This concise guide is conceived as an introductory scholarly resource. The questions advanced herein are not central to the principal debates of this course; rather, they function as elementary points of departure. The material is presented with the utmost commitment to objectivity, while recognizing that the interpretive framework is not, and cannot be, impartial.

Prof. Jorge Majfud.

“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”

Table of contents

Questions

1. What was the major new political perspective that matured during this century? What new social class emerged?

2. What new materials were introduced and revolutionized architecture during the 19th century?

3. With what new ideas is the architecture of this century associated?

4. What new types of buildings arose during this century?

5. Mention one architectural or design style that expresses the spirit of this century.

6. When and how did modern skyscrapers originate?

The Industrial World

The Century That Wanted to Know Everything

The 19th century was born with a promise and died with a suspicion. The promise was that everything could be known. The suspicion was that, once known, everything was already decided.

In 1814, the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined an intelligence that, knowing the position and force of every particle in the universe at a given moment, could calculate the entire future and the entire past. «Nothing would be uncertain,» he wrote, «and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.» Laplace’s demon (or entity) was not a scientist. It was a theologian with a better accounting system. God had been retired, but His omniscience had been transferred to the laboratory.

That was the spirit of the era: determinism. If the planets obeyed laws, why not societies? If chemistry had its elements, why not history? The steam engine had demonstrated that matter could be put to work. Now the task was to put human beings to work, and to find the laws that explained why some worked and others profited.

Because the age of science was also the age of the factory. The Industrial Revolution produced two new classes, as the textbooks say, as if they had sprung from the soil like potatoes. On one side, a bourgeoisie that owned the machines and believed in progress, especially its own. On the other, a proletariat that owned nothing but its hands and believed, increasingly, in nothing it was told. Between them, cities expanded like rabbits: Manchester went from about 25,000 inhabitants in 1772 to over 300,000 by 1850, with children working fourteen-hour shifts in the cotton mills and an average life expectancy, among laborers, that some contemporary reports placed below twenty years.

Each class required its discipline. The bourgeoisie discovered it in Auguste Comte, who between 1830 and 1842 issued his Course in Positive Philosophy. Humanity, he said, passed through three stages, theological, metaphysical, and finally positive, governed by observation and law. Society would be run by engineers of the social, a priesthood of experts. Positivism traveled well, especially to places where elites desired order without the inconvenience of democracy. In 1889, Brazil’s new republic inscribed Comte’s motto on its flag: Ordem e Progresso. In Mexico, the advisers of Porfirio Díaz were called, without irony, los científicos. Order came first. Progress, for most people, never arrived.

Then, in 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It was a revolution in biology and a boon to those who needed to justify inequality. Herbert Spencer had already coined the phrase «survival of the fittest,» and soon the jungle became a business paradigm. If the poor were poor, it was because nature had chosen them for poverty. If Europe ruled Africa, it was evolution, not theft. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, coined the word «eugenics» in 1883. In Italy, Cesare Lombroso measured skulls in 1876 to find the «born criminal,» who, by remarkable coincidence, tended to look poor, southern, or foreign. Science did not originate racism, but it gave it a lab coat.

The workers also had their science, and it was just as deterministic. In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels released the Communist Manifesto, the same year uprisings broke out across Europe. Marx took the century’s confidence in law and turned it against its owners: history, too, obeyed laws, but those laws led not to the triumph of the bourgeoisie but to its burial. Before Marx, the utopian socialists, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Robert Owen, had dreamed of just societies. Marx called them dreamers and promised something better: certainty. It was the century’s great irony. Capital and its critics agreed on almost nothing, except that the future could be calculated.

Meanwhile, the workers did not wait for history to fulfill its laws. They organized. In Britain, unions were unlawful until the annulment of the Combination Acts in 1824. In 1834, six farm laborers from Tolpuddle were sentenced to transportation to Australia for swearing an oath to a union. In 1844, twenty-eight weavers in Rochdale founded a cooperative store and devised, without knowing it, a global movement. In 1864, the First International was founded in London. In 1868, the Trades Union Congress. In the United States, the American Federation of Labor in 1886, the same year as the Haymarket affair in Chicago, where workers demanding an eight-hour day ended in a bombing, a trial, and four hangings. That is why the whole world celebrates May Day, except the country where it began.

The workers also organized their leisure. In 1863, the Football Association was founded in London, and the game that had belonged to elite schools passed to the factories. In 1878, railway workers established Newton Heath, later Manchester United. In 1886, workers at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich created the club that would become Arsenal. In 1895, the Thames Ironworks gave rise to West Ham. The British exported the game along with their railways. In 1891, the employees of the Central Uruguay Railway in Montevideo founded the club that would become Peñarol. The ball was round, but the field was not level. The factory owners realized early that a team could build loyalty, discipline, and, on Sundays, a passion that did not end in strikes.

But not everyone embraced the clockwork universe. Romanticism was the century’s dissent, the rebellion of feeling against calculation, of the individual against the machine, of the mountain against the factory smokestack. William Blake condemned the «dark Satanic mills.» In 1818, Mary Shelley issued Frankenstein, the first great novel about a scientist who creates life and cannot take responsibility for it, a warning still unread in many laboratories. The Romantics looked to nature, to folk songs, to the nation, to the lost Middle Ages. Not all their nostalgia was innocent: from that love of the Volk came nationalisms that the next century would use for slaughter. In Latin America, Romanticism and positivism fought within the same men. Domingo Sarmiento wrote like a Romantic and governed like a positivist, dividing his continent into «civilization and barbarism,» with the gauchos and the Indigenous peoples on the losing side.

Literature absorbed determinism and gagged on it. Hippolyte Taine interpreted art by «race, milieu, and moment.» Émile Zola composed novels as experiments, where heredity and environment sealed his characters’ destinies like chemical reactions. Others resisted. In 1864, Dostoevsky’s underground man insisted that two plus two equals five, because a human being who is reduced to an equation is no longer free. Nietzsche proclaimed that God was dead and warned that the gods of science and history would be no less tyrannical.

The century concluded without knowing that its certainty was already fractured. In 1890, Henri Poincaré discovered that three bodies orbiting each other could behave in ways no equation could predict over time. Chaos had entered physics through the back door. In the next century, Heisenberg, Gödel, and two world wars would finish the job. Laplace’s demon would be dismissed. The future would once again be uncertain, which is to say, human.

The nineteenth century wanted to explain everything. In part, it did. But it confused explanation with justification. It discovered the laws of nature and then utilized them to write the laws of the market, of race, of empire. Its great lesson is not that science is dangerous. It is that every age mistakes its own interests for the laws of the universe.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

French novelist Anatole France from his 1894 novel The Red Lily (Le Lys rouge)

Reticular structures

Different space frame: **

Reinforced concrete

Roman concrete (MIT **), lime (calcium oxide CAO)

Portland cement, limestone (CaCO3), clay.

New material and technologies (XIX)

Iron, steel, carbon, stainless steel, chromium.

Iron and glass (new uses)

Aluminum (1886).

Reinforced concrete **, **, **, **,

Reinforce concrete structures: ** ,

Leaning Tower of Nevyansk, Russia, 1721.

Francois Coignet, France, 1853.

Joseph Monier (patented 1867, 877) iron meshes.

World’s first reinforced concrete bridge, (Monier, Paris, 1867) **,

Trains (1820s) Electricity, urban lighting, elevators (1880), automobile (internal combustion (1885)

telegraph (M 1844), Radio (Marconi, 1894)

Paradigmatic works

Eiffel Tower (1889)

Palm House, (London, 1848), The Crystal Palace (London 1851)

Clifton Suspension Bridge (Suspended Bridge) (Bristol, 1863) **, (model) **,

Vittorio Emanuelle Gallery (Milan, 1877)

John Ruskin (environmentalism, sustainability and craft) , William Morris (Arts and Crafts Movement **, **), Victor Horta. Tiffany Studios> Clara Driscoll, Agnes F. Northrop.

Art nouveau / Europe Belle Époque / US Progressive Era)

The Chicago School.

Skyscrapers

First Leiter Building (1879, William Le Baron Jenney) **

Home Insurance Building (William Le Baron Jenney, 1885) First skyscraper. **

Tower Building (NY 1889) **

Marquette Building (1895, Holabird & Roche.)

Fisher Building, 1896 (“neo-Gothic”)

Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright

Wainwright Building (St Lous MI, Henry Sullivan, 1881) “Form ever follows function”/but **

Flatiron Building (NY, 1902)

AEG Turbine Factory by Peter Behrens (Berlin, 1909)