In the following decades the Classical language of architecture was used in a self-consciously picturesque way to dress the modern capitals of northern Europe in classic costume. Ambitious building schemes were put into effect in St Petersburg and Copenhagen, the new Prussian capital Berlin, and Edinburgh, the “Athens of the North” which counterbalanced Britain’s commercial metropolis in the south.

This architecture of the first industrial age was indeed an “international style”. Although it did not outwardly display the sinew and fibre of industry ? it was unseemly to show off muscle and brawn ? it made sense to benefit from new industrial developments, and many architects exploited the latest technical possibilities. Nets of iron, for example, could be used for reinforcing masonry, and new theories of structure allowed this to be calculated. Cast iron could be used for framing, not just as columns (in compression). And when formed in trusses (to withstand bending and tension) it could carry a roof over wide spans. There were also developments in piped services; in glass as a walling material; in mill-sawn timber and mass-produced nails, and much more. All these were utilized but politely hidden behind the accepted language of architecture. Jacques Soufflot’s mid 18th-century Ste Genevi?ve in Paris had iron-reinforced masonry, and Leo von Klenze’s early 19th-century Walhalla near Regensburg, a copy of the Parthenon, had a pioneering iron-frame roof. The great early 19th-century classicist Karl Schinkel drew designs for immense sheets of glass held unframed between masonry columns, unbuildable until thirty years later when Alexander Thomson pioneered such “direct glazing” in his own classicist architecture.

In general architects were much more concerned with giving recognizable clothing to the new forms of assembly than in celebrating the materials of industrial development. In the early 19th century there was a demand for a huge variety of new building types as the story of architecture broadened to embrace commercial, social and public buildings rather than just palaces, churches and dwellings. Exchanges, offices, institutions for health, incarceration or education, municipal libraries and ? most of all ? museums, mushroomed without precedent. As Marx and Engels noted in The Communist Manifesto (1847) “the bourgeoisie [has] accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.”

The importation of such precious objects as lacquerware and porcelain during the early 18th century stimulated interest in Chinese art, but only in terms of its decorative qualities. Art from the Far East was filtered through Western taste and applied superficially to European models. It was initially expressed in the production of objects inspired by Oriental motifs, but then came the thoroughly rococo creation of small ‘Chinese’ arrangements in which the furnishings, tableware, and wall decorations created highly refined settings; it finally led to the almost literal replication of buildings, such as the Pagoda in London’s Kew Gardens or the Tea Pavilion of the park of Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam. This taste began to decline around 1770 but continued in further imitations during later years, such as Marvuglia’s Chinese Palace at Palermo of 1799. At the same time, following the military and scientific expeditions to Egypt in 1769 and the Napoleonic campaign of 1798, the Egyptian style spread throughout Europe; once again, the initial taste for furnishings grew to take on a monumental scale, involving urban creations, with gardens strewn with pillars and obelisks and cemetery tombs shaped like pyramids.

European city squares filled more and more with souvenirs from the Orient, much like triumphal displays of conquests made in far-off exotic lands, often with eclectic styles generated by the confusion of archaeological references. Thus came into being those heterogeneous constructions in which Asian elements – the Royal Pavilion of Brighton – are joined to those neo – classical.