Review: Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain: Myth and Modernity, Excess and Enchantment, by Paul Dobraszczyk

Abstract

Paul Dobraszczyk Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain: Myth and Modernity, Excess and Enchantment Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2014, 310 pp., 16 color and 153 b/w illus. $124.95, ISBN 9781472418982 Until recently critical discussions of architectural ornament were generally to be found in writings about nineteenth-century and/or Islamic architecture. Still riding the contemporary wave of interest in ornament and its relationship to architectural form, Paul Dobraszczyk's Iron, Ornament and Architecture in Victorian Britain offers the reader new perspectives on a historical moment of the nineteenth century that is curiously apposite to architects and theorists today.1 One aspect of the resurgence of this interest is carefully detailed and chronicled in Dobraszczyk's comprehensive study of Victorian Britain's experience with iron as the first truly modern building material. Dobraszczyk articulates a technological experience for Victorian architects that is analogous to the one that Antoine Picon and others have theorized regarding the reappearance of ornament in contemporary architectural culture, which they see as strongly influenced by the new wide-ranging opportunities made possible by advances in digital culture. In similar fashion, advances in iron production methods and technologies in the second half of the nineteenth century led to revolutionary ways of understanding and producing architecture. Through an exploration of various “ironworlds” in Victorian Britain, Dobraszczyk claims to seek out how a “fusion of iron and ornament” sought to reconcile art and technology by creating “a new, modern architectural language that drew on both history and modernity” (3). Striving also to challenge assumptions about the “perceived ideological split between Victorian architecture and engineering” (5) as well as more enduring and complex relationships, such as perceptions of architectural form and material as they relate to history, Dobraszczyk concerns himself in detail with what he refers to as iron's “unboundedness” (9). This “unboundedness” of iron, according to Dobraszczyk, has a number of implications, but the perception of iron as unbounded can be attributed to two main factors. The first was the large amount of the material that …