ARCHITECTURE IN THE VICTORIAN AGE
Victorian times - Merry England
In the early 19th century, the French Revolution was recent enough to provide an awful example of what
might happen if the upper classes lost control, whilst Peterloo and demonstrations against the Six Acts
in 1819 were a reminder that it could happen here. The building classes took refuge in a fictitious past,
such as the Middle Ages of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1819) or the romantic Elizabethan style of
Kenilworth (1821). The myth of Merry England, with its strictly ordered society and its chivalric code of
values, had a strong appeal for a ruling elite which felt under threat from social and political unrest at
home and abroad.
The huge glass-and-iron Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition of
1851, shows another strand to 19th century architecture - one which embraced new industrial
processes. But it wasn't long before even this confidence in progress came to be regarded with
suspicion. Mass production resulted in buildings and furnishings that were too perfect, as the individual
craftsman no longer had a major role in their creation.
Railing against the dehumanising effects of industrialisation, reformers like John Ruskin and William
Morris made a concerted effort to return to hand-crafted, pre-industrial manufacturing techniques.
Morris's influence grew from the production of furniture and textiles, until by the 1880s a generation of
principled young architects was following his call for good, honest construction.
Victorian buildings
The Houses of Parliament (Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin, 1840-60) replaced the building
destroyed by fire in 1834. A good example of the period's confused love affair with the past, it
was summed up earlier this century as classic in inspiration, Gothic in detailing, and carried
out with scrupulous adherence to the architectural detail of the Tudor period. Built in the Neo-
Perpendicular Gothic British people of civil liberties achieved throughout time.
With its quiet, unassuming love for the vernacular of Kent and Sussex, and its rejection of
Victorian pomposity, Philip Webb's Red House at Bexleyheath (1859-60) is the building which
started the Arts and Crafts movement. It was originally designed for newly-weds William and
Janey Morris.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Glasgow School of Art (1896-99, 1907-9) proves that there
were a few dissenting voices raised against the Victorian trend to return to the past.
Mackintosh was uncompromising in his rejection of historicism, and his buildings have more in
common with the vertical geometry and sinuous curves of Art Nouveau work in France,
Belgium and Austria. But his decadent approach to design met with hostility in Britain and, a
few years after the School of Art was completed in 1909, he gave up architecture.
New structures and materials in the architecture
Beside the question of styles, the 19th century is an important period because a rapid development
began in architecture in the field of structures in this period. Greenhouses, covered markets and halls,
exhibition pavilions, passages and utility buildings were built of iron and steel. At that time some people
believed that the new industrial civilization would give birth to new architectural forms. They had high
hopes of the newly introduced materials as cast and wrought iron, glass and concrete. Since they
brought a visible break with past methods of building, they might be a precedent of a new architecture.
Iron began to qualify as a building material only when it became possible to massproduce it to a
reliable standard of quality.
The most perfect examples of early iron architecture, the suspension bridges are the work of engineers,
not of architects. In the space of a few years three buildings were erected, each of which amounts to a
statement of basic principles: a cast-iron factory in New York by James Bogardus in 1848, Joseph
Paxton's Crystal Palace in London in 1851 and Philip Webb's Red House in Kent in 1859. In all of these
buildings are to be seen the beginning of trends which have become central to architectural and townplanning practice and theory during the twentieth century.
New functions
Next to the question of the styles in contradiction to the use of new materials and structures, the 19th
century was a period when new functions appeared and spread in the architecture. The importance of
this period is given not because of repetition of historical architectural styles, but because of the great
development in the field of the functional planning.
People thought much too much of aesthetics and too little of function.
Nineteenth-century architecture is first of all a simple matter of statistics. In 1800 Europe had a
population of 187 million, in 1850 266 million, and in 1900 420 million. These people who lived in an
age of industrial revolution required hundreds of markets and stations, schools and town halls, hospitals
and prisons, and hundreds of thousands of houses and blocks of flats.
The nineteenth century is a golden age of model collections of every kind, from the cottage to the city
apartment block, from the church to the prison and mental hospital. The individual building is less
significant than the series to which it belongs.
If one tries to pick out the best examples of town architecture of all dates and all countries in the
nineteenth century, the vast majority would be governmental, municipal, and later private office
buildings, museums, galleries, libraries, universities and schools, theatres and concert halls, banks and
stock exchanges, railway stations, department stores, hotels and hospitals. But most of them were
erected not for worship not for luxury, but for the benefit and the daily use of the people, as
represented by various groups of citizens. In this a new social function of architecture appears.
The national monuments are the most particular but the most significant new examples of our period.
In the 19th century the architects used not only from the Romans inherited forms and vocabulary for
design of monuments, which were the column, the triumphal arch, the peripteral temple, the tholos, but
more monuments were built in Gothic style mostly in Great Britain. These monuments built in
contemporary styles expressed always the general taste and the philosophy of Historicism.
Similarly to the national monuments the government buildings had symbolical meaning. These building
types such as houses of parliament, ministries, public offices, town halls, law courts had only a little
preceding example from the past, but were built in a great number in our period. Their particular
functional claims and the formation of their ground plans developed during the 19th century.
The new civil societies with their increasing organization claimed also such public
buildings as hospitals or prisons in a great number. The programmes of hospital and prison
accommodation have much in common. In both cases a number of people are confined in one
particular place, although they would prefer not to be, and in both cases constant supervision is
necessary. The ideal hospitals of this era were built with pavilion system symmetrically around
a central court. This form was inherited from the previous century, but spread in the 19th
century.
Some people think that if the symbols of the medieval architecture are the cathedrals and fortified
castles, than the symbols of the nineteenth century architecture are exchanges, banks and warehouses.
These were the most important building types of the civil architecture. At the beginning of the century
the severe Neo-Classical style was preferred for banks and exchanges. The style probably intended to
express security. Later all of the historical styles were used also for these building types. Early glass roofs
were built in bigger and bigger size for the representative, huge banking halls.
The shops, stores, department stores or the warehouses were more wide-spread new
building types in the 19th century. From the beginning of the century the shops were often built
covered by a glass barrel-vault, as a passage. These gave the early examples of using iron as
new material in covering long passages. The inner span increased continuously during the
century. The same process happened when the markets became market halls covered by glass
roofs. The warehouse was a really new building type holding shops together in a great building.
Main claims were the great spaces and spans to show and regroup free the wares and to see
across the different storeys. The mature and representative shape of the warehouse formed
only in the period of Eclecticism.
In the 19th century the train service developed rapidly. The first cast-iron rails were made
at Coalbrookdale in 1767, the first horse-drawn public freight railway was the Surrey Iron
Railway in 1803, and various experiments were followed with the locomotive on tracks between
1801 and 05. George Stephenson designed the first real railway Liverpool to Manchester
opened in 1830. The line was 34 miles long. In the 1830s other countries began to build
railways as well.