The Temporary Houses of Parliament and David Boswell Reid’s Architecture of Experimentation

Abstract

what they may lose in dignity they will undoubtly [sic] gain in comfort and health.(The Champion, November 1836)The heating and ventilation of the two debating chambers in the British Houses of Parliament occupied the minds of various Select Committees and some of the country’s most renowned scientists and engineers during the nineteenth century. Indeed, since the seventeenth century the chambers had been major sites for technical experimentation in the field of ventilation, which, according to the Victorian physician Neil Arnott, reflected the technological and scientific advances made during this period. Nineteenth-century writers chronicled the design and testing of the numerous heating and ventilation systems that had been deployed. However, the strategies implemented during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not entirely successful in generating a pleasant internal environment. The destruction of the ancient Palace of Westminster by fire on 16 October 1834 therefore provided an important opportunity to design completely new debating chambers from first principles.