The pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen, one of the great masterpieces of the Baroque in the history of architecture, was completed in 1772, the same year as the Coalbrookdale iron bridge. Today the bridge must receive nearly as many pilgrims, as it symbolizes the new industrial age - the birth of our times. Although a pioneering bridge is not architecture, any more than was the equally pioneering Eiffel Tower in Paris a century later, such structures have had an enduring influence, as images, on architects.

Another type of new building that became instantly attractive to the cultured Romantics was the factory, or “mill”. Produced for entirely practical purposes and at a distance from architectural culture, it tended not to disguise its straightforward use of the latest constructional developments. K. F. Schinkel, when visiting England, sketched not the Neo-Classical monuments but the new Mersey docks and the smoking chimneys of Dudley. This was the other face of Romanticism, in which industry and technology were seen as the honest production of the industrial age’s “noble savages”, and it has echoed through architectural culture ever since.

Towards the middle of the 19th century there were rapid developments in methods of organizing the erection of structures, usually formed in metal. The products were not regarded as “architecture”, nor were they usually the work of architects. Some, such as the glasshouses and metal roofs of J. C. Loudon, were the common-sense designs of self-taught men while others, like the great train sheds or town markets, were the work of engineers. Brunel designed a war hospital for the Crimea in prefabricated wooden elements, which were shipped to the Dardanelles and erected at Renkioi very speedily. It was a magnificent exercise in rational planning, being uniquely air conditioned and sanitary.

Sometimes architects were involved, working in collaboration with an ironfounder. The hand of the architect John Baird can be clearly discerned in Gardner’s warehouse in Glasgow, but the Palm House at Kew, although credited to Decimus Burton, is really the masterpiece of his Irish ironfounder, Richard Turner. For Paddington Station, Brunel, as the entrepreneur and engineer, specifically commissioned M. D. Wyatt as his architect to add the facade of culture.

London’s Crystal Palace was designed by entrepreneurs with acute understanding of new contractual and organizational practices (in engineering rather than in architecture), of mass production and of competitive tendering. It also was produced at a distance from architectural culture; unashamedly straightforward and structurally uninspiring, the process of its production was planned with radical commonsense, simply aggregated to an arbitrary size which produced the eventual astounding glass-clad space. Architects were bowled over by it, but none could emulate it. Yet it is these glazed, iron-framed “umbrellas”, epitomized in the glazed arcades which followed, which provide the one memorable architectural form of the era.