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Handout L5/6: Engineer & architect / The growing city
CS2 2015
31 March, 2015
Christoph Schnoor
Part I Engineer and architect
The Iron Age
Walter Benjamin said: “With iron, an artificial building material appeared for the first time in the history of
architecture. It went through a development whose tempo accelerated during the course of the century.
This received its decisive impulse when it turned out that the locomotive, with which experiments had
been made since the end of the twenties, could only be utilized on rails. The rail was the first unit of
construction, the forerunner of the girder. Iron was avoided for dwelling-houses, and made use for
arcades, exhibition halls, railway stations, buildings that served transitory purposes. Simultaneously the
architectonic areas in which glass was employed were extended. But the social conditions for its increased
use as a building material only came into being a hundred years later.”1
The Industrial Revolution
“From the last quarter of the 18th century to the outbreak of World War I (in 1914), Europe was
transformed from a series of traditional agrarian communities into a collection of modern industrial
nations. Radical changes in the methods by which goods were produced – the widespread adoption of
capitalism, mechanization and the factory system – gave rise to a period of unparalleled economic growth,
though interrupted by cyclical depressions. There was also a rapid increase of population and an influx
of people from the countryside into the new towns and cities that sprang up around the new workplaces.
The industrial Revolution, as this transformation came to be known, had its origins in Britain. Its effects
were first seen in the cotton and woollen industries in the north of the country. Mechanical innovations
improved the speed and efficiency of weaving, and required new factories powered first by waterwheels
and later by steam engines. These factories brought together the various operations involved in textile
manufacture. Britain was ideally placed to pioneer and develop mass production, possessing abundant
natural resources to power the new machinery, favourable terrain on which to construct extensive
transport networks […], and a ready market for manufactured goods. […] The new railway network
played a prime role in promoting economic expansion […]. The social effects of the Industrial Revolution
were as radical as its technological and financial consequences. Employers exploited the large pool of
children and female labour to depress wages. Living conditions deteriorated in the vastly expanding new
cities, where sanitation failed to keep pace with population growth. Cholera and typhus epidemics were
common. […]
To challenge the effects of capital, both the industrial working classes and the rural peasantry organized
themselves into trade unions. These efforts met oppositions from the state as well as the capitalists. […]
Socialist parties were formed to argue for a more and equal distribution of wealth, becoming particularly
strong in Germany and France. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their Communist Manifesto in
1848, arguing for a class-based revolution in highly industrialized states such as Britain. […] For many
people, the solution to poverty was to emigrate. Nearly half a million Poles moved west to find jobs in the
industrialized Ruhr […] Yet far more people left Europe, emigrating in their millions to Australia and
New Zealand, but above all to the Americas.”2
Architect or Engineer?
The development of new structures developed by engineers – bridges, exhibition halls, train stations –
caused debate amongst architects. Central questions of the architects and theorists at the time were:
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Walter Benjamin: Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, 1930.
John Haywood. Cassell Atlas of the 19th Century World (London: Casselll, 1998), p. 5.10.
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How can the new material iron be used within traditional forms of architecture? Can, or should it
take on new forms?
Is iron beautiful? Does it produce an aesthetic of its own? Or is it ugly and needs to be hidden?
Is building with iron “just” engineering? Or is it art, that is architecture?
Does iron blend in with other materials, such as brick, masonry?
One way of answering these questions was to say that buildings which were seen as representative
had to be clad in masonry (the substantial, “real” material), those that were not representative,
could be done by the engineer – in iron.
Iron in French architecture
“Iron, pioneered in bridges in the 1770s, began to appear in public buildings and spaces in Paris in the
1830s and 1840s. The iron and glass greenhouses by Charles Rouhault de Fleury at the Jardin des Plantes
[Garden of Plants] opened in 1833, and on the Place de la Concorde and along the Champs-Elysées the metal
lamp standards, music kiosks, and shelters were features of Jaques-Ignace Hittorf’s redesign of parks and
promenades. In 1840 a massive strike of carpenters spurred the introduction of iron floor members in
Parisian housing construction. Iron’s spanning capacities were exploited in spectacular train sheds that
accompanied the railway’s phenomenal growth in London and Paris in the 1840s and on much of the
continent by mid-century, notably in Léonce Reynaud’s Gare du Nord [Northern train station] in Paris,
much admired for its hollow columns which doubled as a drainage system. This was built in 1842–46, just
as Labrouste was refining the design for his library, the first major public building in which exposed iron
played a prominent aesthetic role.”3
Labrouste was the architect of two important Paris libraries; the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1843-50) and
the National Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale (1857–67).
Some theorists at the time believed that great eras of human civilization could be associated with a single
building type “which embodied a culture’s highest spiritual aspirations”4. For the mid-19th century, this
might have been the library. For the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève Labrouste searched for an appropriate
form since he was convinced that “architectural forms, to be legible, must derive from historical
evolution”5. He found the answer in the adaptation of a centuries-old building type – the refectory of
monasteries. But he also sought to accommodate the newest technologies: new systems of heating,
ventilation, and gas lighting. It is important to note the combination of masonry and iron, but specifically
Labrouste’s expressive use of iron in the reading room. The ionic volutes of the cast-iron columns
have been turned 45 degrees to receive the membrane-like iron arches and trusses: a synthesis of Greek
and Gothic structural systems.
Bergdoll points out: “Like Pugin, Labrouste taught that ornament must derive from construction, but he
went further and took up the challenge of giving an aesthetic as well as structural role to iron.”6
Joseph Paxton: the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London (1851)
“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. Yet Queen Victoria’s opening on 1 May 1851 of the glass and iron hall
hosting the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works and Industry of All Nations’ […] also inaugurated debates
over the ‘new’ material and over relations of art to industry. Technologically Joseph Paxton’s (1803–65)
‘Crystal Palace’ […] offered little more than refinements of technology developed in green houses, […],
and in the youngest generation of railway sheds […]. 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
Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 182.
Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890, p. 179.
5 Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890, p. 181.
6 Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890, p. 182.
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assembly […] [nine months only] was spectacular even for Victorians [who were] regularly appraised of
the country’s new engineering feats in the pages of the illustrated press.”7
Erected on a module of 24 feet and a sub-module of 8 feet; the arched glass transept uses the same
folding technique as Paxton’s Chatsworth glass house (but made of timber, not iron!).
“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 100,000 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 of Paxton’s showcase,
destined to have an impact not only on exhibition buildings but on an emergent mass consumer culture.” 8
The Crystal Palace was dismantled after the exhibition and rebuilt in an altered and extended fashion at
Sydenham, south of London. It was destroyed by a fire in 1936.
John Ruskin said about the Crystal Palace:
John Ruskin criticized the Crystal Palace, saying: “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 works are characteristic of the age; and all, in their several ways, deserve our highest admiration; but
no admiration of the kind that is rendered to poetry or art.”9
Compare Le Corbusier in Toward an Architecture (V ers une architecture, 1923):
“My house is practical. I thank you, as I might thank the Railway engineers or the Telephone service. You
have not touched my heart.”
Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79)
The French architect and theorist Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79) became famous for his
investigations into the structural nature of architecture. “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 [his] overarching explanatory system.”10
Viollet-le-Duc was known as a champion for the Gothic Revival (in France), as well as the leading
exponent of structural rationalism. He studied the Gothic architecture of the great medieval cathedrals
and came to the conclusion that their architects 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 […]; form and structure, in short, were identical.”11
He wrote and drew a dictionary on architecture which was published in 1858 (the Dictionnaire raisonné de
l’Architecture). It became famous for its three-dimensional cut-away sections of Gothic structures. These
drawings can be compared to anatomical or botanical drawings of the same time. “Taking inspiration
from both the methods and the drawings of contemporary treatises of comparative anatomy, Viollet-leDuc’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.”12
As a nationalist, Viollet-le-Duc saw Gothic architecture as a French achievement. He also believed that the
Gothic spirit did not have to be produced in stone, and therefore explored ways of turning the Gothic
principles of construction in stone into iron structures.
Two contradictory statements by Viollet-le-Duc show his exploration of new structural possibilities:
“Iron and masonry make poor bedfellows.” (1855)
“Can [masonry] be combined with iron construction? Certainly it can.” (1872
Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890, p. 207.
Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890, p. 209.
9 John Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture (1853), quoted after Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890, p. 212.
10 Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890, p. 225.
11 Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890, p. 225.
12 Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890, p. 230.
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The Eiffel Tower: engineering or architecture?
In his study of the relationship between architect and engineer, Andrew Saint points out the important
role that architects played even in the ultimate “engineering-project” of the Eiffel Tower:
“In the old view, the 1889 Exhibition represents the triumph of iron and therefore of the engineer: the
Eiffel Tower is offered in ultimate proof of that. That is poor history. Two of the three victors in the 1886
competition were architects, confirming their profession’s tightening grip on the great exhibitions since
the 1850s. Moreover, although the tower was unquestionably an engineering conception, drawing upon
the technique and panache accumulated by the Eiffel firm in bridge design and construction, its fate too
depended at a critical juncture on an architect.”13
Maurice Koechlin had come up with the first design – still quite stiff and rigid – as early as 1884, five years
before the Exhibition. Stephen Sauvestre, an architect, reworked Koechlin’s design in 1886, and this
embellished design, which showed a heavier structure than was structurally necessary, helped Eiffel’s firm
win the competition – and their tower was built between 1887 and 1889.
Part II The growing city
This part of the lecture deals with the development of the great European cities between 1800 and 1900:
– extensions of the existing towns or cities that made the great city possible and assured its survival;
– utopian or reform ideas which searched for alternative solutions instead of the city.
1: London ca. 1800: John Nash’s Regent’s Park and Regent Street
“Regent Street […] has been upheld [by historians] as the first large-scale urban design in which the
principles of picturesque landscape were applied to the city, empirically exploiting each impediment posed
by unobtainable building plots to create a street of studied irregularity, sequence and even surprise.
Parsimony and the picturesque formed a new alliance. Numerous architects were involved, but the whole
was choreographed by John Nash (1752–1835). […] The development of Regent’s Park and Regent’s
Street to connect them with the centre of power and government at Westminster a mile away, was […] as
much a product of market forces as original design intent. As Nash’s vision of a dense development of
terraces of houses arranged in a double circus at the heart of Regent’s Park gave way to a handful of
generously spaced villas, an important prototype for the modern urban park as a public amenity came into
existence thanks more to lacklustre [=dull] housing-market than to civic-mindedness. […] The
quintessential adaptation of the empirical philosophy of the picturesque to the changing demands of
urban design, Regent Street reveals not only Nash’s brilliance at turning obstacles into dramatic incidents
in tracing the path of the street, but marks the alliance of the aesthetic notions of variety and surprise to
the commercial strategies of urban architecture in an increasingly competitive market of goods.”14
2: Europe, particularly England, the middle of the 19th c.
The growing industrialized city without design intent
In the 19th century the European cities were re-shaped to a degree that marked a complete change
between the old – medieval – and the new city.
What are these changes and how did they come about?
Industrialization caused large-scale extensions of the city. Thousands of blue-collar workers needed
homes. England, of course, is just one of the countries with poor housing conditions, but as
industrialization took its start in England, it was there that its negative effects were visible earlier than in
13 Andrew Saint, Architect and Engineer, A Study in Sibling Rivalry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2007), p. 164-5.
14 Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750–1890, pp. 130–3.
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other countries. Thus it is not surprising that Friedrich Engels, the friend of Karl Marx, would severely
criticize working and living conditions of English people in towns like Manchester.
At this time, English houses were often built in lightweight construction. In industrial capitalism of the
middle of the 19th century the house as such was no longer the objective or the goal of the building
enterprise, the goal rather was the exploitation of the plot, the accumulation of profit. In these
cases, no effort was made to produce good architecture.
Parallel to production processes, planning and building in mid-19th century England was dictated by the
principle of making as much profit as possible with as little costs as possible. The more densely a
site was built on and the more people lived in the flats or houses the more the landlord could earn
on them. The less sanitary facilities were built, the more he could earn. The more schematic the plan
of the housing scheme was, the more he could earn on it.
The simplest form was the rectangular grid and this was usually chosen. On the plots, houses were built
as densely as possible. Back-to-back houses were common: the rows of workers’ houses were built
directly with their backs against each other. This means only the front of the house received any light since
on the left, on the right and at the back other houses were built.
But not one single family lived in one house – usually a whole family had to live in one room – which
means only those families that lived in the front rooms had light and fresh air – not to mention the
number of people that had to use the same toilet.
Through such conditions, the industrial city received criticism in a number of ways:
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Social critique (seeing living conditions as unfair, they should be improved for poor people);
Aesthetic critique (seeing cities as ugly, demanding that as much concern be given to the
appearance of a city as to its function);
Moral critique (saying that cities were immoral, that they were enticing people to drink, to visit
whores, to spend money on useless entertainment etc.);
Hygienic critique (saying cities were unhealthy places to live in: cholera, tuberculosis and other
diseases were proof of the poor sanitary conditions in many cities).
3: England, 1898: A Utopia – Ebenezer Howard’s Garden-city
In 1898, Ebenezer Howard, an English Parliament stenograph, set out to reconcile the advantages and
disadvantages of country and city through what he proposed as Garden-city.15
In his famous diagram of the “Three Magnets”, he proposed to combine the qualities of living in the
countryside (beauty of nature, fresh air, low rents) with the advantages of the city (amusement, high
wages, social opportunity). Through public ownership of the land, this new type of a town – at a size of
about 32.000 inhabitants – would put an end to land speculation and thus to the misery of people. People
would move away from the city to live in the healthier environment of the new Garden-City. Eventually,
he believed, even the crowded city of London would thus thin out and finally develop into a new cluster
of garden-cities.
Although he was not an architect and thus his proposals were diagrammatic rather than “designed”, he
managed to found the Garden City Association which raised enough money to build two experimental
towns, Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn Garden city (1920). Unfortunately, these towns are rather diluted
realizations of Howard’s utopian ideas. Several things he did not take into account: the size of 32.000
inhabitants was too small for attracting large-scale industry (such as, f ex, steel manufacturing); and his
garden-cities were built too closely to London: they never really worked as individual towns, rather
developed into dormitory towns and are now fully incorporated into the periphery of London.
“[Howard] was utopian in that he tried by the ‘object lesson or experimental method’ to create an
alternative society within the existing one. The result both at Letchworth and at Welwyn proved that this
was impossible and illusory. He did not even achieve the first step of a city owned and governed by the
15 Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1898), re-edited 1902 as
Garden cities of To-morrow.
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community, and the ultimate goal of a new social and industrial order remained in the realms of the
unattainable.”16
About the question of whether to be utopian or not, Howard was very clear: “One should never be
excessively realistic in humane plans. There are always too many difficulties and only a small percentage of
aims may be attained. Our aspirations therefore should be as far-reaching as they can be, so as to make it
possible to retract from some of them if necessary; for great gains are not to be thought of. And the
percentage of losses depends only on the enthusiasm, energy and perseverance of the idealists who
undertake it.”17
4: Paris, 1853–1870: The “Haussmannisation”
Baron Georges Haussmann was Prefect for the Seine (the river through Paris) under Napoleon III.
between 1853 and 1869.
He saw the intolerable conditions of living in Paris “as being polluted water supply, lack of an adequate
sewer system, open space for both cemeteries and parks, large areas of squalid housing and last, but by no
means least, congested circulation. Of these, the first two were undoubtedly the most critical for everyday
welfare of the population. As a consequence of drawing the bulk of its water from the Seine, which also
served as the main collector sewer, Paris had suffered two serious outbreaks of cholera in the first half of
the century. […] Under the brief autocracy of Napoleon III, Haussmann’s radical solution to the physical
aspect of this complex problem was percement [cutting through the existing buildings].”18
He gave Paris
a) fresh water supply, b) a sewage system, c) parks (Bois de Boulogne and Bois des Vincennes) and d)
pavement for many streets.
By his ruthless cutting through the old city fabric, Haussmann changed Paris into a modern city with
everything the 19th century considered ‘modern’: broad straight boulevards, greenery, and hygiene.
Summarized, the six reasons for the so-called “Haussmannisation” were:
1. To make the capitalist instrument of the city more efficient by liberating its circulation (allowing
for quicker and more efficient commerce);
2. to celebrate the monuments and glory of past and present empires by linking focal points with
vistas;
3. to let in air, light and greenery for the bourgeoisie;
4. to push the poor elsewhere;
5. to turn the boulevard into a social stage;
6. to use the boulevard as a means of military control (fearing revolutionary uproar, the aim was that
barricades could not be easily built any more, and soldiers would be able to shoot straight through
the streets).
Note how, in his 1753 Essay on Architecture (a hundred years before Haussmann!), Marc Antoine Laugier
had already talked about the need for the re-shaping of Paris:
“Our towns are still what they were, a mass of houses crowded together haphazardly without system,
planning or design. Nowhere is this disorder more noticeable and more shocking than in Paris.”
“Paris is therefore in great need of […] embellishment. […] The beauty and splendour of a town depends
mainly on three things: its entries, its streets and its buildings. […] The entries of a town must be (1) free
and unobstructed; (2) numerous, proportionate to the circumference of the wall; (3) sufficiently ornate.
[…] It is not enough that the avenue be wide and as far as possible without bend and deviation; the gate
and the street inside, which corresponds to the avenue, must also have these advantages. It would even be
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Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia. A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 182.
Ebenezer Howard, cited after Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, p. 184.
18 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture. A Critical History, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1980, new ed. 2004), pp.
23–4.
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desirable to find a large square opened up by several streets forming a fanlike pattern at the entrance of a
big town. […] The gateway of a town must have décor and an air of magnificence and grandeur.”19
5: Berlin, 1862–1910: The Hobrecht plan and the tenement block
“The city’s architectural appearance was based on the much-derided plan by James Hobrecht, approved
in 1862 and in force as a binding document until 1925. The Hobrecht plan introduced Berlin to a modern
infrastructure on the model of both London and Paris.
In spite of the criticism it attracted, the plan remained the greatest achievement of Prussian Berlin, and
would have provided for a measured growth of over one million inhabitants had not municipal and
private interests acted to prevent this. […] The Hobrecht plan broke with the techniques of traditional
urban planning […] The Hobrecht plan provided for both an internal and external ring road that were to
extend far beyond the city limits. By using alternating square, circular and star-shaped open spaces and
incorporating large boulevards, he followed the Parisian model, but he also remained faithful to the Lenné
plan [of 1843]. A new element was the extraordinarily large size of the city blocks, which would have
required access through private roads.
As the implementation did not fall into the jurisdiction of the Prussian state, nothing came to this. The
landlords, who formed the majority on the Berlin city council, insisted on maximum utilization of their
property. […] By 1910 the ‘largest tenement city in the world’ had arisen with densely packed built
backyards and a mixed use of homes and workplaces – a development that had neither been intended nor
predicted in 1862. […] The city’s design and aesthetic was left in private hands. All the same, Hobrecht
had developed a sensibility for social concerns in housing on the basis of his observations of London and
Paris. The result was the ‘Berlin Mixture’, which was to prevent the separation of social groups and the
formation of slums. The ideal was for a balance of social classes in one housing unit: ‘For ethical, and
therefore for State reasons, it is not isolation but mixing which seems to me to be what is required’
[Hobrecht said].
However, after both this plan and the indicative floor plans of the residential blocks were published […]
in 1862, […] [speculation] led not only to a shortage of housing, which peaked in the slum developments
of 1872–-73, but to the long-term crowding of individual apartments and even to the use of cellars and
attics [as flats]. It was these impossible social conditions and not the architecture itself that caused Berlin
tenement building to be so emphatically rejected. In fact, today’s much lower residential densities have
shown the value of the tenement as a flexible and comfortable residential building.”20
Urban reform in Berlin: Alfred Messel (1853–1909) as example
Sickingenstraße in Moabit of 1893–5 is the first of Alfred Messel’s housing schemes which still exists. The
client was a Berlin Savings Bank with Messel being one of its directors. Their aim was threefold:
to protect workers at their workplace, to improve the situation of the workers through education and to
improve their living conditions through new schemes which showed alternatives to the existing all too
tight courtyard housing schemes.
A catalogue of requirements was set up which included:
Reasonably small one- and two-room apartments with integrated toilets and kitchens: strict separation
of areas for living, sleeping and cooking.
Air flow through the building
Green courtyards
Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture (Essay on Architecture, 1753), English edition, translated by Wolfgang
and Anni Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977), pp. 121–2.
20 Bernd Nicolai, “Architecture and Urban Development”, in: Gert Streidt and Peter Feierabend (eds.): Prussia. Art
and Architecture (Cologne: Könemann, 1999), pp. 419–20.
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