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As an introduction to this course, I’m going to do two things:

Set out the general context of London’s built environment and culture to which
architect’s responded

Set out how we might ‘look’ at architecture: what it is, how we can distinguish
different parts of it, and what we can use as evidence

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This painting by John O’Connor presents London as the imperial capital—the
metropolis (metro-polis, mother-city)—of the British Empire.

It depicts a bourgeois, middle-class mother, with her baby in a pram and her young
son sat playing, as she looks out from Somerset House.

Somerset House is a building that was completed during the Regency period—the
early nineteenth century. When originally built, the building looked directly over the
river—you could enter the building by dingy.

But she looks over the newly completed Embankment—a system of sewers,
underground railway, roadway, and protective wall, that confined the river, aided
transportation, transported dirty water downriver, and provided a magnificent
promenade by the Thames. London undertook a series of major infrastructural works
throughout the nineteenth century, transforming it into the first modern metropolis.

On the Embankment we see a military parade—red coats and bearskin hats,

marching in formation. London was the military centre of Empire—indeed, Somerset
House was the home of the Admirality, Britain being a maritime, rather than land,

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power.

The skyline is dominated by the dome of St Paul’s—the great cathedral designed by

Christopher Wren, and built after the Great Fire of London in 1666. Like Somerset
House, St Paul’s Cathedral was designed in a classical style of architecture: a style
modelled on the architecture of ancient Rome and the later Renaissance Italian
architecture of the 14th to 17th centuries.

To the right, we see a working river—steam boats, sail boats, always working boats. It
won’t be until the twentieth century that the river Thames becomes a pleasure and
passenger river-way.

Along the horizon we see mighty smoke stacks, in the heart of the city—as well as a
commercial capital, London is a manufacturing capital throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth century, without rival. Commodities and capital pour through the docks to
the East, are transferred in the markets of the City beyond St Paul’s, and are
immediately refashioned in manufacturies throughout London, to be shipped out to
the markets of Americas, Africa, India, China, and Australasia.

To the left of St Paul’s, we can see the Temple, a medieval building, one of a great
range of legal houses, the heart of the British legal system, home to barristers
presenting civil and criminal cases in the great, teeming law courts of the city. We will
discover that, through the nineteenth century, the ‘gothic’ style of architecture—of
medieval 11th to 15th century buildings—will make a marked influence on the
buildings of nineteenth century London.

Now O’Connor has presented the imperial metropole as a glorious Augustan scene:
the light, the repose of the lady on the balcony, the resting lion, the light traffic and
grand parade, the smoke in the distance indicating quite industry—all this suggests an
empire comfortable with itself, and comfortable with its capital.

This is not how most people felt…

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The first ‘fact’ of our period is London’s phenomenal growth and expansion—

London’s population at the close of the eighteenth century was already larger than
most cities in the world, in Europe only Paris compared.
By the mid-nineteenth century London was larger than any European city, and by the
end of the nineteenth century no other city compared in terms of size of population
or in terms of geographic spread.

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The Palace of Westminster, which contained Parliament, the offices of Whitehall,
which contained the civil service, and Palaces such as St James’s and Buckingham
Palace, that housed the royal family, were the seat of imperial governance; London
was still a dominant manufacturing power—despite the emergence of rival industrial
cities in the north of England; the City of London’s stock exchanges and banks were
the largest in the world, as were London’s dock’s in the East End.

London’s expansion in population was matched by geographic expansion.

By the 1840s, London print makers were travelling in new balloons, created as a form
of urban spectacle, and encompassing this new imperial seat in panoramic or as
displayed here, ‘cosmoramic’ views.

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The model for estate development lies in the Seventeenth Century and the work of
Inigo Jones in Covent Garden—the London square—which had, by the end of the
eighteenth century. Designed to maximise rental yield, great estate holders would
impose strict building codes that produced unified squares and streets, attracting the
wealthy middle class.

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A fine example of this method of estate development is still evident in Bedford
Square (still owned by the Bedford Estate). It’s grand terraced fronts arranged to
appear as a unified whole, though each individual house could be let on long or short
leases to tenants who were able to decorate the interior to the latest trends.

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The rapid expansion of London resulted in increasingly low grade housing stock as
large estate holders in London sought new means to exploit their land.

A new model was provided by Lord Somers, to the north of the Bedford Estate, in an
area of land between Euston Station and King’s Cross St Pancras. Lord Somers,
borrowing heavily, could not sustain long term investment for long term returns from
rental income on leases. Instead, he needed fast return on his estate to pay off his
creditors. For Lord Somers, bricks and mortar were commodities. His estate—which
became the notorious ‘Somers Town’—was a far cry from the previous century’s
gentile urban squares. Somers sold houses cheap, that were built fast, to artisanal
and working class purchasers. Further, Somers utilised the clay bed of London itself—
so that a future resident lived in amongst the brick fields that supplied the material
for the building they inhabited—with all the clay, ash and slag resulting.

As a result of these different approaches to estate development London became

increasingly divided between a wealthy West End and an increasingly ‘unknown’ East
End—an East End of workers, the unemployed and urban poor, of migrants and of
poverty. The location for lurid fictional accounts of crime and disease, as well as real
hardship and suffering.

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A first concern of architects in the period, then, was how to reassemble architecture
and restore it, bring some quality to the built environment. The degradation of the
environment by poor construction, poor materials, and ill-considered (if considered at
all) design, resulted in a thorough re-examination of design principles throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But what had caused this great expansion of people and building stock?

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London, ever understood as a problem for the nation: too big, too grasping, distinct
politically, economically and culturally from the rest of England, let alone the British
Isles, was expanding too rapidly.

The image shown here, by the caricaturist, George Cruickshank, expresses some of
this anxiety—of London’s exponential expansion, encroaching on the landscape.
Whilst it shows a concern about ‘bricks and mortar’,—the suburban expansion of
London—it also depicts the ravaging of nature by industry.

But there was as much anxiety about who the Londoner was now become—for
certainly, expansion of the population did not derive from better health or mortality
rates, but rather from massive migration, from across the British Isles, the colonies,
and from European exiles, fleeing revolution, or more urgently and particularly from
1848, counter-revolution.

London was filling with French, German, Italian, Jewish and also Chinese, African, and
Indian migrants. These new migrants brought with them new knowledge, and new
skills, that could be ruthlessly exploited. But for so many, London would utilise not
their culture or history or knowledge, but their hard labour. And the London political

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elites, institutions and establishments, regarded the great influx of new inhabitants
with naked fear.

Who were these people? Would they bring with them the same revolutionary spirit
and disruption as had been shown on the continent? If so, how might they be tamed?

Newspapers were developing as powerful organs for shaping public opinion, oratory
continued as a principle means to communicate to great crowds of people. But, with
photography only beginning to emerge, and no radio, no cinema, no television, a
dominant medium by which the mass of people were communicated with remained
architecture.

This was the second concern of the architect in the Victorian period — how to
communicate with the ‘mass’ of new Londoners, and as importantly how to marshal
or order or bring some unity to this mass of different peoples.

As a result of this concern, architectural designers were increasingly vexed by

questions about ‘national’ identity or religious community with distinct and
appropriate values and conduct. Architecture was understood as an ethical and moral
as much as an aesthetic art.

At the same time, architects were concerned with more obvious problems…

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Simply and materially, it appeared to Londoners at the time that the fault lay, at least
in part, with the advent of steam powered locomotion—the railways. Britain’s private
railway companies were forged as vehicles for joint stock companies. As with Lord
Somers and his estate, railway companies relied on interest bearing capital, stoking a
feverish desire for new profitable lines, and functional termini as close as possible to
London’s heart (the City of London, or ‘square mile’) (61% of rail traffic in London
consisted of passengers rather than goods). This proved an intractable problem for
the first wave of railway lines in London as they were resisted by wealthy private land
holders in the City core. The proliferation of termini on the edges of London was a
product of competition between railway companies.

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If the spacing and distance of the main lines was a result of prior estate holdings, the
resulting network was radically transformative of London’s landscape. The
overlapping of lines and concentration of termini brought by laissez faire competition
resulted in the desolation of large fractions of London’s (now no longer) suburban
environment.

This etching, by Gustav Doré, though obviously an exaggeration, captures the way in
which formerly suburban housing became consumed by the railways, degrading the
inner city, and driving middle class residents further out.

London’s landscape through the nineteenth century seethed and transformed

constantly, turning once salubrious districts into slum quarters, once pastures and
fields into suburbs for the new middle-class of clerical workers. The railways became
symbolic of technology over-riding human concerns—the machine, once considered a
tool, had now become the master.

This, then, is our third and final concern of the architect in the period—technology,
and industrial machinery. How could architecture respond to machinery, to industrial
production? What form of architecture was appropriate to such an age of constant

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transformation, and of industrial technology and knowledge. Should the architect
look back into history, or forward into a new future? If back into history, would the
architect turn to ancient empires of Egypt, Greece and Rome, or to the nearer history
of medieval Europe, of cathedrals and guilds?

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To give an example of how this played out in practice, we can turn to the event that
has so often been used as both exemplary of and transformative of our period—the
Great Exhibition of 1851.

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Crystal Palace, Hyde Park.

Opened in 1851, the Great Exhibition was the product of Henry Cole, an industrialist,
and Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s husband. Cole had for some time produced small
trade fares—exhibitions that toured Britain, showcasing industrial products. Cole’s
intention was to educate the public as to the benefits and requirements of industrial
manufacture. After a visit to Paris, at which Cole saw a trade exhibition on a much
larger scale, Cole persuaded Prince Albert that, if Britain were to maintain its imperial
supremacy, it needed to open itself to international commercial competition—Cole
conceived, in other words, the first International or World Trade Fair. Albert—a
supporter of scientific and technical education as well as free trade—backed the
project.

The resulting ‘Great Exhibition’ in London attracted somewhere in the region of 6

million visitors. The exhibition itself was held in the Crystal Palace—an enormous iron
framed, glazed structure erected in Hyde Park.
The Crystal Palace was 1,851 feet long and had a height of 128 feet. So large was the
building that it encompassed fully matured trees in the royal park, and was filled, not
only with consumer products (indeed, these were the least of the exhibition) but with
industrial machinery—including entire locomotives. As an international exhibition,
there was representation from all the European powers and North America.
Architects and industrial artists were commissioned not only to produce specific
displays for exhibition products, but reproductions of imagined ‘primitive’
communities in various colonies. The world, it was claimed, was encompassed within
the Crystal Palace.

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The exhibition building was designed, not by an architect, but a landscape gardener
and engineer specialising in green houses—Joseph Paxton. Winning an open
competition, Paxton’s design was as technologically advanced as any of the exhibits—
utilising the iron frame, using standardised prefabricated parts that were
manufactured in factories and brought by rail to the Hyde Park site, the Crystal Palace
only took 8 months to erect, in a production process employing cheap labour.

It has been heralded by some architectural historians as the first modernist building.
The Crystal Palace encompasses those three concerns of the architect that I’ve
discussed of a new mass audience to be morally edified, of a new urban condition of
exponential industrial growth to be tamed, and of a new mode of making and
production to be utilized or, alternatively, refused.

The six million visitors appeared as a great undifferentiated mass, and if the purpose
of the exhibition was to stoke international competition and trade, it was understood
at the time as demonstrative of Britain’s global dominance as an Imperial power. But,
asked critics, was the Crystal Palace really meaningful, was it able, in anyway, to
‘speak’ to the world, or to the British themselves, about a national culture, or a moral
universe?
And who were these visitors? Certainly, by ticket sales and accounts presented by
contemporary observers, it was not a mass of middle class citizens—not designers or
their clients. The majority of visitors were artisans and lower-middle class or working
class people interested in and excited by the possibilities and dangers of the future
industrial world. A new, mass audience, to which architecture had to respond.
And what of the exhibition products themselves. These caused the greatest anxiety of
all— a world of commodities without quality, designed to appear as if flourished with
handicraft skill, but in fact stamped and mass produced in great factories. Wrenched
from any specific locality or context, cheapened and available in such great variety,
that critics felt appalled at the loss of direction for designed products. Architecture,
and the wider industrial arts, were understood by many, as in crisis.

The Crystal Palace, which was treated as opening the way for modernism by later
historians, hoping to construct a lineage for modern design of the twentieth century,
was in its time seen as symptomatic of a deep malaise. In the first part of this
module—from now until reading week—we will be examining the various responses
by architects and architectural critics to this condition, and the answers that they
provided.

The first approach we will examine encompasses a wide range of architects who
sought a return to a former, pre-industrial style of architecture—that a style of
architecture from an earlier age necessarily contained a moral virtue and an urban
improvement. We will then examine a slightly later group of architects who rejected
style, and sought a wholly new approach to architecture and design. But the two
groups—the group seeking a return to an old style, and the group rejecting style
itself—overlap and communicate a great deal with one another.

Consider in the coming weeks—who is the writer (when we are reading the text)
concerned about; or if it is a building we are looking at—who is this building for?
What are they trying to communicate (in words or with the building itself)? How are
they doing this?

What solutions does the writer or the architect offer in terms of the technological
project—how is the building built, with what means (machines, skilled crafts, and
how can you tell?)

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Typology — what kind of building is it? (In this instance a church). This will tell us
something immediately about what we should expect to find in the building.

Structure and material—how does it stand up, and with what materials (in this case,
brick and masonry (stone). The building incorporates pointed arches, buttresses, and
a hammerbeam roof.

Organisation of openings—are the windows and doors arranged symmetrically or

asymetrically, do they tell us about the interior or do they disguise what’s going on
inside? In this instance, the openings are all asymetrical, and their organisation
appears to correspond to the requirements of the interior.

Key elements—specific features of the building that stand out: here it is the spire, the
very heavy buttress, and the ‘gate’ that are most obvious.

Pattern and decoration—some buildings are made of very few materials, and their
decoration follows strict precedents (Classical buildings tend to be of stone, or made
to look like they are of stone, and tend to reproduce decorative motifs from other
buildings of the past for example). Here, a great variety of patterns and decorative

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surfaces have been applied.

Space—what kind of spaces are produced in the architecture and how do they relate
to one another? Here, from the street, the building appears to exist behind a ‘wall’,
our eye is drawn from the gate, to the buttress, to the tower, which allows us to
encompass it (otherwise the tower would seem too far away to be connected to the
building at all); we enter through the gate and come into a small courtyard and
immediately feel enclosed, but drawn to the porch with its oversized covering; when
we enter the building opens out into the nave, with the chancel separated by a low
wall of different marbles. We have experienced a ‘sequence’ of spaces, that feel like
they unfold quite gradually, though they are all in fact compressed onto a very small
urban site.

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We can use these different aspects of architecture to determine its ‘style’ and
sometimes the period in which the building was designed. We can also use an
analysis of these different features to determine the motivations of the
architect/designer, and critically reflect on the success of their work—both in their
time and subsequently.

For this module, we will be taking you to buildings — and they are a fundamental way
in which we can study architecture. But there are other media we can examine to
understand a building—sometimes, we need to look at architectural texts to
understand a building (you have done so in looking at Ruskin); sometimes we have to
look at architectural drawings to understand or even discuss, a building. I’m going to
finish this introductory lecture by examining some principle forms of architectural
drawing.

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