ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the mid-nineteenth-century context of the design of the Iron Museum and its implications for an architectural profession attempting to quantify its own value. Nicholas Pevsner has described the Crystal Palace as the mid-nineteenth century touchstone for three reasons which the Iron Museum replicated. As with the Crystal Palace, the Iron Museum was not designed by an architect; it was constructed using industrial materials and processes; and it was designed for industrial quantity production of its parts factors that were reviewed as either offering an innovative way forward for the architectural profession, or alternatively as representing the end of craftsmanship, and of architecture itself. The relationship between economy and value highlighted here the relationship between the cost concerns underpinning any architectural project and the desire to provide an appropriately civic architectural response was uniquely emphasised in mid-nineteenth-century responses to the Iron Museum in its original form.
