I was in a beautiful Kent village hall last Tuesday evening giving a talk to locals on my book ‘Building Passions’.
It’s always difficult to anticipate the audience at such events, but the best approach is to assume little knowledge about the subject and hope for one or two individuals with some level of higher expertise. This is exactly what happened.
I decided to expand on a theme that had featured on one or two slides in previous such talks, called ‘Guess the structure’. I put up a six images of historic buildings and then asked the audience to try and identify them. This kind of quiz is run online by organisations with an interest in the history of structures: for example, the Institution of Civil Engineers Library and Archive runs a weekly ‘guess the bridge’ competition that usually focuses on older ones.
One of my structures was the Connel (Ferry) Bridge at Loch Etive in Scotland (see below image), designed by Sir John Wolfe Barry and Partners and completed in 1903. No-one recognised the bridge, though some thought it might have been the more famous Forth Rail Bridge, also in Scotland and made of the same Scottish Arrol steel as Connel, as well as Tower Bridge in London (see Building #40).
Two of the buildings were featured in my last post (Building #42). No-one knew Oriel Chambers in Liverpool, but a few recognised the Royal Liver Building, to be found a just few hundred yards from it.
The final three buildings were across the channel, one in Brussels (the famous Hôtel Solvay by Victor Horta, father of Art Nouveau architecture, completed in 1894) and two in Paris, one by Horta’s French disciple Hector Guimard (Castel Béranger, completed in 1898). I may come to these in a future post.
The other Parisian building featured in my doctoral thesis. La Samaritaine Department Store was re-designed by Frantz Jourdain in 1910 using iron, steel and glass to a bold effect (see the below photographs taken by me of the facade and interior). It has recently been renovated after years of relative neglect and still functions today as a luxury retail outlet in the heart of the French capital.
