Size Matters
2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/oxartj/kcw004
ISSN1741-7287
Autores ResumoEarly historians of iron architecture like Sigfried Giedion and Alfred Meyer sensed that iron represented something more than just an incremental technical advance. More than just an architectural material, iron symbolized new worldviews: behind it lay the energy of the Napoleonic engineering corps, the ambitions of the École Polytechnique, and the mysticism of the Saint-Simonians. Giedion even suggested that the disruption caused by iron was so basic that it could only be understood in terms of a broader social progress. Walter Benjamin, reading these scholars as he prepared his Arcades Project , came to less optimistic conclusions. For him, the constructive imperatives of iron architecture were analogous to the state’s function ‘as an instrument of domination by the bourgeoisie’ – an inherent power and capacity for immense scale that early nineteenth-century architects had failed to grasp but that engineers, who were involved with the mass-produced iron rails of the new railroads, swiftly recognized. 1 In a short radio talk on the subject, Benjamin referred with delight to the famous 1843 image by the French caricaturist J.J. Grandville, in which an iron bridge complete with gas streetlamps stretches across the universe, each pier resting on a separate planet. (The second planet is Saturn, whose ring is depicted as a cast iron balcony where the inhabitants come to enjoy fresh air in the evenings.) Recent scholarship, following the lead of François Loyer, David Harvey, and others, has rendered commonplace the idea that a revolution in the scale of conception, driven in important measure by the technical properties of iron construction allied to the economic and organisational forms of capitalism, was an essential feature of nineteenth-century architecture. 2
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