ABSTRACT
In Peter Sealy encyclopaedic, yet fictional, descriptions of Second Empire France, the novelist Emile Zola often grappled with iron architecture and its unstable place within the nineteenth-century imaginary. Zola's descriptions of the market, the department store and other iron buildings provide telling indices of attitudes towards iron architecture. In his preparatory notebooks, Zola recorded few details about the Les Halles' roofs, apart from their general form and how they could be accessed from inside the pavilions. Zola's description of iron buildings often expressed the zeitgeist of dematerialization. In a definitive project for construction in May 1854, iron columns supported zinc roofs on a six-metre column grid. Each pavilion's exterior walls were in-filled with thin brick curtain walls. Strangely material and yet persistently incorporeal, iron buildings resisted existing conventions of architectural discourse. The coincidence of seemingly archaic pastoral nature and forward-looking industrial modernity was a common trope in the nineteenth century.
