I.ARCHITECTURE 23

7. Did you read the account of the proceedings at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham the other day?¹ Some dozen of men crushed up among the splinters of the scaffolding in an instant, nobody knew why. All the engineers declare the scaffolding to have been erected on the best principles,-that the fall of it is as much a mystery as if it had fallen from heaven, and were all meteoric stones. The jury go to Sydenham and look at the heap of shattered bolts and girders, and come back as wise as they went. Accidental death! Yes, verily; the lives of all those dozen of men had been hanging for months at the mercy of a flaw in an inch or two of cast iron. Very accidental indeed! Not the less pitiable. I grant it not to be an easy thing to raise scaffolding to the height of the Crystal Palace without incurring some danger, but that is no reason why your houses should all be nothing but scaffolding. The common system of support of walls over shops is now nothing but permanent scaffolding; part of iron, part of wood, part of brick: in its skeleton state awful to behold; the weight of three or four stories of wall resting sometimes on two or three pillars of the size of gas pipes, sometimes on a single cross beam of wood, laid across from party wall to party wall in the Greek manner. I have a vivid recollection at this moment of a vast heap

balcony; and above all this was built the entire height of a three-storied house, the whole weight of the walls resting on this single beam which had not two inches of hold at each end; and the timbers of the first floor being let into it also, so that literally the whole house with its inhabitants depended on this two inches of timber-hold, like a man clinging by his fingers’ ends to a precipice. But now mark the consequences. It is indeed probable that the two-inch hold will be found enough for its work, so long as no casualty happens to the house; but let fifty years pass by; let a new drain be opened or a well dug near one of the brick pillars; let the slightest settlement of one of those pillars take place, the timber slips from its hold, and in an instant the house is a mass of ruins. ... Or suppose no such calamities happen, but the house prolongs its tottering existence in a plastered peace-for a century or so. By that time, at the latest, the wretched work of it begins to give way, the floors slope and bulge, long rambling cracks show themselves through all the external stucco, and reparation after reparation is made, and botch after botch, until the house has cost more than would have built two of its size, and at last the surveyor of the district condemns it as unsafe, and it is pulled down for materials. That will be the history of nearly every house we build in these days of civilization.”]

¹ [See the Times, August 16, 17, 18, 1853; portion of the main transept gave way, killing and wounding nearly forty men.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]