Part 1: Architect’s Guide 1 - 1 1 INTRODUCTION What do Claude Perrault’s Louvre colonnades (1670), Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive apartment towers (1951), Soufflot’s Church of St. Genevieve in Paris (1759), Piano and Roger’s Georges Pompidou Centre (1977) and Jean Nouvel’s Hôtel Industriel in Pantin (1990) all have in common? Each one bears testimony to the great epic of metal in construction. Of course, the transformation from iron used as structural reinforcement and decoration to the light and airy steel frame which we know today was a very long process. It encompassed no less than 300 years of historical progress, innovation, imagination and creativity: on the part of architects, who introduced new shape grammars with cast iron, iron and then steel; on the part of engineers, whose technical expertise and imagination played a major role in the building of new structures which were once thought of as impossible, even utopian; and on the part of manufacturers, who have worked tirelessly on the development of new materials and products. Three hundred years of passion for metal: a passion which has been expressed in different ways. Cast iron, once used in buildings, was expensive, heavy and brittle, and provided a very special kind of structural reinforcement dictated by the style of that period: enormous proportions, with iron staples used to hold together blocks of stone to ensure the building’s stability. Today’s enthusiasm for iron and steel is very different. Iron brought about transformations in design and the introduction of standard profiles (I, T and L). Thanks to riveting, profiles could be assembled in numerous ways to create all sorts of structures. A landmark achievement was Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851), the predecessor of modular architecture with its prefabricated building components. Figure 1.1 Crystal Palace, London Steel has been in the vanguard of new assembly processes, rolling techniques and computational modelling. It has made possible the use of large spans in construction, for example in industrial buildings (La Samaritaine department store in Paris, which opened in 1917), and in infrastructure and transportation (The Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland, 1890).
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