PART FIVE: TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY 892 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 898 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) . 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. 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. 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