The Ambivalence of Smoke: Pollution and Modern Architectural Historiography

Abstract

The idea of decorative architectural materials presupposes the existence of supporting structural materials. In architecture, we are not accustomed to think of decoration outside of its relationship to structure. This binary encompasses other terms used to describe materials, such as envelope and structure or skin and bones. Terra-cotta and steel are considered early modern architecture’s emblematic decorative and structural materials, respectively. Landmark skyscrapers such as Burnham and Root’s Reliance Building (Chicago, 1895) or Adler and Sullivan’s Wainwright Building (St. Louis, 1891) are some of the examples commonly used to establish this canonical categorization. The dominant historical narratives of modernism, from Spiro Kostof to Leonardo Benevolo and Leland Roth, give the sense that the categorization of these materials happened suddenly, as if architects of the late nineteenth century immediately understood them as decorative and structural. In truth, the change from the premodern to the modern catego rization of these materials was a slow and contentious intellectual and cultural process that took place over the entire nineteenth century and involved generations of architects, each of which tried to make sense of the new products of industrialization in their own way, often disagreeing as to the place that new materials should take within the inherited framework of architectural knowledge. Many architectural historians have been satis fied to point to the outcome of this collective and gradual transformation of architectural discourse as the origin of a new modern understanding of architectural materials circa 1880, sometimes cherry-picking buildings and portraying them as anticipatory exceptions (Paxton’s Crystal Palace being among the favorites). Even when more-inquisitive historians have puzzled over why nineteenth-century architects were so slow in embracing new industrial materials as legitimate architectural materials, they have seldom questioned the narrative that the eventual adoption of these materials into architectural knowledge constituted a radical intellectual rupture with nineteenth-century architectural culture. In support of that hypothesis, some of the founders of modern architectural historiography, such as the otherwise