Architecture

Summary

In the nineteenth century social and industrial revolution required a new architecture. New building types such as railway stations and department stores evolved, and in them new materials like iron and glass made possible unsupported spans and better lighting. But only in temporary or utilitarian structures such as the Crystal Palace, Paddington Train Shed or the Garabit Viaduct could these facts be admitted. Elsewhere, as at the Albert Hall, an engineer's structure was clothed in stone and a period style.

Inspired by Ruskin, William Morris attacked this dishonesty, arguing that the present age should imitate the methods and not the style of the Middle Ages; that it should base art on craft to give it roots in society. He devised a new ornament freshly stylised from plant forms to replace the machine-made and tasteless decoration in which everything was smothered. His own house (built in 1859 by Philip Webb) replaced pomp by domesticity, showed its bricks and structure, and was planned in terms of function rather than of symmetry and facades. Charles Voysey continued this reticence into the 1890s. His homes too had period flavour without period detail, but were lighter and more suburban. Contemporary were the Garden City (city in the country) experiments which made a first attack on the squalor of industrial housing. But the whole Art and Craft movement was flawed by Morris's rejection of the machine which was becoming the central fact of civilisation, so that after 1900 it lost relevance.