ast-Iron Architecture
SoHo, New York City
ast-iron architecture was a mass produced American architectural innovation of the 19th century. Used as building facades, cast-iron was cheaper than stone or brick and allowed ornate features to be prefabricated from molds in foundries. This represented an inexpensive way to garnish a structure with a face that was ornate, costly looking and stylish, which at first meant classically inspired Italian Renaissance, and later, French architectural styles. At one time you could order, as if from an L.L.Bean catalog, and quickly assemble and bolt it to a building's frame. You could paint it any color you wanted or move it to another building if necessary. It could even be melted down and recycled. The new facades permitted designers to build larger windows on all floors, thus bringing natural light to where there was none.
Today, New York City has the world's largest concentration of full and partial cast iron facades. The best, built in the 1870s, are in the SoHo Cast-Iron District.
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Haughwout Building - 1857
Built by E.V. Haughwout. It is a perfect example of how the cast-iron movement was a phenomenon where aesthetic sensibilities of past eras (Renaissance Italy) converged with the practicality,technical skill and replication capability of the industrial age. The window treatment was taken from Jacopo Sansavino's Renaissance Biblioteca (see picture on right) on Venice's St Mark's Square. The architect simply repeatred it 92 times.
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The Libreria Sansoviniana
1486-1570
Sansovino Library
Piazzetta Di San Marco,Venice
Considered Sansovino's masterpiece. It was defined as the "most sumptuous ever built." It houses a collection of rare books.
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Like the manuscript illuminators of the 4th and 5th century, architects of the late 19th century were adding on cast-iron facades to enhance the appearance and reduce the costs of a building. It is not unlike the visual decoration manually added to manuscripts/codex by the Irish monks in the Book of Kells and later after the Gutenberg Press, by unionized Guild Craftsmen in the mid-to-late 15th cnetury.
Today, we (the entire spectrum of society - or wherever computers exist) can decorate our web page facades with colored text, gifs and jpegs thus giving them a form of contemporary industrial strength. Now, with computers and available software, virtually anyone with access to a computer, can add the same kind of visual imagery and icons to their pages that a 4th-5th century illuminator laboriously placed on vellum.
Each era, it seems, uses the technology available to change, morph, modify and enhance our social, cultural, political, economic, religious, and architectural connections to the past.
Additional Samples
