Culture span - reconciling new technologies with old perceptions in architectural design

Architectural Review, The, March, 1996

In the last couple of centuries, architecture has had a relationship of love and hate to engineering and technology in general. Ruskin, for instance, was convinced when he wrote `The Lamp of Truth' in The Seven Lamps of Architecture that the time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction,.(1) But, almost in the same breath, he asserted that `true architecture does not admit iron as a constructive material, and that ... the iron roofs and pillars of our railway stations, and some of our churches, are not architecture at all'.(2) His reasons were that the materials `accessible in quantity ... clay, wood or stone' have determined the proportions and laws of structure of architecture from the earliest times so that the `employment of metalic framework would ... be generally felt as a departure from the first principles of the art'.(3) Construction in metal (and glass, which, curiously, few people of the period talked about much, though developments in glass production were just as dramatic as those in the ferrous metals) was, thought Ruskin, so radically different from that of traditional materials that the world was not ready for it - and perhaps never would be.

The confusion that his thinking bequeathed is nowhere better seen than at St Pancras Station in London, where George Gilbert Scott created a Neo-Gothic front, much based on Ruskin's Gothic doctrine. Even Pevsner could not refrain from liking it: `No London hotel', he said, `was quite so splendid and varied in appearance'.(4) Yet at the back is W.H. Barlow's glass and iron train shed, 1875 (one of the wonders of Victorian engineering, and the widest - 73 m - iron span ever made). The two come together in one of the most excruciating architectural cacophonies contrived in history, and no more perfect instance can be found of the culture clash of the nineteenth century.

In the very year in which the first edition of Ruskin's Seven Lamps was published, M. Jobard argued in the Revue Generale del' Architecture that `The new architecture is architecture in iron. Architectural revolutions always follow social revolutions'. (He was writing just after the dramas of 1848.) `There are great periods in architecture just as there are great historical periods: a new race of plants or animals only appears after the disappearance of the old. In architecture it is the same... where shall we find masters clever enough? We should not tell you to seek these people among old masons whose hands have been so long occupied with stone and mortar that it is safe to presume that their brains also move in an equally restricted orbit. To create what is new, you must have young people.'(5)

Sigfried Giedion, in whose epoch-making 1941 book Space, Time and Architecture Jobard's words are to be found, wanted to generate a creative climate for the twentieth century as different as possible from the one that Ruskin had made in the nineteenth. Of Giedion's many passages on the wonders of new construction, his description of the steel Galerie des Machines by Contamin and Dutert for the Paris Exhibition of 1889 is one of the most lyrical: "The dimensions ... exceeded anything previously known. The largest vaulting attempt ed up to that time had been St Pancras Station ... The glass end walls do not, strictly, close up the building; they constitute only a thin transparent membrane between the interior and outer space ... The aesthetic meaning of this hall is contained in the union and interpenetration of the building and outer space, out of which there grows a completely new limitlessness and movement in keeping with the machines it contains'.(6) Giedion was out to provide the examples that would make the fusion of architecture and engineering seem established and exciting for the second half of the twentieth century.

His message, that of the high Modern Movement, was received as gospel by architects for several generations after the Second World War. (Results were often less than successful: funds were short, new materials and building methods too little understood.) In the 1970s, the Modern Movement approach was given an Immense boost and vastly increased range of expression by the evolution of new approaches to structural engineering, partly based on new inter-relationships of theories of statics, dynamics and pure mathematics, and partly on development of new materials like very strong adhesives, silicone jointing for glass sheets and ductile iron.(7) At last the fusion of interior and exterior could be achieved in ways that were only dimly perceivable to nineteenth-century designers.

A whole new approach to society and the natural environment, hinted at by Giedion, began to be realisable. Richard Rogers is one of its most articulate protagonists: `The creation of an architecture which incorporates the new technologies entails breaking away from the platonic idea of a static world, expressed by the perfect finite object to which nothing can be added or taken away, a concept which has dominated architecture since its beginning. Instead of Schelling's description of architecture as frozen music, we are looking for an architecture more like some modern music, jazz or poetry, where improvisation plays a part, an indeterminate architecture containing both permanence and transformation'.(8)