NBO-KENAISSANCE AND NEO-BAROQUE
Early Renaissance, and Paris rebuilt its 16th-century townj
with picturesque gables and playful pilasters. To this correspol!
in England a revival of Elizabethan and Jacobean forms, esj
for country houses. Their associational value was of course natior
their aesthetic appeal lay in a still livelier play of ornaments on surfaces.
Apparently the underground tendency, covered up by changing
period costumes, was towards the mouvementi and spectacular,
the flamboyant style of Disraeli and the pompousness of Gladstone.
Thus about 1850-60 Italianate forms became also more and more
exuberant, until a Neo-Baroque was reached. Charles Garnier's
Opera in Paris of 1861-74 is one of the earliest and best examples
(pi. cm). Another is Poelaert's enormous Law Courts at Brussels
(1866-83). In England there is litde of this Second, Empire style. A
revival of Palladianism in its most Baroque form took its pkce, and a
strong inspiration from the Wren of Greenwich Hospital. Then with
a slight sobering of form and a marked influence from a Classical
Re-revival in America (McKim, Mead and White) a character-
istically prosperous Edwardian Imperial style was arrived at
(Selfridge's). In Germany the late ipth- and early 20th-century
Neo-Baroque goes under the name of Wilhelmian; in Italy it has
disgraced Rome with the national monument to King Victor
Emmanuel II.
However, by the time these buildings were designed, a reaction
had come and spread against so superficial—truly superficial—a
conception of architecture. It did not originate with the architect.
It could not; because it concerned problems of social reform and of
engineering, and architects were not interested in these. Most of
them loathed the industrial development of the age just as heartily
as the painters. They did not see that the Industrial Revolution,
while destroying an accepted order and an accepted standard of
beauty, created opportunities for a new kind of beauty and order.
It offered to the imaginative new materials and new manufacturing
processes, and opened up a vista towards architectural planning on
an undreamt-of scale.
As for new materials, iron, and after 1860 steel, made it possible
to achieve spans wider than ever before, to build higher than ever
before, and develop ground plans more flexible than ever before.
Glass, in conjunction with iron and steel, enabled the engineer to
make whole roofs and whole walls transparent. Reinforced concrete,
introduced at the end of the century, combines the tensile strength
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