Technology has had a progressive influence on design, driving it on towards new forms, but at the same time technology has been used as a symbol within design.
Technology has always had an influence on architecture. Concrete, which we think of as a modern material, was used by the Romans. The Roman Pantheon was a temple to all the Roman gods, surmounted by a giant dome representing the entire universe. This had the largest concrete dome in the world. This shows how new materials can produce a new aesthetic.
In the Victorian age, the Crystal Palace was built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. This was a very innovative building constructed of iron and glass. It showed that modern technology could produce a building of unprecedented lightness and delicacy. The Victorians did not recognise this as architecture, they saw it as engineering. John Ruskin, for example, the famous art critic, called it a "fortified greenhouse." They continued to worship historical styles.
Ostensibly, the Gothic Revival was backward looking, because it was inspired by the Middle Ages. But Victorian Gothic began to embrace the structural possibilities of iron and glass.
Iron was mainly used for functional buildings like railway stations like the Gothic Midland Grand Hotel, next to St. Pancras Station in London. The station itself was designed by the engineer William Barlow, and it had the widest arch in the world. This was the closest the Victorians ever came to producing a style of their own, but at the time this was not regarded as architecture so it was hidden behind the hotel with a Gothic facade.
The Natural History Museum at Oxford (1854-8) is constructed from a cast iron framework that was very innovative for its date, but even here the arches are in the Gothic style and have been painted. There is still an embarrassment about technology, a feeling that it has to be beautified.
But a new type of architecture was emerging. Viollet-le-Duc was a French architect who began to produce visionary designs for iron buildings. Unlike previous attempts, he didn't disguise or hide the use of iron. He learned how to exploit the structural possibilities of iron. Iron works in tension, whereas stone works in compression. So iron can be stretched and used to suspend glass walls and so on. So this led to a skeletal architecture that was more about spatial enclosure than it was about ornament or decoration. These were some of the most forward looking works of the 19th century.
Of course, the prime example of technological innovation in the 19th century was the Eiffel Tower (1887-9), designed by Gustave Eiffel. This was influenced by Viollet-le-duc. When it was built, it was the tallest building in the world. It was intended to be a temporary structure, but it became a symbol of France.
An architect who had a major impact was Louis Sullivan, an American who worked in Chicago at the turn of the century. He was a pioneer of steel frame construction. The Carson, Pirie, Scott department store (1899) in Chicago was one of the first multi-storey buildings. Sullivan is famous for coining the phrase "Form follows Function," which became a mantra of the Modern Movement in the 20th century. It means that the object should be designed to function perfectly, and that aesthetic value would follow naturally. In this case, the underlying structural frame gave rise to a simple grid pattern on the façade. This was the basis of the modern skyscraper that was built throughout the 20th century.
To summarise, Victorian architects began to be influenced by technology. At first they felt the need to disguise technology by using historical styles, but eventually the stylistic language was stripped away, and people like Violette-le-duc and Louis Sullivan exposed the underlying structure. A new range of expression opened up.
