Iron as a Building Material
The late Professor Cockerell, in a lecture on Architecture, at the Royal Academy, observed upon the early employment of this material in building:
The progress of architecture depends as much on discovery of new materials and new methods of building as on taste. Iron was used by Tubal Cain as a subsidiary material. It has been employed in building ever since; but never in solid and in the gross as a constituent part of the substance of building before Mr. Rennie employed it as voussoirs in the Southwark Bridge. Sir Robert Smirke has nobly followed in applying iron in trabeation, and so has Mr. S. Smirke in the new reading-room of the British Museum, and others; but the engineers have kept ahead of the architects, from Mr. Rennie to Messrs. Stephenson, in displaying the powers of iron.
Iron has been cited in Deuteronomy as the essential and last fruit of the promised land. Our interiors, as halls and churches, will assume new development and grandeur by iron, since we have seen 200 feet span at Birmingham without abutment, and 150 feet at Paris in still more enduring structure. The Pantheon of Rome, Sta. Sophia, St. Peter’s, the Baths, and the great Riding-house at Moscow, will hide their glories; and iron will henceforward dispense with pillars and clerestory, flying buttresses and abutments, and roof our churches in bold and single spans. With all due reverence for antiquity and precedent, we ought to open our eyes to the reconciliation of this new material and its peculiar faculties with the laws of proportion and taste; and this is a problem worthy of the best spirits, both as to the form of roofs or ceilings, and the form of supports, which, in iron, with 1-40th part of substance of stone, will give equal strength of support.
Iron may be termed the osteology of building. Hitherto the architectural system has proceeded on statics and equipoise of molecules, as if the human frame were built without bones. Now our buildings will have bones, giving unity and strength which never before existed. The nervures of the Gothic will now be in uniform and single arcs, erected at once: the library at St. Généviève, by Mons. Arbruste, exhibits an experiment in this way.