19th C / Technology

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Alfred Hardy: the odyssey of a constructional entrepreneur

Iwan Strauven, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning,
Ghent University

The evolution of scientific research on materials and their application in building practice have rarely been a central theme of study in architectural historiography. This is particularly evident for twentieth-century achievements in the field of reinforced concrete, the material par excellence of this period. Despite the interest paid to technical innovations by prominent modernist architects like Walter Gropius or Ludwig Hilberseimer as well as eminent authors like Sigfried Giedion and Reyner Banham, the work of pioneers in the field (Hennebique, Perret, etc.) has only recently been studied in extenso. There has never been a thorough or systematic study of postwar achievements, the decades after World War II in which the possibilities of new techniques and innovations (prestressed concrete, malleability) were opening up.

The proposed paper aims to clarify the position and the technical achievements of Alfred Hardy (1900-1965), a postwar Belgian pioneer in the field. Although he is one of the rare Belgian designers of this period, whose work has gained some international recognition through publications in magazines and through the 1964 Moma exhibition “Twentieth Century Engineering”, nothing is known about Hardy’s work except for his aircraft hangars, built in Grimbergen in 1947. These two circular buildings were conceived as elegant mushroom-shaped shell structures in reinforced concrete with an impressive cantilever.

The paper will present the results of empirical research based on a study of the archives of Alfred Hardy, which first came to the surface in January 2002. Attention will be drawn to the basic constructive principle certified by Hardy in 1946 as well as to the variety of projects in which it was applied, ranging from mass housing projects (approved by the French ministry of construction in 1961) to agricultural buildings, skyscrapers and high-rise parking lots.

A Force for Urbanism and National Identity: nineteenth-century Australian international exhibitions and their domestic exhibits

Kirsten Orr, University of Technology, Sydney

When the international exhibitions came to Australia in 1879, 1880 and 1888, exhibits of items for the home were the most popular. Exhibitions fostered occasions for nations to construct and present images of national character. Domestic exhibits, in particular, linked design with nationality in a manner capable of interpretation by a wide cross-section of the population. They provided an important interface between needs, wants and interests of ordinary people and visions of society promoted by power elites. Elites, interested in ideas of progress and civilisation, used photographic images of Australian cities to represent colonial advancement, and promoted exhibitions in Australia for their refining values. They believed that the home, a fundamental unit of the city, was an index of, and an agency for, civilisation and moral order.

This paper explores how exhibits gave visitors opportunities to engage with ideas about similarities and differences between peoples; national and non-national imperatives; local and non-local influences and characteristics; and perceptions of modernity and progressiveness compared to Old World traditions. Exhibits of a domestic nature provided an impetus for ideas beyond the exhibitions themselves and contributed to shaping the development of the cities of Sydney and Melbourne in the years leading to Federation.

The Idea of Empathy in the Architecture of Louis Kahn and Frank Furness.

Peter Kohane, Faculty of the Built Environment University of New South Wales

The paper argues that Kahn’s 1971 drawing, The Room, invokes one of the historical sources for his thinking about the body analogy, Frank Furness’s University of Pennsylvania Library (Philadelphia, 1889). Kahn based The Room’s window, structural frame and curved plan on the apse-like reading room of Furness’s building. The discussion of formal themes in works of Kahn and Furness also highlights a shared interest in the idea of empathy. Initially formulated in the late nineteenth century, this theory influenced Furness: he would have known of Leopold Eidlitz’s views about the body’s perception of a ‘tendency to motion’ in structure. Furness’s library and The Room both exemplify such an idea. Kahn even shows how the two figures have assumed distinctive poses by imitating the shape of their respective sides of the window. This is necessary for their empathetic appreciation of an animated, life-like presence in built form. By focusing on The Room, I will offer a new interpretation of Kahn’s understanding of an architectural frame. This questions the prevailing account by scholars like Kenneth Frampton, who emphasize the relevance of the French rationalist tradition. I will place The Room, and the mature theory of space it illustrates, within a different historical context, one that includes Furness’s powerful architecture and the theory of empathy. For Kahn, structure is not only valued in terms of an inherent logic, but also because it ultimately is a frame that shelters, indeed embraces, the human body

The Iron Duke’s West Indian Barracks

Pedro Guedes, Queensland University of Technology

Wellington’s Uniform Barrack System crystallized a complex vision, imprinting an 1820s type on generations of military builders for over a century.

Vernacular forms of Caribbean building with deep verandahs had influenced the design of 18th century barracks and hospitals. Lord Combermere used his authority as Commander-in-Chief, Leeward Islands to highlight certain features of this tradition, giving them official blessing. He also mused upon the economies of using iron and called upon medical opinion for scientific backing. The use of galleries was mandated for all Caribbean military buildings by a circular from the Secretary for War and the Colonies, Lord Bathurst, narrowing the options for fine judgements in design further still.

Wellington as Master General of the Ordnance saw the use of iron for colonial military buildings as a method of imposing absolute uniformity and central control. Under the influence of Combermere and Bathurst, Colonel Sir Charles Smith provided the dimensional templates. Edward Holl’s ideas embodied in naval buildings were plagiarised for ideas and solutions. These were translated into building components by Lieut. Brandreth’s collaboration with ironfounder William Bailey, under the watchful eye of General Gother Mann, Inspector General of Fortifications.

Buildings could henceforth be issued instead of designed, implemented rather than built. Iron castings, multiplying identical assemblies, would remove the uncertainties and waste of thinking through similar problems again and again. The norm replaced the specific or ideal response with the assurance that not all solutions to a problem could be equally satisfactory.

“Reading Giedion Backwards”: Walter Benjamin’s reception of Building in France

Mark Hiley, Department of Architecture, University of Queensland

In “The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory”, Detlef Mertins discusses “a detail” from Walter Benjamin’s reception of Sigfried Giedion’s Building in France from 1928. Benjamin wrote to Giedion in February 1929, expressing his excitement at receiving a copy of Giedion’s book and indicating that he had begun reading the last section of the book first. Mertins draws on this account of “reading it [Giedion] backwards” in order to lead into an analysis of the utopia of glass. Following on from (or rather preceding) Mertins’ analysis of the utopia of glass, this paper proposes to illuminate what a “backward reading” of Giedion might entail.

In order to distinguish between Giedion and Benjamin’s reading of Giedion, the paper contrasts Giedion’s appropriation and Benjamin’s critique of the 19th concepts of “spirit” and “progress”. In Building in France and Space, Time and Architecture, Giedion implicitly uses these concepts to describe architecture’s relation to history and culture. The development of iron construction by engineers in the 19th century and the development of ferro-concrete by architects in the 20th century is thought to embody the spirit of the age and mark the progress of history. Writing at the same time as Giedion, Benjamin was extremely critical of the use of these concepts in the 19th century. Paradoxically, Benjamin described Giedion’s book as “prolegomena to any future historical materialist history of architecture.” The paper argues that rather than a misreading Benjamin’s “backward” reading of Giedion provides a useful insight into the role of material technologies in conceptualising modern architecture.

A Rough Trade: how artisan ironworkers mediated architectural modernism. A case study of early steel framed architecture, The 1897 Wesleyan Church, Darwin.

Kevin Green

In 2001 the former Methodist church at the corner of Knuckey and Mitchell streets in Darwin NT, was dismantled, refurbished and re-erected on a new site in the Darwin Botanic Gardens. As well as being the oldest surviving church building in Darwin, it is a unique example of nineteenth century prefabricated steel framed building. The building was first erected at the Knuckey St. site in 1897. It was manufactured at a time when artisan craftsmen worked new materials of iron and steel with highly evolved handicraft skills, but had begun to make increasing use of machine tools. This continuation of artisan production into the late machine age, places it at odds with the process of modernisation Giedion describes in Mechanisation Takes Command and raises questions about the manner in which the application of the steel frame 'modernised' architecture.

Striving Towards an Ideal: high style mansion planning in Australia

Kerry Jordan, The University of Melbourne

The planning of houses always reflects not only how they were used but contemporary social ideals. Nineteenth century mansion houses in Australia developed from British models, which reflected particularly British attitudes to privacy, gender and social hierarchies. The characteristic features of British domestic planning are made apparent when compared with French and German houses during the same period. Australia’s high style mansion houses of the nineteenth century largely emulated British planning principles, despite the more informal nature of Australian society, which was often compared to that of the United States at the time. Changes in society should lead to changes in form, but while domestic planning in the United States diverged significantly from that of Britain, the planning of the grandest mansions in Victoria differed little from British models. The new rich in Australia continued to build the sorts of houses associated with high status in Britain, however they did adapt these to serve their own purposes. One of the most important of these was to establish their owners’ status in a new and rapidly changing society. This paper will examine the planning of several representative nineteenth century mansions in Victoria, as a local interpretation of the standards of ‘home’.

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