Function and Fantasy ─ Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century

The introduction of iron - and later steel - construction and decoration transformed architecture in the nineteenth-century. While the structural employment of iron has been a frequent subject of study, this book re-directs scholarly scrutiny on its place in the aesthetics of architecture in the long nineteenth century. Together, its eleven unique and original chapters chart - for the first time - the global reach of iron’s architectural reception, from the first debates on how iron could be incorporated into architecture’s traditional aesthetics to the modernist cleaving of its structural and ornamental roles. The book is divided into three sections. Firstly, 'Formations' considers the rising tension between the desire to translate traditional architectural motifs into iron and the nascent feeling that iron buildings were themselves creating an entirely new field of aesthetic expression. Secondly, 'Exchanges' charts the commercial and cultural exchanges that took place between British iron foundries and clients in far-flung locations such as Argentina, Jamaica, Nigeria and Australia. Expressing colonial control as well as local agency, these iron buildings struck a balance between pre-fabricated functionalism and a desire to convey beauty, value and often exoticism through ornament. Finally, 'Transformations' looks at the place of the aesthetics of iron architecture in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a period in which iron ornament sought to harmonize wide social ambitions while offering the tantalizing possibility that iron architecture as a whole could transform the fundamental meanings of ornament. Taken together, these chapters call for a re-evaluation of modernism’s supposedly rationalist interest in nineteenth-century iron structures, one that has potentially radical implications for the recent ornamental turn in contemporary architecture.

Paul Dobraszczyk is a lecturer in Art History at the University of Manchester and his research covers a wide variety of subjects, including ornament and iron, visual representations of London's Victorian sewers, and the relationship between real and imagined urban ruins. He has published widely on these subjects, including Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain (Ashgate, 2014), London's Sewers (Shire, 2014) and Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London's Victorian Sewers (Spire, 2009). He is currently working on a monograph, provisionally titled Dead Cities and the Imagination of Disaster. Peter Sealy is a PhD student at Harvard University, where he is a Frank Knox Fellow. His dissertation charts the productive utility of photographya€?s claim to factuality as it explored increasingly subjective qualities in late-nineteenth-century architectural publications. An exposAc of this argument appeared in Blackwella€?s Companion to 19th Century Architecture. He co-authored (with Martin Bressani) an article on the photographs published with Charles Garnier's Le Nouvel OpAcra, published in Art and the Early Photographic Album (CASVA, 2011). He holds architecture degrees from McGill University and the Harvard GSD; previously, he worked at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in MontrAcal on exhibitions including Actions (2008) and Journeys (2010).