[Anon], ‘Design in Relation to Material’

Whether in relation to materials such as stone, wood, iron, plaster, or processes including veneering, marbling, graining, and electroplating, the arguments exercised many of the most well-known minds of the time. Stone, which may be considered, in spite of all newly-applied material that are coming into fashion, the architect’s medium for design, is a material best used under compression, very weak under cross-strain, and which in general can only be used in super-imposed blocks of a limited size. As to wood, there is no end to the misuse that has been made of the useful and pliable material; the misuse in the majority of cases resulting from the imitation of stone treatment. Wrought iron is so peculiar a material, and demands so much arduous labour in the treatment of it ornamentally, that there is little fear that it should ever be used except to produce those effects which are peculiar to it, and which nothing else can well imitate.