frameworks had been developed in the early
nineteenth century principally for industrial
buildings such as factories, warehouses and
railway stations but were little used in the
types of building which, at that time, were
considered worthy of the descriptive term
Architecture. As the century progressed,
however, metal frameworks were gradually
absorbed into the world of architecture. They
were used mainly for 'new' types of building,
such as department stores and multi-storey
offices, where they allowed uncluttered inter-
iors to be created within buildings which were
of conventional external appearance. In
Europe, this was the age of revivals and the
streets of the commercial districts of late
nineteenth-century European cities became
filled with imitation Greek and Roman temples
and Italian Renaissance palaces which were in
fact steel frameworks clad in masonry and
which, in their scale and internal arrange-
ments, bore little resemblance to their historic
predecessors. In North America, the techno-
logy of the steel frame and the existence of a
rapidly expanding economy generated a new
type of building, that of the skyscraper, which
found architectural expression in the work of
Louis Sullivan.
The structural technology on which these
buildings were based was that of the skeleton
framework, a characteristic of which was that
loads were channelled into slender elements of
low volume in which stress levels were high.
Large-scale interior spaces were created with
minimal interference from vertical structure,
and plan arrangements were varied between
levels in multi-storey buildings, within the
constraints of a regular column grid, because
walls were simply non-loadbearing partitions.
The frameworks themselves were normally
hidden. Internal columns were cased in fire-
proofing materials and finished frequently as
one of the classical orders of architecture
within a conventional scheme of interior
decoration (Fig. 3.3). External walls were of
loadbearing masonry and were fashioned into
historic stylisations. Eventually, the frame was
to take over the structural function of the
external walls, although, in the maioritv of
cases, the walls would continue to be of
masonry until well into the twentieth century.
The first steel-framed building in Britain with
a non-loadbearing external wall was the Ritz
Hotel, of 1903-06, in London's Piccadilly. It is
often said that the reason for the adoption of
the elaborate stone facade, which did not bear
any load, was that the London Building Bye-
Laws did not permit otherwise but, given the
conservativeness of the architectural establish-
ment in England at the time, it is difficult to
imagine that a building of less conventional
appearance would have been erected on this
very prominent London site.
The constructional system which was devel-
oped in the nineteenth century in connection
with metal-framed buildings, that of the
complete separation of functions between
structural framework and non-loadbearing
walls, was to become the standard pattern for
the steel-frame architecture of the twentieth
century. Structural skeletons would be made to
support external cladding of many different
materials and the building-type would offer
architects new opportunities for architectural
expression. Masonry, which has ideal proper-
ties as an external walling material, would still
be used but other, more fragile materials, such
as sheet metal, glass and plastics, would also
become part of the architectural vocabulary.
The promotion of the steel framework from
the status of a purely supportive role to that of
a major contributor to the aesthetics of a
building was accomplished by the Modernist
architects of the early twentieth century. It was
inevitable that they would find the material
exciting. In the 1920s and 1930s they were
engaged in the project of inventing a new
architectural vocabulary for the modern world
of industry and technology, and, from their
point of view, this new structural material had
many virtues. Perhaps the greatest was that it
was new, but it was also appealing because it
was a product of a complex and sophisticated
industrial process which made it an appropri-
ate medium with which to develop an architec-
tural vocabulary celebrating industry and
technology. Steel also had excellent structuralproperties, especially high strength in both 51
Steel structures