The Industrial Revolution

European architecture in the 19th century was profoundly altered by the Industrial Revolution of c.1760–1840. In earlier times, for instance, multi-storey buildings depended on stout walls and buttresses: the taller the building, the thicker the lower sections had to be. That changed when forged iron and milled steel began to displace wood, brick and stone as primary materials for the infrastructure of tall buildings.

As machinery took over menial tasks, towns expanded as workers moved from farms to factories. Buildings sprang up to meet demand, including town halls, museums, libraries, hospitals, shops, schools, colleges, banks, offices, warehouses and factories. The advent of rail travel – the first passenger railway was opened in England in 1825 – created a need for new structures, such as stations, railway hotels and bridges. Technological progress inspired architects with new ideas, but they also borrowed from diverse historical styles, including Greek, Roman, Islamic, Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance.

Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale, England, Thomas Pritchard, 1777–81

Joseph Paxton and Gustave Eiffel

Improved production of cast iron and steel enabled 19th-century architects to build on a new and massive scale, and advances in sheet-glass manufacture led to a vogue for conservatories and greenhouses. In 1837, gardener Joseph Paxton (1803–65) built the largest conservatory in the world for his employer the Duke of Devonshire. He later built the vast, prefabricated Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, for the Great Exhibition (1851). Covering some 92,000 square metres (990,000 sq ft), the cast-iron, timber and glass structure (opposite) had no precedents. It took eight months to build and even less time to dismantle.

In 1889, French civil engineer and architect Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) built a tower in Paris as the centrepiece of the Universal Exposition. Designed with an open lattice to minimize wind resistance, it comprised 18,038 separate components, all made in Eiffel’s factory on the city’s outskirts and assembled on site. Until the construction of New York’s Chrysler Building (1930), the Eiffel Tower was the world’s tallest structure.

Railways

The myriad advances of the 19th century altered lives beyond all recognition; arguably the greatest change was created by railways. By the 1840s, railways reached all parts of England and many other parts of Europe and elsewhere; in 1869, the first transcontinental line linked the east and west coasts of the United States. Railways had become the wonder of the age, and distinctive styles of architecture developed around them. Philip Hardwick (1792–1870), Robert Stephenson (1803–59) and Charles Fox (1810–74) created Euston Station in London in 1837, with its propylaeum (grand gateway) and Doric columns. A determination to outshine the neoclassical King’s Cross Station (1851–2) and Great Northern Hotel (1854), designed by Lewis Cubitt (1799–1883), spurred George Gilbert Scott’s (1811–78) design for St Pancras Station and Midland Grand Hotel (opposite, 1865–76). Convinced that the Gothic style was the only true Christian style, Scott gave these buildings castellated fringes, dormer windows, towering pointed roofs, banded ‘neo-Byzantine’ arches and Venetian-inspired façades.

Gothic Revival

Following the Renaissance, the Gothic style had been ridiculed and generally considered ugly, thanks in no small part to painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511–74). He had labelled medieval architecture ‘Gothic,’ declaring that the Goths had invented it after sacking Rome. But by the 1830s, several architects were re-evaluating church architecture: they saw Gothic as truly Christian, and dismissed classicism and neoclassicism as ‘pagan’. Devout Catholic Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812–52) argued that a return to the medieval styles of architecture would lead to the revival of a morally upright Christian society. John Ruskin (1819–1900), a leading art critic and patron, draughtsman, watercolourist and philanthropist, wrote The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–3), promoting the virtues of a Protestant form of Gothic architecture. The third significant theorist of the Gothic Revival was the French architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, who had become known for his restorations of medieval buildings.

Budapest Parliament Building, Imre Steindl, 1885–1904

Palace of Westminster

London’s old Houses of Parliament, which burned down in 1834, dated back to the 12th century, and the fire provided an opportunity to replace them with a modern structure suitable for governing Britain. In 1833, noted architect Charles Barry (1795–1860) won a competition to create the new building. During construction, he came to rely heavily on Pugin; while Barry favoured classicism, Pugin added many Gothic stylings. The façade of sand-coloured Yorkshire limestone stretches along the Thames for 289 metres (914 ft), and the vast building incorporates grand assembly chambers as well as committee rooms, kitchens, offices and libraries. The building is dominated by two towers: the huge Victoria Tower and the soaring Clock Tower, known as Big Ben after the great bell inside it. The decorative Clock Tower, finials and turrets were largely designed by Pugin, who added ogees (double curves) and carved crockets (leaf-like elements bordering spires and roofs). Pugin was also in charge of the Gothic-styled interiors, and supplied designs for furnishings.

Tower Bridge

In 1877, a public competition was held to design a new bridge over the River Thames in East London. The challenge was to still allow tall-masted ships to reach the busy anchorages at the commercial heart of the British Empire. The winning architect, selected in 1884, was Sir Horace Jones (1819–87), who as well as being surveyor of the City of London also happened to be one of the judges. After his death his assistant George D. Stevenson took over, changing Jones’s original brick façade to a more ornate Gothic style. Engineer John Wolfe Barry (1836–1918), son of Sir Charles Barry (see here) devised the idea of a suspension bridge with two massive concrete towers on piers sunk into the riverbed. The central span comprised a pair of bascules (balanced drawbridges) that could be raised to allow river traffic to pass; upper walkways served foot traffic and, more importantly, braced the towers against the horizontal force exerted by the bascules. The steel frame was clad in Cornish granite and Portland stone. Construction began in 1887, employing more than 400 workers for eight years.

Victorian Gothic

In Britain, the Gothic Revival reached its full flowering through Victorian buildings of the mid-19th century, but its roots were considerably older. Horace Walpole, 4th earl of Orford (1717–97), art historian and politician, had been one of the first to revive the Gothic style. Starting in 1749, he spent nearly 30 years building the fanciful, heavily adorned Strawberry Hill House in Middlesex (opposite). Other early British champions of Gothic included Robert Adam’s rival, James Wyatt (1746–1813); his design for Ashridge Park in Hertfordshire, begun in 1806, features a huge central hall that imitates a medieval great hall. After an apprenticeship with Gilbert Scott, George Edmund Street (1824–81) became a leading practitioner of the Victorian Gothic Revival, known especially as the designer of the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Street made more than 3,000 drawings of his design, and construction took 11 years from 1873. The massive white building is reminiscent of French 13th-century cathedrals and châteaux, dominated by soaring pitched roofs, pointed arches, towers and half-towers.

Gothic Revival – Europe and America

Initially, the Gothic Revival was an English style, but by the second half of the 19th century it was appearing erratically in other parts of Europe and America. In 1879, Heinrich von Ferstel (1828–83) built the Votifkirche in Vienna, a national shrine to the Emperor Franz Joseph I (opposite). A unique interpretation of the 13th-century French Gothic style, it features two slender, soaring towers and lozenge-patterned tiling on the steeply pitched roof. Across the Atlantic, Richard Upjohn (1802–78) built Trinity Church in New York (1846), which features towering pointed arches, an 86-metre (281-ft) spire and jewel-bright stained-glass windows. Also in New York, the Woolworth Building on Broadway was designed by Cass Gilbert (1859–1934), with a modern steel skeleton and a strongly Gothic façade. Dominated by a massive central tower, the Woolworth Building (completed 1913) comprises 30 storeys, incorporating turrets, towers and lanterns with a copper-clad pitched roof. Because of its resemblance to European Gothic cathedrals, it was nicknamed ‘The Cathedral of Commerce’.

Viollet-le-Duc

Through his restorations and descriptions of medieval buildings, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–79) inspired the Gothic Revival in France. Eschewing the neoclassicism of the École des Beaux-Arts, he studied French and Italian medieval architecture, and his first restoration for the Ministry of Historical Monuments was Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois (1838) in Paris. The following year he oversaw the restoration of the abbey church of the Madeleine at Vézelay. With Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus (1807–57), he worked on Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame in Paris, which they restored in an overtly Gothic style. Yet although his renovations reproduced past ideas, they were blended with his unique Gothic sensibilities, which took them beyond restoration into the realm of invention. Nonetheless, in his Analytical Dictionary of French Architecture from the XIth to the XVIth Century (1854–68) and his Discourses on Architecture (1863–72), Viollet-le-Duc dominated 19th-century theories of architectural restoration, and would exert a powerful influence on modern design.

Château de Pierrefonds, c.1400, restored by Viollet-le-Duc 1857–85

Neuschwanstein Castle

High on a crag in southwest Bavaria stands the fairy-tale castle of Neuschwanstein. It was built c.1869–81 for King Ludwig II (1845–86) along the lines of two ancient castles: Wartburg in Germany and Pierrefonds in France, both constructed in the medieval style with massive walls, tall towers and battlements, and palatial interiors. Eduard Riedel (1813–85) designed Neuschwanstein in a Romanesque revival style then popular in Germany, featuring round-topped arches, barrel vaults and strong walls. Built of brick faced with limestone, the main towers have overhanging battlements with machicolations and carved masonry. The image of an ideal castle is, however, idealistic: there are no real fortifications. Inside, the turreted residential block is called the Knights’ House, but no knights lived there. Instead, it housed offices and service rooms. Based on Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the throne room includes rows of arches and an apse, with pillars of imitation porphyry and lapis lazuli. Neuschwanstein was the inspiration for the castle in Disney’s The Sleeping Beauty.

Scottish Baronial

Alongside the classical and Gothic revivals of the 19th century, Scotland saw its own independent revival. Adopting elements of fortified local tower houses of the 16th century, and blended with medieval, Gothic and Renaissance components, Scottish Baronial style appealed to national pride. It was also inspired by the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) and his house at Abbotsford, built in 1824 in the Scottish borders, with stepped gables and projecting turrets. When Queen Victoria acquired Balmoral as a holiday home and had it rebuilt in 1852–6, the crenellations, lancet windows and turrets of Balmoral became common features of the Scottish Baronial style, along with rough-hewn stone, gables and steep roofs. First emerging in rural areas, the style spread to cities, where townhouses adopted elements of the revival, such as crow-stepped gables, small windows and tiny bartizans (turrets) added to façades. The most prominent Scottish Baronial architects were William Burn (1789–1870), his pupil David Bryce (1803–76) and also Bryce’s pupil, Charles G.H. Kinnear (1830–94).

Torosay Castle, Isle of Mull, David Bryce, 1858