Quietly, without fuss, Victorian engineers and architects also learnt how to create deep and attractive buildings with glass fa\u00e7ades to let in the light. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner thought that these were the \u201cpath\u201d to modernism. He was wrong: they are too playful.<\/p>\n
Best known are Liverpool\u2019s Oriel Chambers and the interior of Oxford\u2019s University Museum. However, Glasgow, the \u201csecond city of Empire,\u201d has the loveliest: 36 Jamaica Street is good. But I admire most the so-called Ca d\u2019Oro Building, forging Venetian cornices, friezes and diamond shapes in cast iron. A modern planning officer or architectural historian would have a heart attack at the mix of old patterns and new materials. But what do they know? The Victorians just did things and lacked our paralysing fear of buildings with ornament.<\/p>\n
Nicholas Boys Smith is founder and chairman of Create Streets and a visiting professor of architecture at the University of Strathclyde.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Quietly, without fuss, Victorian engineers and architects also learnt how to create deep and attractive buildings with glass…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[722,2756,4683,4685,330,1797,104,4684,1798,5,6,4686],"class_list":{"0":"post-9595","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"tag-leeds","9":"tag-liverpool","10":"tag-luxury-property-and-architecture","11":"tag-newcastle","12":"tag-standard","13":"tag-top-story","14":"tag-travel","15":"tag-travel-destination-guide-hubs","16":"tag-travel-priority","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom","19":"tag-victorians"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116369381318633969","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}