ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY
of steel with the crushing strength of stone. Architects knew little
of these things. They left them to the engineers. For about 1800,
in connection with the growing subdivision of competencies, the
architect's and the engineer's had become different jobs for which a
different training was provided. Architects learnt in the offices of
older architects and in schools of architecture, until they set up in
practice themselves doing what the civil-servant-architect had done
in the I7th century, but now chiefly for private clients instead of the
State. Engineers were trained in special university faculties or (in
France and Central Europe) special technical universities. The most
perfect examples of early iron architecture, the suspension bridges,
such as Brunei's Clifton Bridge, designed in 1829-31 and begun in
1836, are the work of engineers, not of architects. Paxton who con-
ceived the Crystal Palace of 1851 was a landscape gardener used to
the iron and glasswork of conservatories. The men who introduced
iron stanchions into the construction of American warehouses and
occasionally, in the forties and fifties, opened whole fronts by
glazing the whole interstices between the stanchions, are mostly
unknown or undistinguished as architects. And in France, where a
few trained and recognised architects (Labrouste: Genevieve
Library, 1845-50) used iron conspicuously—even occasionally for a
whole church interior (St. Eugene, Paris, begun 1854), they were
attacked and ridiculed by the majority.
In all this a fundamentally unsound conception of architecture as
a social service is apparent. This was first recognised by Pugin, who
saw only one remedy: the return to the old faith of Rome. Then
shortly after him, John Ruskin preached in The Seven- Lamps of
Architecture (1849) that a building must be ixutMuJrfifst of all. And
a little later he began to realise that to achieve this, thought had to
be given to social as well as aesthetic problems. The step from theory
to practice was taken by William Morris (1834-96). He had under-
gone the influence of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, had actually
been for a time a pupil of Rossetti, and also of one of the most con-
scientious Neo-Gothic architects. But he was not satisfied with
either painting or architecture as he saw them practised, i.e.
painting as the' art of making easel pictures for exhibitions, and
architecture as writing-desk and drawing-board work.
And whereas Ruskin kept his social activities apart from his
aesthetic theory, Morris was the first to link up the two in the only
way they could be successfully linked up. Instead of becoming a
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