ABSTRACT
The Iron Museum, or the ‘Brompton Boilers’ as it was more disparagingly known, was constructed in 1856 as the first addition to Brompton Park House on the site of the newly created South Kensington Museum, now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Iron Museum embodied an entirely economically focused mode of architectural production which was explicitly driven to provide economic certainty through the precise specification of prefabricated components. As governmental departments accountable for budgeting public finances began to review public work budgets, these historical arrangement began to be criticised as insufficiently precise. In a climate of increasing mistrust between the architectural profession and the building industry, evermore precise specifications from the architect were explicitly promoted as a tool to protect against inferior workmanship and to defend the architect from litigious claims. The certainties of economic value had failed at the 1856 Iron Museum to guarantee architectural quality as it was defined by an emerging architectural profession.
