Function and Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century

The book is divided into three sections. Firstly, 'Formations' considers the rising tension between the desire to translate traditional architectural motifs into iron and the nascent feeling that iron buildings were themselves creating an entirely new field of aesthetic expression. Secondly, 'Exchanges' charts the commercial and cultural exchanges that took place between British iron foundries and clients in far-flung locations such as Argentina, Jamaica, Nigeria and Australia. Finally, 'Transformations' looks at the place of the aesthetics of iron architecture in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a period in which iron ornament sought to harmonize wide social ambitions while offering the tantalizing possibility that iron architecture as a whole could transform the fundamental meanings of ornament.