and worked into a formal
language at once its own, finer and more delicate than stone, and capable of imitating the natural forms Ruskin upheld as guarantors of truth
in art. Ruskin remained sceptical; like others he doubted if the frailty of
iron construction had the makings of monumental architecture with a
public presence and a moral aura. Woodward and Skidmore created an
ogival arched skeleton that at once echoes in architectural terms the
anatomical specimen collections and, in the spandrels, literally bursts
into leaf and flower to add native and exotic trees to the building's visual encyclopaedia, while vines of all sorts ornament the trefoils of the
girders. Even iron, they demonstrated, had the potential for higher expression in the aesthetic of realism preached by Ruskin and the PreRaphaelite painters just getting their start in Oxford in these years.
Both nature and the nature of materials were open to interpretation.
Even before it was completed the glazed roof had to be dismantled and
redesigned as Skidmore had underestimated the sheer weight of even
its thin members; the whole had begun to buckle under its own weight.
Paxton, for all his critics accused him of reducing architecture to calculation, proudly maintained that nature had been his guide for finding
efficient forms of broad-span iron and glass structure. The hollow ribs
and thin leaf membranes of the Duke of Devonshire's exotic giant
water-lilies-the famous Victoria R egia for which Paxton had designed
216 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCH I TECTURAL FORM, r851-90

108 Paxton

a) Lily house at Chatsworth

bl Botanical diagram of
structure of leaf and stem of
the Victoria Regis water-lily
Paxton built a special glass
house to display the Duke of
Devonshire's prize specimens,
the great Victoria Regis waterlily. To demonstrate the
strength of its rib and infillleaf
structure Paxton had his
daughter walk across one of
the great circular leaves and
claimed it a moment of
revelation for his own
inventions. In contrast to
Ruskin, Paxton maintained
that nature provided structural
lessons rather than forms.

a special greenhouse (1849-5o)-had provided the first inspiration for

his innovative architecture of frame and infill, as much a product of the
intellect as the factory [108a, b]. Structure rather than ornament, he
claimed, was the true lesson of nature. By the time ofPaxton's writing,
the circle around Cole was formulating a theory of ornament and form
in opposition both to Ruskin's vision of didactic naturalism and his fear
of the machine.
218 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM, 1851-90

Art and industry: Henry Cole and William Morris

Despite resounding popular success, the manufactured goods displayed in the Crystal Palace signalled to many, including the design
theorists Cole had gathered to work on the installation, a veritable crisis in art's relationship to industry. 'T he absence of any fixed principles
in ornamental design is apparent,' Cole concluded reluctantly. Finding
'the art manufacturers of Europe .. . thoroughly demoralized', 13 he was
not alone in admiring the originality and integrity of the hand-crafted
objects sent by Asian and Islamic countries. Seeking explanations and
correctives, architectural theorists in the 185os addressed the whole
range of everyday objects, redefining the relationship between the decorative arts and the fine arts, and postulating comprehensive theories
of architectural form-most influentially in the seminal writings of
Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc, and Semper-which were to be the foundation for European architectural debate and practice for the rest of the
century. Responding to official reports, such as those drawn up by the
Comte de Laborde in France in 1856, governments promoted design
reform as a strategy of commercial competitiveness as never before.
T he greatest impact came from Cole's renewed efforts to educate
designers, manufacturers, and consumers. After 1852 the vortex was the
Department of Science and Art within the government Board of
Trade, which took up quarters at Marlborough H ouse while plans
were studied for a permanent home at South Kensington. Inspired by
Pugin, whose Medieval Court Cole thought one of the few successful
marriages of good design and quality manufacture, Cole set up a museum of prototypes which included examples from all historical periods as well as a 'Gallery of False Principles in Decoration', best known
today through Charles Dickens's parody of this pious effort at reforming public taste in Hard Times. What had captured the public's fancy in
the Crystal Palace was now to be the object of scorn, as visitors learned
to reject products that defied the nature of materials and to disdain illusionistic 'direct imitation of nature', particularly in fabric and wallpaper design. While the gallery was short-lived, the influence of the
museum- today's Victoria and Albert-was enormous; by the end of
the century it had spawned numerous imitators in the Arts and Crafts
museum movement in German-speaking countries. D espite the emphasis on models, the mission shared by Cole's circle was to combat illusionistic imitation, be it expressed in the 'vulgar' products of the
marketplace or in the naturalistic approach to ornament championed
by Ruskin. In his widely consulted Grammar ofOrnament (1856) Owen
Jones juxtaposed ornamental motifs culled from the most diverse cultures, with unprecedented attention to Islamic, Chinese, and even
Maori ornamental forms. But unlike contemporary historicists who
argued for inalienable links between individual forms and their cultures, Jones derived universal principles of good design-37 in allART AND INDUSTRY: HENRY COLE AND WILLIAM MORRIS

219

MAUftfSC.H

MORESQUE. N 5

~AU:;tESQUES

109 Owen Jones

'Moresque Ornament', details
of mosaics from the Alhambra
Palace, lithographic plate (no.
153)from The Grammar of
Ornament (London, 1856)
In his great compendium of
decorative systems, Jones
paid particular attention to the
building he had first studied in
the 1830s, the Alhambra in
Spain, 'the very summit of
perfect1on of Moorish art, as is
the Parthenon of Greek Art ...
every principle which we can
derive from the study of
ornamental art of every people
is ... present here.' He was not
alone in proposing that the
underlyinggeometries of such
abstract systems, as nature
itself, could liberate
architecture from historicism;
similar proposals were made
in France in the 1860s byV.M. Ruprich-Robert.

from his folio museum. The richly coloured lithographic plates could
easily be misused as templates to be copied, but careful study brought
the student to a series of plates-drawn by a pupil of the school,
Christopher Dresser-demonstrating how original designs could be
derived by abstracting the underlying patterns of leaves and plants
[ 109].

In the 185os Dresser pursued these new interests in both nature and
the art of the east as paths away from what }ones condemned as the
'fashion of copying'. As a student of the Schools of Design in the late
184os, he attended Richard Redgrave's lectures on 'The Importance of
the Study ofBotany to the Ornamentist'. A decade later he enrolled at
the University of Jena to write a dissertation on Goethe's theory of
metamorphosis in relationship to plant morphology, the doctrine celebrated three decades earlier by Schinkel in his Bauakademie [93]. By
the r86os Dresser was teaching that conventionalization of natural
forms was a stage rather than a goal in the artistic manipulation ofgeometric principles of order observable in nature. In The Art ofDecorative
Design (r86z) he laid out a veritable set of spiritual exercises by which
the designer progressed from 'natural adaptations ... the lowest form
of ornament' to 'purely ideal ornament'. 'The designer's mind must be
like the vital force of the plant, ever developing itself into forms of
beauty, yet while thus free to produce, still in all cases governed by unaltered laws,'14 Dresser concluded, in lines that recall the German
Romantic theory of the free genius in rapture before nature as much as
they anticipate the growing impact of the young science of experimental psychology on theories of abstract form in the r88os and r8gos. Yet
for all his celebration of inspiration, Dresser also embraced the rationality of machine production, which he thought had unlimited potential and provided the only means by which the artisan could assert his
place in society on an equal footing with industrial producers.

William Morris, Philip Webb, and the quest for an earthly

paradise
William Morris (r834-96), Ruskin's most avid disciple, reached this
same conclusion only with great reluctance at the end of a lifelong
quest to revive endangered handicrafts as the basis for a renewal of
both architecture and society. The legendary Red House [11 0], designed by Philip Webb (r8Jr- r9rs), a fellow member of the 'Crusade
and Holy War against the age', was a microcosmic utopia of Morris
and Webb's rearguard action to restore the ethics of both design and
labour they admired in the thirteenth century in defiance of industrial
capitalism. 'The beauty of the handicrafts of the Middle Ages came
from this, that the workman had control over his materials, tools, and
time,' Morris explained years later in a lecture to a socialist group. 15
With his private fortune it was possible to create a house, much inWILLIAM MORR IS , PHILIP WEBB, T HE QU EST FOR AN EARTHLY PARA DI SE

220 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHIT ECTURAL FORM ,

1851-90

22I

110 Phitip Webb

Red House stairhall, near
Bexleyheath, Kent, 1860s
To the ongoing cultivation of
the small free-standing house
as an architectural and social
type for British middle-class
society, Webb added the
philosophy of Morris and his
friends that all aspects of the
interior should be designed in
harmony. The Red House
announces the theme of the
private interior as a
psychological retreat from
urban realities that would
make the house increasingly a
site of architectural
experimentation.

William Morris

The son ofwealthy parents, Williarn Morris (r834-<)6) was educated at Oxford, where
he imbibed antipathy to commercial values by reading Carlyle and Ruskin, took up
painting under the influence ofRossetti and Burne-Jones, and learned archltecture in
the office ofG. E. Street, where he met Philip Webb. Togetherwith Webb he
designed the Red House, a manifesto for a reunion ofarchitecture with handicraft,
which he considered the greatestlegacy of the l\1iddle Ages. The notion ofthe
collaborative effort ofdecorative arts and architecture, a joint set of principles of
honesty, handwork, truth to materials, and non-illusionistic pattern, derived largely
from Ruskin and Pugin but was now applied to the domestic realm. Morris &Co.,
with its wallpapers, textiles, and stained glass, was to be the cradle ofthe Arts and
Crafts movement. In 1877 Morris and Webb founded the Society for the Protection of
Ancient Bui.ldings.i\nti-Scrape'was their critique ofprevalent practices of restoration
which sought minimal intervention in historic buildings, for fear that the loss of
original fabric and handwork, precious vessels ofgenuine and tactile historical records,
would extinguish historic architecture's 'lamp of memory' (Ruskin).

spired in its honest brick and asymmetrical expression in massing and

fenestration of different functions by the contemporary parsonages of
Butterfield and Street, and to design and craft by hand all its furniture-much of it built-in-panelling, wallpaper, and textiles. Not a
single thing was to be purchased from the marketplace. Pugin had
done as much in his own house at Ramsgate a decade earlier, but
Morris and Webb were determined to work with minimal recourse to
machines, launching a philosophy that laid the foundations for the
British and American Arts and Crafts movements at the end of the
century.
For the next 30 years 'the firm'-reorganized in 1875 as 'Morris and
Co.' under Morris's sole control-took on numerous commissions,
many of them to decorate the country houses designed by Web b-and
later William Lethaby, Ernest Newton, and others-for a close-knit
clientele of artists and others who shared their disdain for ascendant
bourgeois conventions. Increasingly Morris's designs and Webb's architecture drifted from the pronounced medievalism of the Red House
towards a self-consciously modest astylar expression which drew considerable inspiration from rural vernacular buildings- notably those of
the seventeenth century misleadingly called by Richard Norman Shaw
and others 'Qyeen Anne'-and from the austere utilitarian aesthetic of
such Cistercian buildings as the barn at Great Coxwell, 'unapproachable in its dignity, as beautiful as a cathedral', Morris said. 16 In their
commitment to honest expression of materials, quest for simplicity,
and preference for abstracted natural patterns in decoration, M orris
and Webb organized their lives and work in defiance of 'the present
system of commercialism and profit-mongering'. 17 Morris had given
up architecture when he realized that he could not control the entire
design process, although he continued to preach that architecture was
222 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM, 1851-90

WILLIAM MORR I S, PHI LI P WEBB, THE QUEST FOR AN EARTHLY PARADISE

22J

the master art, even expanding the word's definition to embrace everything from teacups to town planning. He defined architecture alternately as 'the turning of necessary articles of daily use into works of art'
and as 'the moulding and altering to human needs of the very face of
the earth itself' .18 Along with Dresser, he was one of the first to identify himself professionally as a 'designer', but he refused to conceive of
this as part of a chain of command. Morris mastered every step and
technique of the successive crafts he took up, from mural decoration
and wallpaper to embroidery, dying and the weaving of carpets, tapestries, and textiles, book design, stained glass, and ceramics.
Webb likewise refused to take on more commissions than he could
personally supervise, controlling every element of design and construction, and increasingly striving to conceive his buildings from materials found locally-at Smeaton Manor, Yorkshire (r876) the bricks
were made from clay on a nearby site-and taking cues both for design
and construction from local vernaculars. Like Morris, Webb never relaxed his standards or convictions. Both admitted, in turning to active
engagement in socialist politics in the r88os with hope that some challenge to 'the cash nexus' might be on the horizon, that their practices
were fraught with paradox. 'Our architects are constantly trying to find
workmen who can use materials with the simplicity and directness of
those of earlier times, so that the workmen themselves should be able
to ease the designer of the unbearable burden of directing the manipulation of all trades from his office,' 19 Webb wrote, even as he maintained an office that never exceeded three employees and continued to
provide full-scale drawings and detailed instructions not to leave any
element of his designs to chance in a capitalist labour market. Morris
lamented that he was never able to produce his designs cheaply enough
to reach more than a rarefied market of consumers; indeed they risked
becoming precisely the type of commodity he struggled to resist
through a painstaking study ofMarx and Engels's writings in the r88os.
Gradually Morris came to admit that machines might be used to produce designs provided they remain firmly under the control of the designer: 'It is not this or that steel and brass machine which we want to
get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny,
which oppresses the lives of all of us.'20

Industry and style: Viollet-le-Duc and Gottfried Semper

The burning issues that moved Morris and his followers, symbolized
by the Crystal Palace, were to spark two other great undertakings in
architectural theory in the 1850s. No less than Ruskin, EugeneEmmanuel Viollet-le-Duc in France, and the German Gottfried
Semper formulated comprehensive theories to guide the search for architectural form in light at once of the historical evolution of society
and the challenges of industrial materials and methods. But unlike
224 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM, 1851-90

Ruskin, whose understanding of architecture remained grounded in

his literary metier, Viollet-le-Due and Semper were practising architects whose quest for universal theories of form-typical of the midcentury's quest for systems of knowledge-was tempered by the
realities of construction even as they drew fresh inspiration from developments in the most diverse disciplines, from biology and physiology to anthropology. A theory of style, and of the mechanism which
explained the interrelationship of physical, cultural, and aesthetic determinants in its formation, was the keystone of their respective overarching explanatory systems. Jointly their legacy was as important for
the subsequent development of art history as a discipline as it was for
architects' continued anxiety over the question Viollet-le-Duc put so
succinctly: 'Is the nineteenth century condemned to come to an end
without having found a style of its own?' 21
By the time he conceived the project of a ro-volume dictionary of
medieval architecture (Dictionnaire raisonni de /'architecture.franraise du
XI' au XVI' siecle (r8s4-68))-the format alone betrayed his quest for an
objective and systematic theory-Viollet-le-Due had emerged not
only as an adamant combatant for the Gothic Revival but as the leading exponent of structural rationalism. In a serialized history of medieval architecture in the pages oftheAnnalesArchiologiques, the organ
of the Gothic party of the Catholic Revival, he laid down clearly the
foundations of his later work in the r84os. There he advanced the historical hypothesis that was his most lasting legacy: that in less than a
century the architects of the medieval cathedrals of the Ile-de-France
had perfected a structural system in which every element contributed
to the dynamic equilibrium of the whole, and in which material was reduced to a daring, but reasoned, minimum. The resulting architecture
possessed what he called, in his definition of 'style', 'the perfect harmony between the results obtained and the means employed to achieve
them';22 form and structure, in short, were identical. Unlike elements
of Classicism learned by rote at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts- in this
Viollet-le-Due paralleled Ruskin's belief that Classical architecture
was a form of slavery of the human spirit-Gothic offered flexible
lessons of materiality, rationality, and economy as relevant in the nineteenth century as in the thirteenth. 'Cathedrals represent the first and
greatest application of the modern spirit to architecture, emerging
from the midst of an order of ideas quite opposite to those of antiquity,'
he proclaimed.23 Fiercely nationalist, he believed this rationality to be
the genius of the nation that had produced Descartes, the scientific
discoveries of the early nineteenth century, particularly the biological
work of Cuvier and St-Hilaire, and several generations of engineers
whose bridges and roads were the envy of Europe. In the same years
that the Comte Leon de Laborde drew up conclusions from his observations on the Crystal Palace jury, proclaiming that it fell to France to
I NDUST RY AN D STYLE: VIOLLET-LE-DUC AND GOTTFRIED SEMPER

225

prove that art and industry could be brought into a fruitful alliance,
Viollet-le-Due began to recast himself less the prophet of the Gothic
Revival and more the suffragette for the place of French architects in
giving form to 'the abundance of means and materials' presented by industrial and engineering advances. 24
In the 184os Viollet-le-Duc fought in the trenches with a group of
young architects-most notably Labrouste's pupil Lassus-for opportunities to demonstrate that the style of the French thirteenth century
was the only conceivable starting-point for a new national architecture
and a way of breaching what they considered the fortress of the
Academy and the centralized architectural administration, bastions of
Classical doctrine. Each new Gothic Revival church was a momentous
political battle, from Lassus's design of St-Nicolas at Nantes (1843) to
the Parisian church ofSte-Clotilde (1846-57), begun by F. C. Gau and
completed by Theodore Ballu, the Gothic spires of which rose defiantly over the Classical portico of the French National Assembly.
In the wake of Guizot's organization of the State Commission on
Historic Monuments in 1834, Viollet-le-Due not only crafted the fabric and the reputation of France's medieval monuments as embodiments of the national spirit, but formulated an influential theory of
restoration as an idealist construction of perfect monument 'which
may in fact never have actually existed at any given time'. 25 As a historian he considered the cathedral building yards of the Middle Ages
crucibles of the national school ofrational architecture. As an architect
and reformer, he used his restoration projects at Notre-Dame in Paris,
Amiens, Carcassonne, and countless other sites to forge a new union of
building technique and architectural design and to foster no!hing less
than a counter-culture to the academic routines of the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts. A whole coterie was formed, some of whom worked in
the French provinces, notably Eugene Millet, Emile Boeswillwald,
Paul Abadie, and Edmond Duthoit, others carrying the doctrines
abroad, notably Viollet-le-Duc's son-in-law Maurice Ouradou, who
worked in Cracow, and Sureda, who helped set up the Historical
Monuments Commission in Spain. In the mid-184os he prided himself on designing with Lassus a new sacristy and vestry for NotreDame Cathedral that could be easily mistaken for medieval work; by
the 185os this life-long atheist was losing faith in the literal imitation of
Gothic forms in favour of a position which paralleled the theory of'development' explored by the English followers ofPugin. As in England
an important catalyst was to be the use of iron in architecture.
Fewer than 4 years separate London's Crystal Palace from France's
response, the Palace oflndustry on the Champs-Elysees to house the
Universal Exhibition of 1855, by which France determined to rival
England not only in the marketplace but in the showcases of industrial
progress. But in those years debate over iron came to the fore, first with

the insistence of Emperor Napoleon m in 1853 that Victor Baltard halt

construction of new stone buildings for Paris's central markets [124]
and replace them with a building in 'iron, iron, nothing but iron',26
then with the controversy unleashed in the press in 1855 over LouisAuguste Boileau's (1812-96) St-Eugene-Ste-Cecile, Paris's fir~t castiron church. Whereas both of those buildings were predommantly
conceived in iron, at the Palace oflndustry conception was divided between an architect, Jean-Marie Viel, who styled the Renaissance masonry fas:ades, and an engineer, Alexis Barrault, who was able ~o exp~oit
this rigid envelope to create a glass and iron vault held aloftw1th no 1~
termediate supports to subdivide the interior space. The great tnumphal arch entry flanked by caryatids symbolizing 'Science' and 'Art'
expressed ambitions long at the heart ofSaint-Simonian t~eory-~or
mer Saint-Simonians dominated the team entrusted w1th stagmg
France's 1855 and 1867 exhibitions- and most recently recommended
as national policy by de Laborde, namely that it was the destiny of
France to effect new alliances between the material and the spiritual,
between art and industry. In the heat of these controversies Viollet-leDuc formulated a challenging theory of contemporary architecture,
one in which advances in iron technology would be assimilated to the
lessons of rational structure and the principle of dynamic structural
equilibrium which were the legacies ofFrench Gothic.
.
Boileau took up the challenge. In large part prefabncated, StEugene [111] exploited the lightness of cast iron a~d sheet metal to c~e
ate an open cage of structure filled with light. Flymg buttresses, which
Viollet-le-Due's academician critics had repeatedly derided as the weak
point of Gothic architecture, were rendered unne~essary by light in.fill
walls of stucco over brick, gaining thereby the max1mum amount of mterior space in a structure built to fill its cramped c?rner .site. !"'-.restrained exterior gave way to an interior of iron pamted m brilliant
colours, emulating the system of abstracted Gothic ornament that
Duban, Viollet-le-Due, and Lassus had pioneered in their restoration
of the Sainte-Chapelle a decade earlier. The church was dedicated by
the Empress Eugenic, and celebrated in an article by Michel Chevali~r,
a former Saint-Simonian and economic adviser to the state. Chevalier
asked why the system Boileau had already proposed to patent ~~d generalize-Boileau's pamphlet The New Architectural Form descnbmg the
so-called 'synthetic cathedral' appeared in 1854-had not been adopted
for the expensive new churches then under construction by the state..
Above the new steamship ports at Marseille, Vaudoyerwas supemsing the foundations for a new cathedral which embodied the notion of
historical accretion through the chain of continuous progress and the
vital lessons to be learned from moments of cultural transition and intermingling, a theory he and his friends Leonce _Reynaud a~d ~bert
Lenoir had formulated alongside Romantic histonans and art1sts m the
INDUSTRY AND STYLE: VIOLLET-LE-DUC AND GOTTFRJED SEMPER 227

226 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM, 1851-

90

112 Leon Vaudoyer

Marseille Cathedral, 1852-90
Embodying the philosophy
that architectural forms evolve
according to laws of historical
development and through
direct interactions of cultures,
the eclectic amalgam renders
VISible Marseille's historic and
contemporary role as 'gateway
to the Orient'. Its twin-towered
fa~ade and radiating chapels
signalled the French medieval
tradition; married to this was a
cascade of Byzantine domes
and marble striping, evocative
at once of Italian medieval
cathedrals and Cairene
mosques.

111 Louis-Auguste Boileau

St-Eugene-Ste-Cecile, Paris,

1854-55
The first of a series of all-iron
Gothic Revival churches
designed by Boileau, this
Parisian church catalysed a
lively debate over the use of
new industrial materials in
public architecture. Later
exa mples were constructed at
Montlu~on and in the su burb
ofleVesinet[ 134].1n
subsequent decades iron
buildings were exported to
France's colonies, notably in
the Caribbean.

point of departure. But whereas Viollet-le-Due admired Labrouste's

Bibliotheque Ste-Genevieve enormously [87], he dismissed Boileau's
view of both architecture and history as vulgarly mechanistic~
Adopting a line of attack Hubsch had advanced in refuting the notion
of the transposition of archaic wooden forms into the stone syntax of
the Greek temple, Viollet-le-Duc bemoaned that the rational spirit of
Gothic should be defamed by a crude notion of imitation that defied
the nature of materials. In a stunning exploded perspective drawing
[ 113] for his Dictionnaire he demonstrated that Gothic was an organic
system in which every component had a structural role and form that
was reasoned in relationship to its place in a perfectly functioning
whole. In this architecture were paralleled the creative potential and
laws of nature, 'her deductions follow one upon the other according to
the order of an invariable logic'.27 Using his pencil as a scalpel to uncover nature's laws he took inspiration from the displays of articulated
skeletons by which Cuvier had made visible his 'law of correlation' at
the Museum of Natural History and from the stunning sectional dissections in the illustrations of Marc-Jean Bourgery's (179{1849) seminal Complete Treatise of H uman Anatomy (I8JI-S4)- Rather than
copying, architects should imagine what the consummately rational
medieval builders would have done if blessed with large sections of
iron. Baltard's central markets [124], with their frank expression of
programme and materials, were more suggestive of a starting-point
for finding a modern architecturallanguage.28 Viollet-le-Duc recommended studying them as a tonic to avoid the pitfall of those

I83os. In an eclectic but purposeful amalgam Vaudoyer sought to create

a building which pictorialized, even as it found its logic in, the role of
Marseille as the historical crucible between the east and the west, the
place where French culture had continually been provoked to stylistic
experiment and advance by contact with eastern Mediterranean cultures from the Greeks to the Byzantines to the Arabs [112].
..- Both the literal imitation of Gothic forms in new materials and the
vision of history as a process of eclectic cultural intermingling were
concepts Viollet-le-Duc was determined to combat; he lashed out
against both Boileau's cast-iron church and Vaudoyer's historicist
cathedral. Boileau modelled his cast-iron uprights on the svelte stone
columns of the twelfth-century refectory of St-Martin-des-Champs,
a building Viollet-le-Due praised and which Labrouste had taken as a
228 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM, I851-90

I NDUSTRY AND STYLE: VIOLLET-LE- DUC AND GOTTFRIED SEMPER

229

113 Viollet-le-Duc

U.i4.""Tl>

nated by the coexistence of a limited number oflaws in nature and her

dizzying diversity of forms, notably in crystals. The capacity of
mankind to create, the very nature of art, was to be revealed by the simultaneous study of the science of history and the history of nature.
'Any school that has studied natural flora minutely, and natural fauna
as well, and that has succeeded by the application oflogical method in
creating out of stone an organism with its own laws similar to those of a
living organicism'-and by this point Viollet-le-Duc did not even
need to identify the Gothic by name-'does not have to be preoccupied
with style; these methods, then as always, constituted the very essence
of style. The day when artists go out looking for style, that is when art
no longer has style.'31 He disbanded his atelier when his students
thought to please him by creating French Gothic designs when asked
to imagine a building for North M rica. Solicited for advice on a future
Russian architecture, Viollet-le-Due demonstrated in L'Art R usse
(1877) how a rational framework of structure had been found in the
brick architecture of seventeenth-century Moscow which might serve
as a point of departure for integrating the new resources of iron.
Universal laws of form and the relativism of culture were, he maintained, not incompatible.

Springing point of the arch

from the article 'Construction'
of the Dictionnaire raisonne de
/'Architecture, 1858
Taking inspiration from both
the method and the drawings
of contemporary treatises of
comparative anatomy, Violletle-Duc's exploded perspective
technique conveys instantly
his theory that in architecture
as in nature every part was a
uniquely functioning element
of a larger organic order. Here
he analyses the complex
stereotomy of ribbed vaulting
at its key structural joint.

114 Viollet-le-Duc

Revivalists 'who make one think of those people who believe they are
performing their religious duty in reciting Latin prayers ofwhich they
don't understand a word'.29
Language remained an important metaphor to Viollet-le-Duc as
he continued to puzzle over the problem of finding an appropriate formal system for modern architecture. Here his quest for a universal law
of form met with his belief in the importance of historical guidance.
Although he agreed with Labrouste's generation that architectural
forms must change and evolve with society, he rejected their vision of
historical hybridization as a motor of progress. 'Why seek to compose
a macaronic language when one has at hand a beautiful and simple language all our own?'30 he remarked, in reviewing Vaudoyer's plans for a
Romano-Byzantine-style cathedral at M arseille [112]. Taken with the
racist theories of the Comte Arthur Gobineau, who preached that
racial mixture was the source of cultural decline, Viollet-le-Duc argued increasingly for the national specificity of architecture. As he
moved on in the 186os and 187os to studies ofboth the geology and the
vernacular architecture of the Alps, he sought to understand the commonality between the evolution of forms and types and the principles
that could be extrapolated for the future of architecture. He was fasci230 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM,

1851-90

Concert Hall, c.l866

An iron armature resting on
eight cast-iron columns is at
once independent of, and
interacts with, a thin masonry
shell in this imaginary building
published in Viollet-le-Duc's
Lectures on Architecture. He
was at pains to show that
universal principles of form,
evident in the equilateral
triangles that form the web of
ribs over the vaults, could
raise iron construction to the
highest ideal of architecture.

INDUST RY AND STYLE: VJOLLET-LE-DUC AND GOTTFRIED SEMPER

ZJI

Viollet-le-Duc's most sustained and influential reflection on the future of architecture came in the wake of student protests which aborted
his lecturing career at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, whose curriculum he
had been instrumental in reforming in r863. In the second volume of
his Discourses on Architecture, he painted an alarming portrait of a profession rapidly losing ground, not only to engineers but to the larger
cultural antagonism between the arts and science and technical knowledge. Was the architect to be reduced to a fashionable decorator? Was
the modern city to be composed of nothing but, as he put it, hangars
and hypogea, the utilitarian iron and glass markets of the engineers and
the public architecture of the academicians nostalgically enslaved to
the period ofLouis XIV? Modern buildings, like modern societies, were
complex organisms, but their envelopes were no more in harmony with
the sophisticated systems of heating, ventilation, and gas lighting recently developed than they were with the structural capacities of iron.
The cultural spirit of rational inquiry that was the motor of unprecedented progress in science, philosophy, history, even archaeology, was
absent in architecture alone, Viollet- le-Duc complained, echoing the
Saint-Simonian dream of an organic society. Also Saint- Simonian was
his choice of a great hall of secular assembly, a concert hall, as the
building to encapsulate suggestions for what forms might result from a
modern fusion of architecture and engineering [ 114]. Calling for a
mixed system of construction in which cast and wrought iron, brick
and stone masonry, and even enamelled tile infill would all be developed to maximize their individual capacities in relation to one another,
Viollet-le-Duc called his invention an 'organism' which took its place
as the next link in a long chain of architectures for mass gatherings.
The hall was a successor to the Roman baths and the Gothic cathedrals, just as nature 'neither forgets nor omits anything of her past ...
From the polyps to mankind, she follows an interrupted path.'32 He
was at pains to argue that his organism was equally prepared to struggle
for survival in the marketplace of construction bids and changing economics of materials.

Gottfried Semper and the problem of representation

'Let the discoveries, machines, and speculation work as hard as they
can, so that the dough will be kneaded out of which interpretive science ... will be able to shape new form. In the meantime, however, architecture must step down from its throne and go into the marketplace,
there to teach and there to learn,'33 Gottfried Semper (r8o3;9) wrote
in a perspicacious essay on the Crystal Palace. Exiled from Saxony for
his part on the barricades of the failed bourgeois revolution of1848, the
former royal architect was keenly aware in London that economically
the world was changing at an unprecedented rate, even if challenges to
traditional forms of political power had been rebuffed. Even as fellow
232 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM, 1851-90

Gottfried Semper ( 1803- 79)

Born in Altona, and trained in Munich and Paris, Semper travelled in Sicily and
Greece withjules Goury, and participated in the period's debates over architectural
polychromy. As a royal architect in Saxony after 1834 he grappled with stylistic and
social ideals in seminal designs. Dresden's opera house and art gallery established the
neo-Renaissance-recalling the city states ofltalr-as a style for public buildings in
modern middleclass urban society.
In the r844 competition for rebuilding St Nicholas, I lamburg, Semper submitted a
Rrmdbogenstil design, an explicit critique ofwhat he viewed as the inherent neoconservatism of the promoters ofthe Gothic Revival Cologne Cathedral. Like many
Germans who saw career prospects dimmed by the uprisings ofr848-49, in which
Semper and his friend Richard Wagner had taken part, he contemplated emigrating
to the United States. But in r849 he accepted an invitation to London, where he
worked in the design reform movement led by Henry Cole.lnr855 Semper took up a
teaching post in Zurich, and designed a numberofimportant buildings there,
including the railway station; and from r869 he designed key structures for the
Viennese Ringstrasse (chapter 8).

exiles Marx and Engels, whose Communist Manifesto had appeared in

1848, sought to formulate the historical laws that could master the
sweeping changes under way in the social and economic relations of
the factory system, Semper grappled with what he had witnessed in the
hothouse ofPaxton's 'world market', where both consumers and makers were confronted with a dizzying 'abundance of means ... the first
34
great danger with which art has to struggle'.
The Great Exhibition confirmed Semper's belief that the chaos of
contemporary architecture resulted from the lack of an integrating
'world view', something earlier societies enjoyed unselfconsciously but
which the modern world could only harness through the new science
of history. For nearly a decade he had been developing an organizational schema for a comprehensive theory of architecture, one that
could complete the work begun by Durand in his famous taxonomic
plates of building types, but infuse it with something of the organic
unity captured in the great synthetic systems advanced by Cuvier and
by Humboldt. His great work, the never completed Style in the
Technical and Tectonic Arts or Practical Aesthetics (r86o-6J), grew from
this project for a 'Comparative Theory of Building'. Semper reflected
continually on the parallels between the inner dynamics of the social
art of architecture and the patterns of change in nature, revealing in an
1843 letter to his publisher that he had been drawn in Paris to Cuvier's
display of skeletons and fossils 'as if by a magical force'. 'Just as everything there envelops and is explained by the simplest prototypical
form, just as nature in her infinite variety is yet simple and sparse in
basic ideas, just as she renews continually the same skeletons by modifying them a thousandfold according to the formative stages reached
by living beings and the conditions of existence ... works of art are also
GOTTFRIED SEMPER AND THE PROBLEM OF REPRE SENTATIO N

233

115 Gottfried Semper

Caribbean Hut. Der Slit, 1862
A little more than a century
after Laugier (1] sought to
return architecture to a
respect for its origins, the
German architect and theorist
Semper responded to theories
of evolution to propose a
completely different
interpretation of architecture's
origins. Laugier's notion of a
template of truth is replaced
by a dynamic model of
historical process and a vivid

demonstration of the
interaction of social belief and
form-making.

based on certain standard forms conditioned by primordial ideas, yet

permit an infinite variety of phenomena according to the particular
needs that affect them.'35 Taken out of context one might imagine this
a passage from Viollet-le-Duc, but while the French and German theorists were to develop in similar intellectual environments, they were to
develop radically different notions of style and diametrically opposed
prescriptions for the present.
Semper's great originality was the centrality of the symbolic or representational role of architectural forms and the belief that those
forms, no matter how evolved, could be traced back to fundamental social practices. A history of becoming was fundamental to his unwavering aim to formulate 'an architectural theory of invention . . . that
teaches the way of nature and avoids characterless schematicism and
thoughtless caprice', 36 evoking the dual spectres of academic convention and eclecticism. At the Great Exhibition Semper found a building
that gave powerful visual form to his theory, not in Paxton's design,
which broadcast only the contemporary 'devaluation of meaning', but
in the exhibition of colonial Trinidad, one of those 'half-barbaric nations'37 whose production yielded glimpses of'earlier stages of cultural
234 NEW TECHNOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FORM, 1851-90

development', before industrial acceleration derailed the slow process

by which artistic forms metamorphose. Unlike the novelties of the
Crystal Palace produced by an emerging consumer market in anticipation of demand, the full-scale model of a wood and thatch hut [115]
embodied Semper's conviction that architecture had evolved from
handicrafts. Architecture had its origins in the choice of a site to erect a
hearth, which as the nucleus for family and social assembly came to organize man's craft activities in the enterprise of shelter. Lifted off the
humid ground by a substructure of masonry and shielded from the elements by a roof, the fire is both protected and consecrated in its own
space. Finally the whole was hung with textiles to form walls. Both a
symbol and a tool, the hearth was the origin of society and-transformed into the altar--of its religious beliefs, of ceramics, and thus of
making in general. Architectural meaning and social meaning evolved
in tandem: 'Around the hearth the first groups assembled; around it the
first alliances formed, around it the first rude religious concepts were
put into customs of a cult. Throughout all phases of society the hearth
formed the sacred focus centre around which the whole took order and
shape.'38
It is tempting to recall Laugier's primitive hut of a century earlier
[see 1], and the whole tradition of structural rationalism in France
which stemmed from it, but for Semper the hut had the status of a
palaeontological artefact rather than an ideal standard. Nor was he willing to allow any single determinant of architectural form, be it laws of
structure or materials, to predominate. I n lectures at Cole's D epartment
of Practical Art he went so far as to proffer a mathematical equation to
symbolize the way in which materials, techniques, climate, society, politics, and even personal taste all acted upon a building's function and
thus on the resulting style. O n numerous occasions he derided any literal materialist view, even ridiculing Viollet-le-Due's doctrine of material determinism in the pages of Style. Semper coined two terms to
underscore the fact that an ongoing process of transformation, and thus
representation, remained at the core of the art of architecture, and of its
continued fulfilment ofboth the material and spiritual needs of society.
The concept of Bekleidung, or dressing, derived from the earlier theories
of the Berlin architect Karl Botticher, who in his dense The Tectonics of
the Hellenics of 1844 drew an influential distinction between the literal
structure of a building, which he called its core form, and its visual expression, or art form. While the theory derived from long-running debates over the use of colour, particularly in Greek architecture, its most
lasting legacy was to explain the conventionalized vocabularies of architectural ornament not as simple decoration but as a symbolic language
embodying the very essence of architecture. To Botticher's theory,
grounded in the notion of discrete architectural cultures succeeding one
another, Semper added a key operative concept, the Sto.ffwechseltheorie,
GOTTFRIED SEMPER A N D THE PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION

235

116 Alexandre Laplanche

Au Bon Marc he, Paris, 1872
a) Exterior
Architect Laplanche's stone
fa<;ades borrowed
recognizable motifs freely
from recent public
architecture, deliberately
blurring the boundaries
between culture and
commerce and pioneering the
use of historical architectural
forms in the new techniques of
advertising and marketing
developed by the ni neteenthcentury department store. The
iron frame behind allowed a
proliferation of display
windows, giving tantalizing
glimpses of the full splendour
of goods arrayed within .
b) Interior
A veritable pendant to Charles
Gamier's contemporary stair
at the Opera [ 117]. Boileau's
iron stair was likewise as much
for seeing the latest in goods,
especially new fabrics, as for
being seen on. Department
stores were among the rare
spaces where smgle women
could stroll acceptably in
public. The Bon Marc he
encouraged them to linger by
opening a reading room and a
buffet with free cakes and

refreshments, as the world of

private commerce
increasingly crafted spaces of
public leisure.

or theory of the transformation of materials, by which he explained that

even when the materials of construction changed, the chain of meaning
in architecture remained unbroken. T he hut again confirmed this notion, for the prime example of primordial motifs and their mutations for
Semper was the origin of the wall in the symbolic patterns of the textile
arts rather than in the constructive laws of masonry. Once these spatial
dividers-and in this he referred also to the tents of the ancient near
east-were replaced by more permanent materials, builders continued
to recall the patterns of the original textile wall in decorative cladding,
be it stucco, paint, or glazed bricks or tiles. In the exhibits of the British
Museum and the Louvre Semper found confirmation, noticing that
Assyrian glazed brick walls were often patterned on models of wicker
mats, such as those used in the Caribbean hut. 'Although architecture
produces original formations and is not an imitative art like painting
and sculpture, it has over the centuries created its own store of forms
from which it borrows the types for new creations; by using these types,
architecture remains legible and comprehensible for everyone,'39
Semper concluded in response to 'the Babylonian confusion of tongues'
that he observed at the Crystal Palace. The marketplace was a school for
the astute eye, armed with a knowledge of the genealogy or etymology
of architectural language, but most makers and consumers would require a more orderly exposition. For this Semper proposed museums as
schools of public taste, a project given its most concrete realization in
the interpretation of his ideas in the formation of Vienna's Museum of
Applied Arts and in Semper's own design for museums as the public
forum ofVienna, where he would culminate his long and chequered eareer as a builder [131].

The first department stores

While Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc, and Semper challenged architects to
respond to industrialization and commercialization, the marketplace
itself pioneered novel uses of iron and glass to create an architecture of
display and consumption that made the ephemeral display of the world
fairs a permanent feature of modern urban life. Just a year after the
Crystal Palace was dismantled, Aristide Boucicaut opened what histo-
rians of mass consumption have labelled the first department store, Au
Bon Marche on Paris's left bank [116a, b]. By 1874 the shop had grown
to fill a city block, and architecture was added to the list of innovations
such as fixed prices and no-obligation- to-buy which transformed
shopping from a task of provisioning to a leisure spectacle, fuelled by
the steady increase of middle-class purchasing power in the second
half of the nineteenth century. 40
As the store expanded, its exterior took on the form of a veritable
public monument [116a], its main entrance picked out from the commonplace fas:ades of the rue de Sevres by an elaborately decorated piling
236 NEW TEC HNOLOGY AND ARCHI T ECTURA L FORM, 1851-9 0

THE FIRST D E PARTMENT ST ORE S 237

up of motifs borrowed from the French Renaissance Revival launched a

decade earlier by Visconti and Lefuel at the Louvre [ 119] and its corner
rotunda adapting a motif much admired in Labrouste's design for the
National Library (r859-68) to the brief of attracting customers. The entrances advanced subtly onto the pavement, hoping to ensnare window
shoppers attracted by the broad display windows where architecture and
merchandise collaborated in making the building a veritable advertisement for the world of goods within. Between r872 and r874 the interior
was remodelled by Louis-Charles Boileau. H e collaborated with the
young engineering firm ofGustave Eiffel, whose experience in bridging
the landscape with iron railway trusses was now enlisted in the conquest
of the deep space of an urban block by new techniques ofselling. In place
of the open courtyards required to permit daylight into earlier interiors,
the new building focused around three skylit atria [116b] and remained
open at night thanks to a full complement of gas lighting. A swooping
metal stairway seemed literally suspended in the space, providing not
only ever-panoramic vistas of merchandise, but making the shoppers
themselves an integral part of the spectacle of a new world ofluxury. A
rival department store, 'A la ville de Saint-D enis', offered the thrill of ascending a three-storey skylit atrium on Leon Edoux's hydraulic elevator,
unveiled a few years earlier at the International Exhibition of r867.
Boileau, son of the architect of St-Eugene [ 111], realized that the
new material negated all he had learned at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of
the proportions, shadows, and manipulation of mass of grand public
architectural design. 'Either we concede that it is impossible to create a
monument with metal, or such a monument being unable to withstand
serious comparison with stone buildings we should avoid once and for
all imitating stone and consider it from an entirely new point of view.'41
H enceforth, he concluded, architects would compose with voids rather
than solids. Whereas Classical and Gothic design alike were based on
adjusting solids to sculpt forms in light, in the delicate gossamer of
iron-frame construction light itselfwould become the subject, manipulated to create reflections, sparkling effects, and even luminous clarity, 'like one plays with the lights of a chandelier by cutting differently
shaped crystals'.42 Architecture and commerce had indeed formed a
new alliance. The interiorized world of the department store was developed by the next generation of retailers to create ever more fantastic
interiors, veritable parallel universes of abundance in which retailing
and design explored the manipulation of human desires and fantasies
even as the new science of human psychology began to explore the
realm of subjective experience. Emile Zola's quip that the department
store 'was the cathedral of commerce ... made for a population of customers',43 gained an air of reality in r874 when the new 'Printemps' department store on Paris's Boulevard Haussmann opened its doors for
business after being blessed by the curate of the Madeleine.
238

NEW TEC H NOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURAL FO RM,

r85r-go

The City
Transformed,
I848-90

117 duard Detaille

Opening of the Paris Opera
House, 1875
Despite the profusion of
ornament and richness of
colour, Gamier argued that the
Opera's stairhall was complete
only when 1! served as the
prop for the spectacle of a
whole society coming together
for a moment of intense
interaction in the minutes
preceding the performance
on stage. Unfinished when the
Second Empire fell, the
building was inaugurated
under the regime of President
MacMahon. Garnier stands in
the centre of the landing,
framed by caryatids and
receiving the presidential
procession.

One of the effects ofcivilization (not to say one of the ingredients

in it) ... is, that the spectacle, and even the very idea of pain, is
kept more and more out of the sight of those classes who enjoy in
their fullness the benefits of civilization.
John Stuart Mill, 'Civilisation' (r8J6)

It was not simply the machines in the Palace of Industry on the

Champs-Elysees which offered a spectacle of progress in the summer
of 1855; Paris itself was being refashioned by new technologies of machinery and capital [118]. Under powerful gas lights, over 3,ooo
worked around the clock to join the Louvre and Tuileries palacesseparated for nearly a century by a dense and decaying quarter--into a
grand palace/museum complex centred on a public garden [119].
Napoleon 1's show street, the rue de Rivoli [63], had taken form over
decades. His nephew Napoleon m, along with his right- hand man, the
Baron Georges Haussmann (r8o9-91), named Prefect of the Seine
Departement in June 1853, accelerated the process of reforming the city
explored piecemeal by earlier governments. The scale of ch ange introduced by the railway in the countryside in the r84os was now unleashed
on the city, which took a place in European consciousness as never before.
Determined to craft a showcase imperial capital, H aussmann and
Napoleon m offered tax exemptions for zo years to speculators in a bid
to complete in time for the r855 fair the great cross-axis that was to be
the backbone for remodelling the city under the banners of circulation,
health, and security. The arcaded rue de Rivoli would be subsumed in a
great east- west axis bisecting Paris from the barracks at Courbevoie in
the west to the Place de la Bastille, perennial centre of insurrection, in
the east. The new Boulevard de Strasbourg (today's Boulevard de
Sebastapol) would link the railway on the city's northern fringe via the
Ile de la Cite to the Porte d'Orleans on the south, clearing some of the
city's densest quarters in its projected path. T hese projects fell short of
their deadline, but influential foreign visitors were treated to the spectacle of a city refashioning itself from the Hotel du Louvre, the largest
of a new breed ofgrand luxury hotels which embellished Europe's large

118
Plan of Haussmann's work in
Paris, c. 1853
The original map which
Napoleon presented to the
new Prefect of the Seine upon
his appointment in June of
1853 is lost, but an 1867 map
given by the emperor to the
Prussian monarch William 11
provides the best evidence of
the French emperor's own
involvement in redrawing
Paris's street network to
enhance circulation of
vehicles, goods, and
ultimately capital in a
modernized city.

cities as railway travel transported not only raw materials, finished

products, and labourers, but a new breed of urban consumers the
tourists, across unprecedented distances. The hotel, designed' by
Alfred Armand, was a project of the Pereire brothers, bankers and land
developers, who had launched their empire in the railway boom of the
1~4os and snapped up most of the sites cleared by the state's expropriatwns along the rue de Rivoli at preferential prices. Like Napoleon m
they were steeped in the Saint-Simonian ideology that remapping national territory and freeing up capital would not only modernize the
country but promote the general good.
Returning for the second Parisian 'Universal Exposition' in r867,
visitors would be dazzled by the great elliptical building in which
Frederic Le Play had brought the bounty of the world under the control of an ingenious organizational scheme. Radial axes were devoted
to different classes of manufactures, while the concentric rings of the
great glass and iron structure hosted displays of individual countries,
making taxonomic and national comparisons possible. The city, too,
with new radial roads connecting railway stations to the commercial
centre, gave the impression of being mastered by new standards of
order, cleanliness, efficiency, and beauty. Over r65 kilometres of new
streets-broad, straight, and furnished with pavements, drainage, gas
lighting, and newly planted trees-were punctuated by monumental
new churches, markets, and administrative buildings. With a six-fold
increase in private construction, apartment houses of unprecedented
refinement, of both exterior decorum and interior comfort, rapidly

119 Eduard Bald us

The Louvre and Tuileries
united, c.1855
Paris's transformation into a
showplace of urban spatial
order was circulated widely by
the new technology of
photography. At the Louvre the
photographer Baldus was
charged with recording the
construction and
photographing hundreds of
plaster models considered for
the rich sculptural decoration
of this palace/museum
complex which would
celebrate Napoleon Ill's
regime as a high point in the
forward march of French
culture.

lined the boulevards. The city that reformers dreamed of a century earlier [20] now breathed an air of progress so complete that even the municipal sewers were open for tours in specially designed wagons. The
working classes had been largely chased from the centre, and thus from
middle-class view, by escalating rents. It is estimated that over 35o,ooo
Parisians were displaced in only r8 years.
By the time the Second Empire fell in r87o, nearly every major
European capital-and many other cities which had swelled with industrialization and migrations from the countryside set in motion by
railway networks- was being 'modernized' in rivalrous emulation.
When the 1873 Universal Exhibition moved the spectacle of progress to
Vienna, the Austrian capital was ready. The transformation of the old
line of fortifications into a broad annular boulevard, the Ringstrasse, offered a model for other cities whose walls, effectively already breached
by trains, were now to fall to the forces of development that the railway
had unleashed. Increasing ten-fold the land area of Barcelona with a
planned extension of gridded blocks, Ildefonso Cerda coined the term
'urbanism' and authored the two-volume General Theory of
Urbanization (r86J), the first book to offer a body of theory, rather than
simply a checklist of tasks, for designing cities. Cerda's book had little
influence outside his native Spain, however; the theory of nineteenthcentury city building was encoded more in the language of contracts,
bonds, and financial instruments that were the machines of the century's credit revolution. Alongside these invisible inventions, France's
determination to remain a model ofrefinement-announced in the juxtaposition of fine arts and industry at the r855 fair--succeeded so well
that the image of the Parisian street and its architecture, both the
grandiose buildings of state and the private architecture of the bourgeois apartment, joined the ranks of the city's luxury exports. By 1900
the prestige of French urbanity was international, imitated perhaps
with even greater conviction in Bucharest or Buenos Aires, for instance,
than among France's western European neighbours, as the Ecole des

242 THE CITY TRAN SFORM EO, 1848-90

THE CITY TRANSFORMED, 1848-90

243

120 Paxton

Birkenhead Pa rk near
Liverpool, 1844
Paxton's device of separate
paths for pedestrians and
carriages which never cross
was refined in Olmsted and
Vaux's design for New York's
Central Parka few years later.
The juxta position of open
lawns for recreation with
artfully composed horticulture
was a starting-point for the
picturesque style
systematized by Alphand in
Paris for green spaces on
every scale from the vast
peripheral parks to the design
of planted city squares.

Beaux-Arts welcomed an ever greater flood of foreign students into its

architectural ateliers.

Urban reform before Haussmann

Like the eclectic architectural imagery of Paris's new skyline, little in
the formal rep ~rtoire of 'Haussmannism' was unprecedented, beyond
the scale and breathtaking speed of the operation. Harmoniously ordered frontages of private dwellings forming geometrically aligned
streets focused on a free-standing monument had been an ideal since
the mid-eighteenth century [19, 20, 61, 63]. Parks as urban lungs and
places for the moral improvement and distraction of the working
classes from potential social unrest were lessons imbibed during Louis
Napoleon's exile in London in the 184os and imported to France in the
wake of the 1848 Revolution. What was new was the sense that an
urban whole, and with it a powerfully consistent visual form, could be
infused into a city, with overlapping and well-functioning systems of
circulation, leisure, and even sanitation. In the wake of the declaration
of 1841 that the French rail system should rapidly connect Paris to all
French borders, Paris was to be transformed by a network of streets, radiating from a series of rond-points, that would connect the ring of new
railway stations to the centre and after 186o integrate the annexed ring
of industrializing villages around the city.
'Government is not a necessary ulcer', the future emperor declared in
campaigning for election as President of the Republic in 1848. 'It is

244 THE CIT Y TRANSFORMED , 1848-90

121 F.-A. Duquesny

Gare de I' Est, Paris, 1847- 52

Duquesny's station design,
with its combination of a
masonry pediment and an
enormous glass lunette
announcing the round arched
span of the engineer Serinet's
glass and iron shed behind,
was a very influential
interpretation of the railway
station as a modern portal to
the city. The monumental
scale of the lunette was
intended to dominate a major
axial boulevard connecting the
station to the heart of the city.

rather the beneficent motive of every social organism.' 1 Echoing SaintSimonian understanding of the city as a veritable body, one indeed that
could be cured, the statement also resounded with memories of devastating epidemics-19,ooo had died in the 1848 outbreak of cholera-and
of the barricades that had divided the city. London had shown the way,
using street cuts such as New Oxford Street to clear slum districts while
opening paths of circulation, in the wake ofEdwin Chadwick's statistical study of the urban poor and ofthe Parliamentary Commission on the
State ofLarge Towns and Populous Districts. Both reports declared a
correlation between the health, and the morals, of the working classes
and the physical environment of overcrowded speculative housing and
insanitary streets. Legislation mandated minimum standards for
dwellings in terms of sanitation, drainage, and ventilation, set up medical inspections, and launched campaigns of building urban sewers.
Chadwick campaigned for public parks, while Engels's descriptions of
the working-class slums of Manchester, soon seconded by the social realist literature of Dickens and others, made it impossible for the middle
classes to ignore living conditions in working class-districts, even if their
daily paths skirted direct confrontation with 'the other half'. In 1842laws
were passed allowing compulsory expropriation of unhealthy dwellings
in the name of the greater public good. Two years later the municipality
of Liverpool charged Paxton with laying out a spacious park in the
working-class suburb of Birkenhead. On the site of a drained swamp,
and bordered by houses, this adaptation of English picturesque gardens
to public welfare was a direct response to the faith that nature was essential to urban health and a morally uplifting agent, a worthy rival in short
to the temptations of the pub or the barricades [ 120].
In France the opening wedge for large-scale intervention in shaping
cities was expropriation laws passed to facilitate laying out the railway,
even if rail companies' desires to penetrate to the heart of the city were
URBAN REFORM BEFORE HAUSSMAN N

245

During the short-lived Second Republic, Louis Napoleon pursued a

two-pronged policy of government-built workers' dwellings and legal
and financial incentives to jump-start luxury real estate. The C ite
N apoleon [122], intended as a prototype for public housing in each of
Paris's administrative districts, offered a startlingly original prototype in
which glass and iron skylights maximized air and light, even while iron
gates, locked each evening, betrayed an overarching concern with reducing the threat of social unrest. But like the contemporary 'Model H ouse
for Families' in London, designed by H enry Roberts for the Society for
Improving the C onditions of the Labouring Classes, supported by
Prince Albert, it remained an isolated experiment. Until the twentieth
century 'improved slum dwellings'- as they were called in Britainwould be the province of paternalistic entrepreneurs such as Sir T itus
Salt at Saltaire near Bradford in Yorkshire (r8srj6), the Krupps manufactory near Essen (r86JjS), or the M eunier Chocolate C ompany at
N oise! outside Paris (c.1874). After the declaration of the Empire in
D ecember r852 and the dismissal months later of Berger, H aussmann's
predecessor, for opposing debt-financed public works, Napoleon m and
his advisers put their energies fully into crafting an alliance between the
state and specially formed private land-holding and development companies. O n the model of the Pereire brothers' company, formed to extend the rue de Rivoli, in which the state's and financiers' interests were
mutually served by finely built ashlar masonry apartment houses, transformation was soon under way in the dense cores of Lyon, M arseille,
and other provincial cities as well as Paris [ 123] .
122 Gabriel Veugny
Cite Napoleon , Paris,

1849- 53
The architect Veugny's design
for sanitary workers' dwellings,
sponsored directly by Louis
Napoleon soon after his
election in December 1848,
was the first adaptation of the
utop1an socialist ideals of a
phalanstry [83] to an existing
city. Its use of glass and iron
skylights to create an interior
street was innovative. Critics of
the regime claimed it put the
workers in barracks, viewed by
some as potentially explosive,
by others as disingenuously
philanthropic.

stopped short at the edge of the historic centres [ 121 ]. I n the r84os the
prefect Rambuteau responded to a debate over whether or not the government should intervene to arrest the westward migration of Paris's
commercial and financial centre. Since the mid-eighteenth century the
quagmire of narrow streets in the central market district, Les H alles,
had been discussed as the city's most pressing need [see 18]. Now the
question was posed in larger political terms. Should the state or the
speculative market- and these were years in which economists such as
Jean-Baptiste Say were extolling Adam Smith's ideas of a free market as
a democratic and natural value- determine the form and destiny of the
city? Rambuteau launched a policy of using street improvements as an
instrument of the state's remodelling of urban space and its self-conscious channelling of private development. T he street that today bears
his name was the forerunner of Haussmann's work a decade later, although by comparison with Second Empire boulevards it seems timid
in width and length. Not only did the rue Rambuteau markedly improve access to Les Halles, it was the first street in Paris to be festively
inaugurated and to sport an inscribed cornerstone-a symbolic threshold of the triumph of ordered open space created by the central power
over the marketplace's desire to build urban fabric to the maximum.

123 Adolphe Terris

(photographer)
Creation of the rue lmperiale
in Marseille
As cities throughout France
were remodelled on the model
of Haussmann's Paris, the
works involved a massive
reworking of the terrain. In
Marseille a whole hill was
levelled to create a broad and
swift link between new
steamship ports and the
commercial centre of the city.

UR BA N REFORM BEFORE H AU SS MANN

247

Launched under the banner of creating jobs-by the late r8sos one
in five Parisians were working in the building trades-the system of
floating loans against future increases in the value of improved land
made Haussmann's works a veritable self-financing system of public
works. In the r86os, when liberal and legitimist opponents of the
regime questioned the legality of these operations and the legislature
annulled the state's right to retain the unredeveloped portions of expropriated properties, Napoleon m's advisers replied that the 'movement of capital . .. must be considered as the principal cause of the
progress of public wealth in Paris? But critics had begun to link mushrooming shanty towns on the city's edge with the transformation of the
centre of Paris into an elegant backdrop for the very moneyed classes
who profited dramatically from urban transformation.

124 Victor Baltard

Les Ha lies, Paris, 1852-55
The new markets hummed
with efficiency and order, their
gridded internal streets poised
as a model for the reshaping of
the city beyond. Their frank
industrial vocabulary provided
a new model for ut ilitarian
building in cities throughout
Europe and for countless
provincial markets in smaller
French cities.

Remodelling Paris: the markets and the Rivoli-Strasbourg

cross-axis
Napoleon m anticipated many of these criticisms. Even before the curtain was raised on the first of the boulevards that made movement a part
of the urban aesthetic for the first time, the emperor demanded that
work on the central markets be given priority over all the other new
public buildings he hoped would leave the imprint of his regime on the
cityscape [ 124, 125]. The 'Louvre of the People', as he called his vast rationalization of Paris's food supply, was the only major state project
completed in time for the 1855 exhibition. In place of the labyrinth of
outdoor markets in twisting streets little changed since the Middle
Ages, Victor Baltard created a rationalized city within the city. Eight
rectangular pavilions ofglass and iron, maximizing ventilation and sanitation, were organized around a grid ofbroad covered streets, providing
easy access for carts and pedestrians. Vaulted undercrofts were even
provided in hopes of a connection to the main-line railway stations and

248 THE CITY TRANSFORMED, 1848-90

125
Unveiling of the Boulevard de
Strasbourg, 1858 (today
~bastopo l}

Haussmann later admitted

that the path of the boulevard
had not been determined
solely by the axis of the Gare
de I'Est, which it connected to
the lie de la Cite over two miles
away: 'lt was to tear open Old
Paris, the district of the riots
and barricades, by a wide,
central thoroughfare which
would pierce this almost
impenetrable labyrinth from
one side to the other.'

thus to a national network of goods. The whole was marvelled at by

contemporaries; Zola even celebrated the newly ordered spectacle of
abundance in his novel Le Ventre de Paris.
The Second E mpire created not only a new alliance between the
state and the market in crafting urban space and fostering an understanding ofland itself as a commodity; it also negotiated a subtle hierarchy between the great monuments of the state and the residential
fabric. Three years after Les Halles was completed, the fas:ades of the
Boulevard de Strasbourg (now Sebastopol) were unveiled [ 125] in a
ceremony celebrating the dynamism of the private market in creating a
harmonious backdrop to public monuments. The simplest legal guidelines governed the relation of fapde height to the broad new street, the
alignment of balconies, the set-back angle of the mansard roofs, and
the use of fine stone on the principal fas:ade [ 126]. T hese ensured that
the work of numerous independent builders would yield those grand
sweeping perspectives that endow even the least accomplished of the
Second Empire's public buildings with a dramatic monumental presence. When one looks north on the Boulevard de Sebastopol, the trees
shading the pavements provide a leafy frame to the vista of the Gare de
l'Est, while to the south an even more theatrical view is staged. Unable
to align the boulevard with a bridge across the Seine, H aussmann ordered the architect A.-W.-N Bailly, a pupil ofDuban, to shift off-centre the crowning dome of his projected Tribunal de Commerce
(r858-64) on the Ile de la Cite so that it might serve as a terminus to the
vista which greets visitors alighting at the Gare de l'Est some two miles
away. Nearly all the major monuments commissioned by the state
would be shaped by such scenographic imperatives. At the head of the
REMODELLING PARIS

249

126
Apartment house, rue de la
Chausseed'Antin, c. l855
Apartment-house living had
been pioneered in Paris in the
eighteenth century, but under
the Second Empire it became
the building-block of a new
urban fabric. The ground floor
was let to shops, while the
apartments were arranged to
give even multiple dwellings
some of the allure of grand
living, from the monumentally
scaled porte-cochereto the
contrivance of principal rooms
en suite along the street

du Palais which crosses the Ile de la Cite and to mask the angled departure of the Boulevard St-M ichel, the left bank's grand new thoroughfare. The Boulevard St-M ichel in turn was traced to align with a view
of the newly recreated fleche of the Sainte-Chapelle. T he Paris of
postcards was emerging even as photography for the first time became
inexpensive enough to compete on the souvenir market. A quip made a
century earlier by Voltaire, that Paris would appear a grand city only
once its historic monuments had been excavated from haphazard
urban fabric, now guided the work of 'liberating' monuments from
fabric as history came to reside in the monument, not the texture of the
city. With the finishing touches of Alphand's carefully calibrated system of urban 'promenades'-a linked system of greenery on every
scale, from single trees planted in traffic islands where boulevards cross
to the replacement of the long straight paths of the Bois de Boulogne, a
former hunting domain, with a picturesque pleasure-ground-Paris
presented the image of the city as a scenic event, background, and destination for an expanding leisured class. Alphand's publication The
P romenades of Paris (r867"73) detailed the inventions that made this
possible, including special machines for transplanting mature trees,
and provided models widely followed. It was the only text that set
down something approaching a theory ofH aussmannization.

fa~ade.

Boulevard de M agenta, Baltard exploited iron to maximize interior

space on one of the awkward polygonal building sites traced by
Haussmann's street network. The iron framework of the church of StAugustin (r86o-7r) is draped with a thin masonry envelope and supports a monumental dome scaled to the urban vista rather than to this
parish church for the luxury quarters developing in the city's northwest. Gabriel D avioud's exuberant monumental fountain on the Place
St-Michel (r8s8-6o) was calculated to close the vista on the Boulevard
250 THE CITY TRANSFORMED, 1848 - 90

Gamier's Opera
T he scenographic masterpiece ofHaussmann's Paris, the luxury quarter of hotels, shops, clubs, and banks developed around the new Opera
(r86215), was completed only after the curtain had fallen on the
Second Empire at Sedan, the decisive battle of the Franco-Prussian
War. Although Napoleon m would never appear in this building, calculated as a backdrop to his court, Charles G amier (r8zs- g8) orchestrated a microcosm of the values of an ascendant urban bourgeoisie
that had come into its own during his reign [ 117, 127]. In r869
Haussmann had been chased from the scene by the outcry over what
Jules Ferry labelled 'Les Comtes Fantastiques d'Haussmann', a play
both on the dual meaning of 'Comtes' in French-stories and accounts-and on Offenbach's popular opera Contes d'H ojfmann (Tales of
H offmann).3 Yet nothing testifies more to the durability of
H aussmann's urban system than the harmonious relations-of scale,
materials, and architectural language-of the urban archipelago of
apartment, office, and hotel blocks, and the monumentally composed
Beaux-Arts island of G amier's Opera. It was a model of urbanity imitated as much for its forms as its finances, a system ultimately eclipsed
only after the First World War.
T here is a fascinating counterpoint between the Opera and the
urban fabric, much of which was planned before G amier's project was
selected in r86r in a particularly contested public competition. The surGARNIER'S OPERA

251

127 Charles Garnier

New Opera, 1863- 75

Paris's hierarchy of a
background fabric of private
building and prominent
monuments of state and
public culture is nowhere
clearer than in the Opera
quarterwhereagrand sweep
of apartment houses provides
a theatrical encounter with
Gamier's richly decorated
opera house. The Opera is a
luxuriant island in an urban
archipelago mapped as much
by architects as by the
interaction of state building
regulations and a dynamic
real-estate market.

rounding structures establish a new grand scale for the building-blocks

of a city-products of the increasing power of the financial actors on
the urban land market-even while they demurely take their place in
the urban tissue. The identical pilastered fac;:ades of the two blocks that
form the sides of the square in front of the Opera offer not even a hint
of the different functions behind-one an office building, the other a
luxury hotel. Within its staid perimeter, the Grand Hotel, another creation of the Pereire-Armand team, contains several of the most luxurious and grandiose spaces of the Second Empire, all of them taking
advantage of the spans made possible by an extensive iron frame completely hidden from view under limestone fac;:ades. The opera house, by
contrast, is the consummate statement of the cherished principle of the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts that grand public buildings should be composed
in both plan and elevation as lucid expressions of their component
functions, set in a clear hierarchy. At the same time the plasticity of its
handling, the high relief and gusto of its ornamental details, and
Gamier's introduction of rich polychromy of coloured marbles, mosaics, and gilding, even on the exterior, represented for many a daring
departure from academic decorum.
Seen from the opposite end of the broad Avenue de l'Opera, cut to
provide a processional approach from the Tuileries Palace and a con252 THE CITY TRANSFORMED, 1848- 90

nection to the St-Lazare station, gateway to the burgeoning western

suburbs [127], the opera house is composed of three independent
masses which build to a crescendo in the great pyramidal flyhouse
housing stage machinery and crowned by a figure of Apollo. This beacon on the skyline-Apollo is also a lightning rod!-envelops the
softer profile of the domed auditorium and the richly ornamented rectangular block of the foyer and stairhall, these scaled to closer vistas.
Gamier's building is not simply a setting for opera; it is itself masterfully staged in urban space. The perspective is calculated so that the
stagehouse and auditorium disappear from view as one enters the
broad Place de l'Opera. The square is no longer an enclosed space in
the city, as in so many eighteenth-century squares, but the point of
convergence of a whole series ofbroad avenues. Even as this space suggests a moment's repose, reinforced by the common cornice heights,
new vistas open up towards the rotunda entrances on the Opera's flanks
and to grand buildings beyond-banks and department stores.
Gamier presented his design as the embodiment of an empirical
and sensual approach to architecture in The Theatre, published in 1871
as construction resumed after the traumatic interlude of the
Commune. But this polemical refusal of the rationalist call for material
and structural expression of his one-time employer Viollet-le-Due was
anything but arbitrary. Gamier was adamant that iron should be exploited to create an architecture that allows free rein to the artist's
imagination and his skill in making his architecture a vehicle for a society's dreams and fantasies. Arguing for the suprem-acy of the artist's eye
and judgement, even taste, Gamier was none the less a perceptive student of human behaviour; his acuity might be envied even by practitioners of the new social sciences of the period, who hoped to theorize
only after empirical observation. Like Semper's, Gamier's notion of
architecture was grounded in a theory of representation, not however
in the art of making but in the observation of the basic human pleasure
in play-acting. 'Everything that happens in the world', he maintained,
'is but theatre and representation'. 4 Once again a primordial fire is postulated, but around this flame Gamier imagines social rituals taking
form as an individual exploits the flame to create shadow pantomimes.
Others gather around, first as an audience, gladly switching roles after
a time. Despite the period's enormous progress in stage machinery,
ventilation, gas lighting, and iron technology for construction-all of
which could be marvelled at by professional visitors-for Gamier the
fundamental and unchanging role of the architect was to accommodate society's pleasure in assuming roles and savouring spectacles, of
seeing and being seen. If the avant-garde of the early twentieth century
vilified the Opera-Le Corbusier chief among them-it was because
Gamier had catered to the status quo rather than using his art as an
opening wedge for a better world.
GARNIER'S OPERA

253

128 Charles Gamier

Paris Opera a) Sectional v1ew
b) Exterior
Gamier's debt to Victor Lou1s's
earlier staging of arrival and
ascent at the Bordeaux
theatre is clear [cf. 26], but by
the mid-nineteenth century
the social spaces of circulation
for intermission occupy fully
as much space as the
stagehouse and auditorium in
this palace of representations.
Gamier calculated separate
paths for each class of users,
but all converge in his
grandiose stairhall.

Gamier imagined the building as both a functional and ritualistic accommodation of three classes of users [ 128a, b]. An elaborate pavilion
was provided for the emperor, complete with a ramped carriage drive
and a suite of lavish rooms for entertaining before progressing to the
royal box, a trajectory that never crossed the path of other theatre-goers,
although the emperor would never in fact appear there. For seasonticket subscribers and for those holding but an evening's ticket, Garnier
provided separate spatial sequences. Subscribers could alight from their
carriages at their own pavilion-pendant to the Imperial entranceand make their way into an opulently ornamented circular space at the
heart of the building--directly below the auditorium-reserved for
their social exchanges. Glimpses of the main stairhall not only provided
a rich view through layers of space-Garnier exploited the same princi254 THE CITY TRANSFORMED, 1848-90

ple throughout of wrapping each space of assembly with circulation

space-but the reassurance of knowing the path ahead, a characteristically self-conscious psychological interpretation of the inherited logic
of the academic art of planning. Mirrors on each of the columns not
only exploited the flicker of the gas light as the first of the dazzling effects the art of architecture could contribute to the festivities, but also,
as Gamier explained, allowed ladies to check their hair and dress one
last time in the comfort of their own social class before stepping onto
the stage of the great stairhall. There everyone would meet in the grand
spectacle of arrival and during the promenades between acts, before returning to the places assigned them by ticket price.
'The auditorium seems to have been made for the staircase rather
than the staircase for the auditorium ... In this floor plan everything
seems to have been sacrificed to introductions,' Viollet-le-Duc complained of Gamier's willingness to break the rules of academic composition, which demanded that the most important place receive the
greatest opulence of decoration. 5 The auditorium seemed an anticlimax after the rich colours of an array of marbles and the layering of
space and orchestration of oblique views that make the stairhall a veritable kaleidoscope of effects. But Garnier was unapologetic: 'the staircase is the Opera, just as the Invalides is its cupola and Saint-Etienne
du Mont its rood screen,' he replied. 6 He went on to say that the composition was only complete when it was filled with the splendour and
movement of the crowd in full regalia. The test was not only the eye but
also the body, for Gamier conceived a space in which architectural
forms are in dialogue with the movement and sensations of an ambient
visitor [117, 129a, b] . The design of the stairs themselves is characteristic of this approach. The lower steps swell gently outward to communicate subliminally the grandeur of the space and of the occasion.
Midway up, the curvature is inverted as the steps now yield to the foot
and endow the arrival on the landing before the portal to the finest
seats, framed by marble caryatids, with an unhurried grace. The eighteenth-century art of sublimity is here on the threshold of the modern
psychology of form. Garnier worked ceaselessly on site, testing with
models of hundreds of works of sculpture, painting, and mosaic commissioned from leading artists-the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
and the painter Paul Baudry among them-making adjustments of
colour, scale, and angle to create a harmonious synthesis of effects.
Underneath its dazzling surface effects the opera house made skilful
use of the latest technologies of iron construction-as the campaign of
construction photography by Delamaet and D urandelle makes clear-but Gamier placed himself in bitter opposition to exposed iron, such as
Viollet-le-Duc proposed for a modern French architecture [114]. 'I have
a great fear of all definitive theories in the arts which are framed in an exclusivist manner,' he wrote, 'because if aesthetics becomes nothing more
GARNIER'S OPERA

255

traced from the works of former assistants in the provinces, such as the
theatres at Reims and Montpellier, to scaled-down adaptations from
Cracow's Slowacki Theatre of 1893 (designed by Jan Zawiejski) to the
opera at Constantin in French Algeria, and the Amazon Opera in Brazil.

The Viennese Ringstrasse

130 (page 258)

129 Charles Gamier

Staircase of the Paris Opera.

Oblique views up from lower
level
Like a choreographer, Garnier
demonstrated full mastery of
the new technology to stage a
sequence of spaces that
would subtly guide theatregoers from the entrance to
their seats with a
choreography of unfailing
ease and charm that echoed
their own codes of social
comportment. Throughout he
composed with a rich palette
of colours and materials.

than the execution of an over-reasoned formula, it will mark the death of

imagination, the spontaneous, and even of the incorrect, which are not
to be disdained in human creations.' 7 In later years he made himself a
tireless campaigner for civic decorum over what he saw as a utilitarian
threat to urban embellishment. He helped to organize the petition
against Gustave Eiffel's great iron tower for the 1889 Universal
Exposition and fought, unsuccessfully, to have Hector Guimard's art
nouveau designs for cast-iron entrances to the new underground metropolitan railway replaced by stone monuments that could declare the city's
commitment to the public sphere as a place of dignity and tradition.
A generation was trained at the Opera, importing a new taste for
colour, a sense of movement through space and tactile cues, and a quest
for spatial richness in public space into the great flourishing of BeauxArts architecture in the final decades of the century. Paul Nenot, architect of the Sorbonne (1885-91), and Jean-Louis Pascal, who designed the
masterful medical school at Bordeaux (1876-88), were among Garnier's
assistants. The vast majority of theatres designed in the second half of
the nineteenth century owe both their vigorous, even neo-Baroque,
sense ofform as well as their urban prominence in no small degree to the
example of H aussmann and Garnier's collaboration. In addition to
Garnier's own work on the festive Casino at Monte Carlo (1878{9), the
building's exceptionally far-flung and long-lasting influence could be
256

THE

CITY TRANSFORMED, 1848-90

Vienna Ringstrasse, 1860

a) Plan
The creation of a new urban
belt on the site of the
fortifications and fire zone
separating the old city centre
and the suburbs which had
grown up over the eighteenth
century created a new kind of
space of continuous
movement and of the
integration of a broad traffic
artery, with planted parks and
free-standing monumental
public buildings.
b) View along the Ringstrasse,

c.l888
The apotheosis of the
nineteenth century's
exploration of the associative
value of historical style in
giving form and meaning to
the new institutions of the
modern nation-state, the
Ringstrasse juxtaposed a
Grecian Parliament, northern
Gothic Town Hall, a great
Renaissance palazzo for the
university, and a twin-towered
Gothic church erected to
commemorate a failed
assassination attempt on
Emperor FranzJoseph 11.

Emperor FranzJoseph's order to layout a new city on the site of the fortifications ringing Vienna was carried out during decades of political
and social transformation in the Habsburg Empire [ 130]. Even before
an urban design competition focused international architectural attention on the Austrian capital in 1858, the sovereign had traced the outlines of a new alliance between market and crown. Land not set aside for
new public institutions long needed by the city, a new opera house chief
among them, or for much needed parks was to be sold for private development, the profits 'to establish a building fund . .. [to finance] public
buildings and the transfer of such military facilities and buildings as are
still necessary'.8 With memories of the 1848 uprisings still fresh, efficient troop movements were, as in Paris, one of the advantages gained
from the new broad, straight boulevards, connected to railway stations
and new barracks. Laying the cornerstone of the first monument in
1856, the emperor also set the stage, unwittingly, for a fierce competition
of values and power that was to play itself out through the style and
placement of public buildings on the Ringstrasse, as the polygonal
boulevard ringing the city's historic centre was soon called. Heinrich
von Ferstel's design for a Neo-Gothic church to commemorate the emperor's fortune in escaping a Hungarian nationalist's bullet would be
raised by public subscription as, in the emperor's words, 'a monument of
patriotism and devotion of the people of Austria to the Imperial House'
[ 130b]. By the time the building was completed 2o years later the
Ringstrasse had become one of the last grand landscapes of stylistic
eclecticism, with a Gothic city hall (187213), by Friedrich von Schmidt,
asserting the rights of the municipality over the imperial prerogative to
plan the national capital, Theophilus Hansen's Greek Parliament
(1874-83), proclaiming the arrival of a legislative sharing ofpower as part
of the constitution awarded the middle classes in r866, and a grandly
scaled Italian Renaissance university (1873-84) by Ferstel, evoking associations with the rise of secular humanist culture. Tellingly, as Carl
Schorske has noted, these three landmarks of the ascendant liberal
bourgeoisie were laid out on precisely the land still held in reserve in the
first years of planning to serve as a military parade-ground. 9
The Ringstrasse quickly emerged as the favoured setting for the new
fluid relations between the rising strata of the bourgeoisie and the old
aristocracy who mingled at the Opera (Siccardsburg and van der Null,
1861-69), the first building completed on the Ring, and the Burgtheater
(Semper, 1874-88), and who enjoyed in both the wealth and the prestige
THE VIENNESE RINGSTRASSE

257

131 Semper
Project for the Museums
district, Vienna, 1873
In this monumental project for
expanding the pa lace and
creating new museums of art
and natural history, Semper
was able to give form to his
theory that monumental
fa~ades should be the
theatrical backdrop to the
rituals and tnstitutions of
urban life. The Renaissance
for him coinctded with the
emergence of free city-states
and bcurgeois culture and he
proposed it be further
developed for modern times.

generated by the construction of the grand blocks of apartments that

rose to share in the aura of the new cultural symbols. Significantly, the
two theatres were the only buildings whose forms locked into the spatial
flow of the boulevard itself, each designed with great loggias for promenading that took in at the same time privileged views of the urban spectacle on the boulevard. The other public buildings were set as
free-standing monuments in the chain of parks developed at the new
quarter's broadest points, coming into view sequentially and individually
as one travelled along the s6-metre (184 ft)-wide boulevard, prototypes
of the monument set in greenery which was.to be repeated worldwide in
coming decades as museums, opera houses, and administration buildings were connected with projects for tree-lined boulevards. One of the
most innovative features of the road design was the provision of service
roads for moving goods separately from the broad central roadway, left
open for faster horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses.
By the time of the Universal Exposition in 1873 the Ringstrasse was
a marvel of civic engineering, along with new quays along the Danube
and a state-of-the art sewage network. On display at the Exposition
were colossal renderings of a project of neo-imperial splendour that ran
counter to the new model of urbanism emerging on the Ring [ 131 ].

THE VIENNESE RINGSTRASSE

258

THE CITY TRANSFORMED, 1848-90

259

Dissatisfied with the results of a limited competition for a museum

complex to be placed just outside the old gate to the palace, Franz
Joseph had called Semper from Zurich in r869. Together with a young
Viennese architect, Karl von Hasenauer, Semper drew up plans for a
grand 'Culture Forum', in which a vast extension to the palace would
be linked across the Ringstrasse by triumphal arches to the great
domed blocks of pendant museums for art and natural history.
Whereas in the r84os, in projects for joining museum and opera house
in Dresden, Semper had proposed to blur the distinction between
court and city, in Vienna his forum was a revival of more traditional
urban space defined by the great walls of buildings in counterpoint to
the dynamic flow of the Ringstrasse. Even in its partially realized form,
the verdant square between Vienna's museums offers a bounded space
of stasis, and refocuses attention on the imperial Hofburg and on the
great statue of Maria Theresa surrounded by major figures of the
Austrian Enlightenment, a celebration of the partnership offered by
the crown to the liberal bourgeoisie in the constitution of r866.
Although Franz Joseph had set up a City Expansion Commission
to oversee the building of the Ringstrasse, the discussion of the ideal
form of a modern city sparked by the competition continued for
decades, fostering the growth of the belief in German-speaking
Europe after r87o that city planning was a domain of professional
knowledge. As the first building plots were being offered for sale, a
controversy erupted over both the form of dwellings and the respective
roles of marketplace and the state. Opposing the spread of the apartment house, already established as the form of middle-class dwelling
in the dense inner city of Vienna, constrained for decades by its fortifications, architect Heinrich von Ferstel and art historian Rudolf von
Eitelberger argued that the state should mandate the development of
newly opened land with single-family houses set in gardens. 'The sale
of these building sites should be undertaken with the interests of the
community in mind ... The objective should be public welfare, and not
short-term gains,' they argued. 10 Ironically enough they took their inspiration from speculative villa suburbs that had ringed London with
the tentacular spread of the railway and the progressive separation of
places of dwelling and work in middle-class life. While Ferstel succeeded in creating a 'cottage association' in r872 and developed 300
homes in Vienna's Wahring suburb, the market for luxury apartment
houses prevailed, transforming much of the Ringstrasse into a dense
quarter of majestically scaled middle-class apartment blocks [132].
These 'rental palaces' (Mietspaliiste) borrowed the imagery of Vienna's
Renaissance and Baroque palaces for fa<;ade details and such interior
accoutrements as grand staircases even while floor plans tested architects' ingenuity in devising schemes to maximize the number of
dwellings and profit on each site. Aesthetics and economics could not
260 THE CITY TRANSFORMED, 1848 - 90

132
Apartment houses on the
Reichsratstrasse, Vienna,

c.l875
The monumental fa<;ades of
the great 'rental palaces' gave
distinction to the apartmenthouse blocks that filled the
plots opened up by the
Ringstrasse development. At
once dwelling and investment
for the middle class, who
enjoyed expanded pclit ical
representation in a
constitutional monarchy and
expanding economic pcwer,
plans were invariably
contrived to place reception
rooms on the fac;:ade of the
building, making Ringstrasse
vistas a quantifiable
commodity.

be divorced, for the large-scale block responded not only to a speculative logic but allowed for the grandeur of imagery and scale that ensured maximum prestige and hence rental revenue. Plans invariably
placed reception rooms along the fa<;ade, making the Ringstrasse's vistas themselves a quantifiable commodity.

The Ensanche of Barcelona

By the time Barcelona's walls were razed in r8s8, not only had the
Mediterranean port achieved the greatest population density of any
European city, but the urban crisis had inspired Ildefonso Cerda
(r8rs;6), a trained architect and engineer, to devote his life and personal fortune to formulating a general theory of'urbanization', which
he declared a new science. At first glance Cerda's plan to decant the
enormous concentration of population, wealth, and commerce contained within Barcelona's defensive walls across the surrounding territory seems but an elaboration of those gridded cities the Spanish
empire had used to colonize the New World since the sixteenth century [ 133] . But for C erda the plan, with its superimposition of a great
diagonal cross-axis establishing a regional scale for a repeatable pattern
of city blocks with distinctive chamfered corners, embodied his notion
that it was possible to channel the forces of nineteenth-century speculative development towards a higher communitarian ideal, one indeed
formed in conscious critique of the Haussmannian model.
Arriving in Nimes in June of r844 Cerda, employed as a civil engineer to improve Spain's roads, was overwhelmed by the sight of the
railway and the realization of the impact it was having on city and
countryside. It was as if in 'those long trains ... whole errant populations had suddenly moved house'.U Cerda dated his determination to
THE ENSANCHE OF BARCEL O N A

261

...

'

11

133 lldefonso Cerda

Ensanche of Barcelona, plan
as adopted in 1860
Cerda conceived of all streets
as part of an endless
communication system,
insisting that all be straight
and eq ually wide. Individual
residential quarters were to be
the same throughout the city,
not only to accommodate all
social classes bul lo forge a
model of a city of infinite
expandability.

'f

,,_.._,

study cities to that moment, declaring that 'the application of steam as

a locomotive force marked for humanity the end of one era and the beginning of another'. He returned to Spain with the writings ofLeonce
and Jean Reynaud, former Saint-Simonians who postulated that the
railway would promote the abolition of artificial boundaries, restructuring spatial relations in terms of networks of time and exchanges of
goods, and of the anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who
had pronounced private property to be 'theft' when it was held by those
who did not work. 12
Barcelona's port was booming with the arrival of the first commercial steam-ships even as the city's population had more than doubled in
a century within its walls. Cerda joined his voice to growing popular
demand for demolishing the fortifications, whose only defenders by
mid-century were property-owners enjoying escalating rents on scarce
urban land. The social uprisings ofJuly 1854 provided the final impetus
to convince the city fathers, who ordered the walls to be demolished
and agreed to organize a competition to solicit plans for city expansion
and beautification. Launched in r858, but a few months after the announcement of Vienna's Ringstrasse competition, the Barcelona plan
attracted little attention outside Spain. But from the first the programme, as well as the proposed projects, was far more radical in responding to the request that the city be allowed to expand to its natural
topographical boundaries. Rather than designing an ideal urban quarter of monuments, contestants were invited to consider how planning
26 2 THE CITY TRANSFORM EO, 184 8-90

might be conceived as a process to last several generations. Cerda did

not enter the competition, but his lobbying in Madrid in favour of
ideas he had long been formulating for his native Catalonia as a critique of what he viewed as the entrenched conservatism oflocal property-owners found support. His plan was adopted in r86o.
On lengthy visits to Paris between r856 and r858 Cerda examined
Haussmann's work with the same statistical completeness he had already applied to diagnosing Barcelona's ills, measuring street and pavement widths, noting distances between benches, trees, and even urinals.
But although he was to be an advocate of an ideally dimensioned grid of
spaces and services in the modern city, he insisted that a plan divorced of
a social calculus could never serve more than the interests of a narrow
class. 'No-one had even considered the question of providing comfortable accommodation for the great number of families who would be
mercilessly evicted,' he complained of Haussmann's work, advocating
in turn that planning a city must comprise both streets and houses. 13
'The family house is an elementary city,' he noted, insisting that neither
could be abandoned to the uncontrolled speculative market. 14 Cerdi
imagined the city as an organism whose dynamic growth must be mastered rather than as an ideal form to be composed. Speaking of the city
as Viollet-le-Due was in those same years speaking of buildings, Cerda
introduced his General Theory of Urbanization with a promise: 'more
than the materiality, I want to speak of the organism, the life, I should
say, which animates the material city's material parts'. 15 Like any organism, a city is a constant interchange between principles of movement
and stasis, terms that came both from his training in mechanical engineering and his readings in French positivist theory. Discussing the
great square that Barcelona's city administration thought should serve
as the link between the old town and the newly laid-out quarters, Cerda
proposed instead a grand railway station linking all lines at a single
nodal point-a critique of the circle of individual stations that ringed
Paris, London, and Vienna by the r86os. Reflecting Jean Reynaud's idea
of the city as a nodal point on a territorial grid, formulated in the SaintSimonian Encyclopidie N ouvelle as early as the 184os, the modern city
would be a place of interchange in a world dissolved of borders and
walls. At counterpoint to the streets as transportation corridors was the
careful design of districts. With all blocks chamfered, the intersections
of streets in Barcelona's plans provide places of assembly which Cerda
imagined as the community squares of the modern large city. In some
places several blocks could be combined to form large public gardensa correction of the grid introduced in these same years in the creation of
Central Park in New York-but Cerda's proposal was even more radical
in that he proposed that each block be built on only two sides and then
only with rows ofhouses no more than 24 metres (99ft) deep; all the remaining area was to be developed as gardens, parks, or open space. The
THE ENSANCH E OF BARCELON A

263

two rows could either be parallel or set at right angles, varied to create
different patterns, introduce hierarchies of neighbourhoods, and create
localized focal points around schools, churches, and market halls. I n
some cases, up to eight blocks might be combined to accommodate industry; but Cerda condoned no radical separation of zones of work and
living, as in the industrializing cities he had visited in France and
England. While the formal aspects ofCerda's plan served as models for
other Spanish city 'expansions', including those of M adrid, Bilbao, and
San Sebastian, even in Barcelona the market ultimately triumphed.
City blocks were densely filled with apartment houses, mansions, and
even blocks of flats for workers, all of which are closer to large-scale
blocks oflate nineteenth-century Berlin or Vienna than the controlled
garden metropolis envisioned by C erda. By the time of his death in 1876
Cerda was at work on a synthesis of his earlier theories of'urbanization'
and 'ruralization' into a global theory of national spatial planning, averitable colonization of Spain's interior. This work served as a point of departure for the M adrid architect Arturo Soria y M ata's r884 prototype of
a linear city in which the new technologies of tram and train travel organized urban space in a model freed of traditional images of city form.

The rise of suburbs

In 1858 a 436- hectare site on the main route west from Paris to StG ermain was developed as a planned suburb, a veritable haven of domestic life from which most forms of trade and industry were banned.
I n emulation of the suburbs proliferating on the railway lines out of
London, Le Vesinet [ 134] was a verdant nodal point on Paris's emerging suburban rail network. Around a small gridded 'village centre' with
The English suburb
The separation of middle-class residence from the commercial urban core was already
characteristic ofLondon's western and northern growth in the eighteen th century,
but it was only in the nineteenth century that the subu rb became associated with the
aesthetic offree-standing buildings.]. C . Loudon became the most vociferous
advocate of individual 'villas' of the type pioneered by Nash in the Park Villages [62]
and Loudon's own 'semi-detached' villa at PorchesterTerrace, Bayswater (1823-5),
publishing numerous articles and handbooks, notably his widely used The Suburban
Gardener and Villa Compa11ion (I8J6-:J8). This appeared at the same time as the first
railway lines out ofcentral London began transforming patterns ofthe daily
commute to work. Loudon believed that suburban life could accommodate both
responsible citizenship and the crafting ofa private universe set in the illusion ofopen
nature. As Dyos and Reed er noted, 'the middle-class suburb was an ecological
marvel. I t gave access to the cheapest land ... to those h aving most security of
employment and leisure to afford the time and money spen t travelling; it offered an
arena for the manipulation ofsocial distinctions .. . to those most adept at turning
them into shapes on the ground . .. ' ('Slums and Suburbs', in H.J. Dyos andMichael
W olff(eds), The Victorian City. Images and Realities, vol. 2, London, 1973, p. 369).

134
Panoramic view of the
projected suburb at Le
Vesinet, 1858
Minutes from St-Lazare
railway station and all the
modern urban functions
around the Opera, the
nineteenth-century suburb
was the dialectical opposite of
the rationally planned city, set
in a contrived nature which
even obscured the boundaries
of individual properties,
although here houses sought
a diversity in style and
personality quite distinct from
the anonymity of the Parisian
apartment house.

church, market, and post office, ample house plots were laid out on
curvilinear streets and set in picturesque landscape developed to create
the illusion of living in ample countryside even while discreet hedges
and garden walls denoted property lines. T he first houses borrowed
their imagery and forms from the French rural vernacular, especially
the half-timbered Norman cottage destined for a long career in suburbs and seaside resorts, notably at Arcachon on the Atlantic coast, developed by the Pereire brothers in conjunction with new railway lines.
T he ideal of the suburb, pioneered by John Nash and others on the
edge of L ondon [62] around r82o, had its first heyday in direct connection with the dispersal and specialization of space made possible by
new modes of transport. 'Villa quarters' rose on the fringes of nearly
every European city, in particular in Germany where walls were progressively dismantled, as the setting of home life was increasingly distinguished from sectors of the city given over to the burgeoning world
of the office, of places of entertainment, and of department stores- located on omnibus routes and near main-line stations-which drew
customers from the city and beyond. New architectural types and the
new distribution of urban activities went hand in hand in the nineteenth century.

Critics and the planned city

City modernization was codified as a 'science' in influential manuals by
Reinhard Baumeister (City Expansion in its Technical, Legal and
Economic Aspects, 1876) and Josef Stiibben (City Planning, 189o), whose
winning project in the r88o competition to replan Cologne's former
CRITICS AND THE PLANNED CITY

265

135 Camillo Sitte

Project for the transformation
of the Votive Church Plaza,
Vienna, from City Building
According to Artistic
Principles(1889)

To integrate free-standing
monuments into the c1ty fabric
and to reform the vast open
spaces of the Ringstrasse,
Sitte drew up concrete
proposals such as this one to
flank the Votivkirche by lower
buildmgs filling out to the
street line and creating a
sequence of outdoor spaces,
including a great cloistered
arcade.

fortifications led to a career in planning urban expansions in cities from

Naples to Warsaw and Helsinki Stiibben praised Paris, noting that
'The city lies . .. transparent before us . .. it is just as easy to find one's
way about as is a clearly designed house. T his gives us a feeling of security and pleasantness ... something that the visitor in an unsystematically designed city will always miss.' 16 By then critics had launched an
attack on the planned city, holding it responsible for that national and
personal degeneration which became a common complaint of thefin de
siecle. Scepticism of geometric order and regularity, already expressed
266 THE CITY TRANSFORMED, 1848- 90

in cartoons and spoofs on the monotony ofHaussmann's works in the

186os, found support in two influential works published at the height
of nineteenth-century urban expansion, Camillo Sitte's City Planning
According to Artistic Principles (Vienna, 1889) and Charles Buls's The
Aesthetic ofCities (Brussels, 1893). Both the Viennese architect and the
former mayor of Brussels-a city that had undergone a radical
'Haussmannization' in the 186os and 187os-attacked the systematic
application of rational formulas in defence of the distinct artistic
wholeness of individual cities as the work of time and generations.
Sitte studied medieval and Baroque town plans throughout Europe,
not to reform them but to learn their secrets, chief among them the
idea of bounded and enclosed spaces as both aesthetically and psychologically more pleasing, and the appreciation ofvaried and unexpected
viewpoints as adding interest and a sense of distinctive place. While he
admitted that it was impossible to recreate in modern times what had
grown up over time, he insisted none the less that public buildings and
diverse functions should be integrated into the fabric of the town.
Sitte and Buls alike attacked architectural restoration in that spirit
of Viollet-le-Duc which 'liberated' historical monuments from surrounding fabric, arguing that the fabric was as important to both memory and modern well-being as to individual monuments. While Sitte's
visual categories are reminiscent of the English picturesque tradition,
with its emphasis on the empirical, the originality of his work-and its
resonance with con temporary concerns-was its preoccupation with
the psychological resonance of urban space. Responding to theories
formulated by the emerging field of psychology that the modern city
posed dangers to the nervous state and mental health of its inhabitants,
Sitte prescribed learning from historical cities, just as artists learned
from nature, to make the new art of city building a therapeutic and
restorative practice. For his native Vienna he even drew up proposals
for restoring some of the qualities of close-knit, traditional urban fabric, scale, and thus sense of community to the Ringstrasse by adding
additional building blocks to fill the voids and reconnect the monuments to the town and the individual [1 35]. Like Morris, Ruskin, and
Webb in architecture, Sitte opened the debates on tradition and innovation, on art and community, and on the role of art in the psychic
sense of the individual in society which were to be prominent themes
of the art nouveau and the early modern movements.

CRITICS AND THE PLANNED CITY 267