ABSTRACT

It has often been claimed that the new spirit in building of the 19th century had little to do with architecture. Architects, it has been argued, were in the main preoccupied with stylistic matters rather than technical ones, producing architectural cloaks for public buildings such as the new town halls, opera houses, theatres, libraries and museums. The less stylistically inclined engineer was conversely building (and often inventing) new systems of construction and the structural shapes of bridges, furnaces, warehouses, derricks, workshops and factories as well as other utilitarian structures of the time.