Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows how the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament in the 1800s helped create clean-air laws.
In his paper London particular; the city, its atmosphere and the visibility of its objects, published in the Journal of Architecture, architectural historian Timothy Hyde says that Parliament’s reconstruction was so affected by pollution, with the air corroding the new stones, that the Government commissioned research into the effects of the atmosphere on the new building.
This research happened at a time when Victorian England was rapidly industrialising and was the first time that the built environment was examined to learn more about the natural environment.
‘The Houses of Parliament project was a catalyst, because of the research that accompanied this building,’ Hyde says. ‘The very specific realization that pollution was corroding the building even as it was being built [formed] a discovery about the environment of the modern city.’
Hyde says that the resulting advances were not just scientific, but more broadly represented a recognition of the linkages between all the elements of urban life.
‘It really did enable a different understanding of the modern city,’ says Hyde, ‘not as a collection of individual buildings, but rather as a set of interrelated causes and effects. One building, like a factory, could cause the decay of another building. And the modern city had to be thought of as trying to achieve an equilibrium between its parts.’
He says that the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament was the most important architectural project in the 19th century in Great Britain. That’s why, when the new building’s limestone quickly began to decay, the Government formed committees of experts to examine the problem.
‘The Houses of Parliament project, because of its public nature, enabled this possibility of bringing into public view knowledge about the decaying of buildings,’ Hyde says.
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