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A leader in the use of this material was the Italian architect and engineer
Pier Luigi Nervi. From his early work on Florence Stadium (1927–30) and his
later imaginative hangars at Orvieto and Ortebello, where he developed the
use of pre-cast concrete elements, he went on to create original and beautiful
structures of infinite delicacy and variety. The Palazzetto dello Sport, built for
the 1960 Romé Olympics, was typical (Figure 18.6). This was a ‘big top’ but in
concrete not canvas, a structure 60m (194 ft) in diameter anchored by 36
concrete ties. In the 1940s Nervi felt constrained by the limitations imposed by
the use of timber formwork to shape the concrete and he went on to
experiment with his own version of ferro-concrete in which he erected metal-
framed skeleton structures to support the cladding, a method with which much
of his subsequent work was identified. The great roof of the 1949 Turin
Exhibition Hall is a major instance of this.
Nervi had been pressed to use his ingenuity in reinforced concrete by a
shortage of steel in post-war Italy. Similarly, necessary economies in a number
of countries led to the development of building methods which saved time and
cost. Pre-cast cladding in high-rise construction was one answer and Le
Corbusier’s experiment in urban living, the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles
was a pacesetter. This structure and others inspired by it gave rise in England,
in 1954, to the term brutalism. This referred to the use of concrete in its most
overt, naked form, handled in strong masses. It was an English derivation from
the French béton brut, meaning concrete left in its natural state, unfinished,
displaying the timber graining impressed upon it after the formwork has been
removed. Formwork, also called shuttering, is the timber or metal form into
which concrete is poured and which is removed when the concrete has set.
Other means of producing a rough but even texture on the concrete includes
bush-hammering after the concrete has set by use of a hammer with grooved
head employed to mark the surface. Typical brutalist work is the Queen
Elizabeth concert hall on London’s South Bank (1967) and, of the same date,

the Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth.
Figure 18.6: Concrete. Palazzetto dello Sport, Rome. Architect and engineer:
Annibale Vitellozzi and Pier Luigi Nervi, 1957.
Drawing by Doreen Yarwood.
BUILDING AND ARCHITECTURE
893
During the 1950s and 1960s vast numbers of reinforced, pre-stressed
buildings were erected all over the world, but by the 1970s disillusion was
apparent. Concrete is an inexpensive building material but it weathers badly
Much work has gone into the problem and better quality structures with better
surface concrete are now being erected. When concrete is faced, as it so often
is in Mediterranean countries, by mosaic, faïence or marble, its structural
advantages are undeniable. In great engineering projects such as the Thames
Barrier Scheme (opened 1984) reinforced pre-stressed concrete has no rival.
IRON AND GLASS
Ironwork
The nineteenth century was very much the age of iron, just as in the twentieth
century steel is such a vital constructional material, but the story of iron as a
decorative and structural material began much earlier.
In Europe iron had been regarded as a durable, utilitarian material since the
early Middle Ages but its use was limited by the lack of power and technical
knowledge which hampered both quantity and quality of production. At this
time the iron in use was wrought, that is, hammered to beat out impurities and
make it into the desired shape. It was manufactured into utensils, weapons and
agricultural implements. With the later, improved blast furnace design, cast
iron could be produced and, by 1600, adequate supplies were available for the
needs of the time (see Chapter 2).
By the later eighteenth century, with the development of steam power, the
adoption of coked coal furnaces and the evolution of the engineering industry,
the Industrial Revolution in Britain had reached a point where large-scale iron

structures had become possible and the material was gradually adopted for
wider use. The famous Ironbridge at Coalbrookdale spanning the River
Severn was a landmark. Constructed from iron elements made in Abraham
Darby’s foundry there, the bridge, designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard,
was completed in 1779.
In Britain, from the last years of the eighteenth century, iron was being
utilized for a wide range of industrial building, for factories, warehouses, textile
mills, bridges. None of these was of note architecturally; they were strongly
built and functional engineering structures. The iron was used for roof trusses
and covering, for wall panels, for column supports and for window frames, as
well as for the heavy machinery. But in the same period iron was also being
employed for architectural projects in both a structural and a decorative
manner. For example, in 1794 Sir John Soane covered the 7m (23ft) diameter
oculus over his Consols Office in the Bank of England with an iron and glass
lantern; Thomas Hopper fan vaulted his great conservatory at Carlton House
PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
894
in London in 1812 with iron; in 1818, John Nash built his Chinese-style
staircase in the Royal Pavilion in Brighton entirely from iron. Increasingly iron
was being used for supporting columns, galleries and roofing in churches,
Rickman’s Liverpool churches of 1812–15, St Michael, Toxteth Road, and St
George, Everton, among them. Decoratively, iron was extensively employed at
this time for ornamental galleries, balconies and railings.
For many years until the early 1860s iron was used for structural features,
especially roofing, in buildings because it was believed to be more fireproof than
timber, as indeed it was. When the danger to iron structures under intense heat
became apparent its use lessened and it was finally replaced by cased steel. Early
instances of roof replacement with iron include Soufflot’s covering of 1779–81
over the staircase hall leading up to the Grand Galerie of the Louvre and Louis’
roof of 1786–90 over the Theâtre Français, both in Paris.

By the 1840s more extensive use of iron roofing was being taken up in
many areas. Barry covered his new Palace of Westminster with iron roofing
and, in 1842, Montferrand completed his cast-iron dome for St. Isaac’s
Cathedral in St Petersburg. Before long American architects were following his
lead as in T.U.Walter’s vast and spectacular dome over the Capitol in
Washington (1855–65).
At this time also iron was becoming increasingly important for heavy
structural work. In New York in 1848, James Bogardus erected his first four-
storeyed factory with iron piers and lintels and went on to more ambitious iron
urban buildings. Others emulated his example for factories, department stores
and apartment blocks. In Britain in 1851 at Balmoral Castle the Prince
Consort ordered a prefabricated iron ballroom. At Saltaire, in Yorkshire much
of Sir Titus Salt’s magnificent new textile mill (1854) in the town which bears
his name was of iron construction. In 1889 in Paris was erected the tallest of
the nineteenth-century structures in iron; Gustave Eiffel’s 300m (984 ft) tower
to commemorate the centenary of the start of the French Revolution.
The nineteenth century was also the great age of railway and bridge
building and for both of these iron was the chief structural material. In
addition to the track and the vast railway sheds with their trussed iron roofs,
iron was extensively used in the architecture of railways, in columns, brackets,
trusses and roofing. It was also a decorative medium, being employed for
window frames and balconies, railings and canopies. In the Victorian Gothic
period, when great London terminals such as St Pancras, King’s Cross and
Paddington were constructed, famous architect/engineer partnerships were
energetically building stations, hotels, viaducts and sheds. The great engineers
of the day included Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Thomas Telford and Robert
Stephenson, the architects Francis Thompson, Sir George Gilbert Scott and
Matthew Digby Wyatt.
Great bridges were also being constructed to carry the railway lines across
rivers, canals and other railway routes. Iron was utilized for such structures in

BUILDING AND ARCHITECTURE
895
girders, piers, cantilevers and chains. Famous among surviving bridges are
Brunei’s Clifton Bridge over the Avon gorge near Bristol (1837–64) and his
Royal Albert Bridge over the River Tamar which divides Devon from
Cornwall (completed 1859) and Robert Stephenson’s tubular Britannia Bridge
over the Menai Straits which separate North Wales from the Isle of Anglesey
(completed 1850) and his High Level Bridge over the River Tyne in
Newcastle.
Ferro-vitreous construction
By the 1820s, as a result of technical advances in the making of both iron and
glass, the idea of combining the use of these two materials for specific types of
building was experimented with widely. Their employment together resulted in
some practical as well as aesthetically attractive interiors. An early use of these
materials was for the construction of conservatories and glasshouses but for
some time wood was used to frame the glass panels, this being gradually
replaced by iron. The Palm House in Kew Gardens is a magnificent surviving
example of this type of construction. Designed by Decimus Burton and erected
by the Dublin engineer Richard Turner in 1844–7, this remarkable structure
comprises over 4180m
2
(45,000 sq ft) of greenish glass. Inside a decorative iron
spiral staircase gives access to an upper gallery from where tall plants may be
closely viewed. Sir Joseph Paxton was responsible for the Great Conservatory
at Chatsworth House (begun 1836, now demolished), a project which he
followed by his entry for the competition held for a building to house the Great
Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park. Aptly dubbed (in Punch) the ‘Crystal Palace’
this (then) unusual structure was a prefabricated glasshouse of vast
dimensions: 563m (1848ft) long, 124m (408ft) wide and over 30m (100ft)
high. It contained 3300 iron columns, 2150 girders, 183,000m (600,000ft) of

timber and 83,600m
2
(900,000 sq ft) of sheet glass (see prefabrication p. 899).
From the 1830s to the 1880s iron and glass were used together to construct
large, naturally illuminated, elegant interiors. These materials employed
together were regarded as more fireproof than wood and glass though, in the
second half of the century, it was being realized that an unclad iron skeleton to
a building could collapse dangerously when fire raised the temperature to a
certain level. This proved only too true on the night of 1 December 1936 when
the Crystal Palace was in a short space of time almost totally destroyed
assisted, in this case, by the contents, much of which were inflammable.
By the 1840s the roofs of many large interiors were being covered by
ferrovitreous construction. Bunning’s Coal Exchange in London (1846–9, now
demolished) was a superb example. In 1854–5, Sydney Smirke filled in the
court of his brother’s British Museum with the domed reading room. It was
soon discovered that this type of roofing was ideal for railway station sheds as
PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
896
evidenced at, for example, Lewis Cubitt’s King’s Cross in London (1851–2)
and Duquesney’s Gare de l’Est in Paris (1847–52).
Iron and glass continued to complement each other as the century advanced
although, as both quality and quantity of steel production improved, steel
increasingly replaced iron for constructional purposes. In many European cities
great undercover shopping arcades and galleries were built where people could
stroll, sit at café tables or window-gaze. A number of these survive: Mengoni’s
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan is an impressive example. Another is the
remarkable department store in Moscow’s Red Square called GUM (Figure
18.7). Built in 1889–93, the interior of this great building comprises three parallel
barrel-vaulted galleries, each about 300m (1,000 ft) in length, with balconies and
walkways at different heights, all serving shops. There are iron connecting

walkways from one section to another. The interior is like the nave and aisles of
a church though the aisles are nearly as wide and high as the nave. There are
hundreds of shops and stalls, all covered by an iron and glass domed roof.
Steel-framed high-rise building
The skyscraper was conceived and named in America where, by the 1880s
conditions were ripe for this type or architectural development. In the big
cities, notably New York and Chicago, steeply rising land values provided the
incentive to build high and the structural means to do so had become
Figure 18.7: Iron and glass. State Department Store GUM. Red Square, Moscow.
Architect: A.N.Pomerantsev, 1889–93.
Drawing by Doreen Yarwood.
BUILDING AND ARCHITECTURE
897
available. However, the desire to build high, at first for commercial and office
needs, had been frustrated for several decades by the twin problems of load-
bearing walls and of transporting the users of a building from floor to floor.
The second of these difficulties was solved when Elisha Graves Otis adapted
the traditional and age-old goods hoist for passenger use. In 1852 he devised a
safety mechanism which would hold the lift in place in the shaft by means of
spring-controlled pawls if, by chance, the controlling rope gave way. In 1854,
Otis personally demonstrated his device and by 1857 the first elevator was
installed in a New York department store.
The next essential development to enable buildings to rise above about ten
storeys was the steel-framed structure. As early as 1849, William Johnston was
erecting his seven-storey Jayne Building in Philadelphia in an architectural style
which though eclectic, displayed the vertical design format for the façade which
was later to become characteristic of high-rise structures. However, until the early
1880s buildings were still being erected with traditionally load-bearing walls up
to ten storeys in height. To rise still higher would require the walls to be
impracticably thick at base in order to carry the load above. It was the

emergence of the load-bearing metal framework, structurally independent of the
external walling, which made the true skyscraper possible. An early landmark in
this development was the Home Insurance Building in Chicago built in 1883–5
by William Le Baron Jenney. In this he devised an iron and steel framework of
columns, lintels and girders. The building was quickly followed by the fully
developed steel skeleton construction of the Tacoma Building by Holabird and
Roche in the same city, where the walls were merely cladding.
Despite these revolutionary structural ideas which made tall skyscrapers
possible, architectural design continued to be largely eclectic, the wall cladding
being dressed with classical columns and entablatures or, as in Cass Gilbert’s 52-
storey Woolworth Building of 1913 in New York, in Gothic detail (Figure 18.8).
The leader in designing an architectural style suited to take advantage of the new
structural method was Louis H.Sullivan, who treated his elevations to accentuate
the height and with continuous pilasters to stress the steel frame beneath rather
than to hide it as his precedessors had done. His Wainwright building in St
Louis (1890–1) is characteristic. A few years later, in 1894–5, came his
masterpiece, the Guaranty Building in Buffalo, based on almost free-standing
piers which anticipated Le Corbusier’s later use of pilotis. The elevations are
sheathed in terracotta and rise to a decorative, non-eclectic cornice.
Since the 1920s American skyscrapers have risen even higher from the
decorative 380m (1247ft) Empire State Building to the 443m (1453ft) Sears
Tower in Chicago. Europe was slower to follow the American lead until after
1945 but the international style soon took over there also. Even in eastern
Europe, where in the early 1960s the Soviet form of neoclassical architecture
was superimposed upon high-rise buildings leading to innumerable skyscraper
‘wedding cakes’, after 1965 internationalism prevailed too.
PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
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Figure 18.8: Steel-framed skyscraper. The Woolworth Building, New York.
Architect: Cass Gilbert, 1913.

Drawing by Doreen Yarwood.
BUILDING AND ARCHITECTURE
899
The steel elements of framed building may be joined together by bolting,
riveting or welding, Carbon steels may corrode through oxidization and above
temperatures of about 370°C may lose their strength so, for both fireproofing
and protection from the atmosphere, steel members are generally encased in
concrete. The steel skeleton of a modern skyscraper is constructed as a grid
made up from vertical columns and horizontal girders or beams. Foundations
and floors are made of reinforced concrete.
MODERN INDUSTRIAL CONSTRUCTION
The process of replacing craftsmanship in building by the mass-production of
materials and of decorative and structural features began on a small scale in
Britain in the eighteenth century; the Industrial Revolution brought steam
power which was to revolutionize the machine tool and engineering industries.
The idea of making the parts of a building in a workshop then assembling
them on the building site was, however, an earlier one. Medieval timber-framed
structures had been partly constructed in this way (see p. 864) and Leonardo da
Vinci in the late fifteenth century suggested an extension of this idea. In North
America prefabrication methods supplied the need for rapid provision of homes
for the men taking part in the California Gold Rush of 1849.
All of these instances were largely concerned with building in wood. The
famous ferro-vitreous prototype of prefabrication was Paxton’s Crystal Palace of
1851 (see p. 895), erected in less than five months in Hyde Park then dismantled
the following year and re-erected in Sydenham, South London. Originally the
parts were standardized and made in quantity for assembly on the site.
The growth of such constructional methods advanced slowly during the
later nineteenth century, then received an impetus with the shortage of
buildings which existed immediately after the First World War. This was
when standardized steel window frames, structural steel framing and pre-cast

concrete panels for walling and roofing were being manufactured at speed. It
was the need to build quickly in Europe after the devastation of towns
during the Second World War which led to wide-scale prefabrication.
Temporary houses were constructed in factories and delivered by lorry for
assembly on site. In Britain four lorryloads were required for the building of
one house. One of these loads carried a complete kitchen and bathroom unit
containing the necessary plumbing. These houses, known familiarly as ‘pre-
fabs’, lasted for many years longer than their intended lifespan. The idea of
utilizing steel and plastic in this way to mass-fabricate complete bathroom
units had first been put forward in the 1930s in America by Buckminster
Fuller, but at that time the cost was too high. The mass-production level
required after the war in so many European countries from Britain to the
USSR made the project cost-effective.
PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
900
An essential concomitant of prefabrication is standardization of manufacture
of separate building parts and, by this time, a system to establish an overall
three-dimensional unit of measurement was required. The system developed,
known as modular design, ensures the accurate fitting of all building parts of
whatever material and wherever or by whomsoever manufactured. In Britain
the Modular Society was founded in 1953 with members drawn from all
concerned with the building industry, from architects to clients and craftsmen.
A further development, in which prefabrication, modular co-ordination and
functional planning are incorporated, is called systems building. In such
projects a complete building is planned for manufacture, not just separate
parts. Its specifications, such as heating, lighting, ventilation, capacity, load-
bearing requirements, building materials, site characteristics etc. are studied
and computerized. This type of system has been utilized for housing and
school buildings.
During the twentieth century many technical advances have taken place in

the manufacture and use of materials which have made new building methods
possible. As early as 1911, Walter Gropius in Germany was experimenting
with glass cladding in his Fagus Factory built at Alfeld-an-der-Leine. This was
a revolutionary design which heralded the introduction of the curtain wall of
steel and glass, hanging in front of a steel-framed structure and separated from
it, introduced in 1918 by Willis Polk in San Francisco. After 1945 architects all
over Europe were emulating the American structures which had been built in
great numbers in the intervening years.
With the development of reinforcement and pre-stressing, concrete has
become the ubiquitous twentieth-century building material. Since 1950 large
construction firms have adopted on-site pre-casting methods, economizing
greatly in transport and handling. Other technical advances have included float
and solar glass, laminated wood and particle board products. The potential
application of plastics to structural needs had not yet been fully developed,
although experimental work and manufacture points to their satisfactory
potential in combination with other materials. A notable instance of this is the
reinforcement of certain plastics, for example, polyester resins, with glass fibres.
Apart from load-bearing units, different plastics are being utilized in ever
increasing quantity and variety in every aspect of building as in, for instance,
cisterns, piping and roofing panels.
FURTHER READING
Brunskill, R.W. Traditional buildings of Britain (Gollanz, London, 1982)
Brunskill, R. and Clifton-Taylor, A. English brickwork (Ward Lock, London, 1977)
Clifton-Taylor, A. The pattern of English building (Faber & Faber, London, 1972)
Clifton-Taylor, A. and Ireson, A.S. English stone building (Gollanz, London, 1983)
BUILDING AND ARCHITECTURE
901
Condit, C.W. American building: materials and techniques from the beginning of the colonial
settlements to the present (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1968)
Copplestone, T. (Ed.) World architecture (Hamlyn, London, 1985)

Fintel, M. (Ed.) Handbook of concrete engineering (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1974)
Gloag, J. and Bridgewater, D. History of cast iron in architecture (George Allen and Unwin,
London, 1948)
Hitchcock, H.Russell Architecture: nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Pelican History of Art
series (Penguin, London, 1982)
Lloyd, N. History of the English house (The Architectural Press, London, 1975)
Raeburn, M. (Ed.) Architecture of the western world (Orbis, London, 1980)
Whiffen, M. and Koeper, F. American architecture 1607–1976 (Routledge & Kegan Paul,
London, 1981)
Yarwood, D. Architecture of Italy (Chatto and Windus, London, 1970)
—— Architecture of Britain (Batsford, London, 1980)
—— Architecture of Europe (Chancellor Press, London, 1983)
—— Encyclopaedia of architecture (Batsford, London, 1985)
—— A Chronology of Western Architecture (Batsford, London, 1987)