Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier [Hardcover]

Simon Holloway (Author), Adam Mornement (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 2008

When Henry Palmer of the London Dock Company was granted the first patent for “indented or corrugated metallic sheets” in 1829, he little realized what he was starting.

Within a few years engineers were putting up warehouses and elegant railway stations of corrugated iron. By the late 1840s entrepreneurial manufacturers were sending out build-it-yourself cottages for gold prospectors in California and Australia. Whole townships complete with churches, sports pavilions, hotels, and meeting halls were soon available from catalogs, to be flat-packed and sent around the world. The First World War brought the development of the shelter known as the Nissen hut, perhaps the most iconic of all corrugated iron buildings and forerunner of the Quonset hut. Today corrugated sheet metal has proved invaluable in relief work and is used so often as roofing in the developing world that it can lay claim to shelter more people from the elements than any other building material. But the big surprise comes as architects around the world rediscover the virtues of this durable, biodegradable, and environmentally sound material, sufficiently versatile to create unique works of architecture and to house thousands in disaster zones. It answers the needs of both high-tech aesthetics and low-tech aspirations for affordability and ease of construction, as demonstrated by such cutting-edge architects as Will Bruder and Lake/Flato Architects in the United States; Glenn Murcutt in Australia; Rem Koolhaas, Nicholas Grimshaw, and Foreign Office Architects in Europe; and Shuhei Endo in Japan. Whether the appeal lies in nostalgia for rain on rusting tin roofs or in the sophistication of contemporary architecture, corrugated iron deserves to be taken seriously. It has a long and fascinating history and a future as bright as its past. 200 color & b/w photos & drawings

Editorial Reviews

Review

What makes this book more than eye candy is the authors' exhaustive treatment. Clearly they love the subject. (Architect Magazine) REVIEW: A well-researched, well-written and engaging narrative....Highly recommended for designers generally and anyone broadly interested in design and design history. (Curve) REVIEW: Corrugated metal surely stands alongside the great inventions, a...material as at home in the slums as it is in the avant garde. (The Financial Times) REVIEW: Catnip to architecturally minded modernists....the book is replete with fascinating reproductions of posters, catalog copy, and architectural renderings....a wonderful book. (Wilson Quarterly, David Akst) REVIEW: Tells the evolving story of the material in a thoughtful way, with an obvious passionate love for the material. (The Architectural Record, John Winter) REVIEW: Intelligent, fascinating, thoughtfully researched, and beautifully photographed. (Traditional Building, Nicole V. Gagné)

A well-researched, well-written and engaging narrative....Highly recommended for designers generally and anyone broadly interested in design and design history.

Review

A well-researched, well-written and engaging narrative....Highly recommended for designers generally and anyone broadly interested in design and design history.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (January 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393732401
• ISBN-13: 978-0393732405
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 10.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,318,449 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A History of an Invisible Building Material, December 10, 2007

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier (Hardcover)

An anonymous writer in 1833 called the public's attention to an architectural novelty that had appeared on the London docks: "Every observing person, on passing by it, cannot fail being struck... with its elegance and simplicity." What had brought this praise was the world's first building incorporating corrugated iron. One might think that the novelty of corrugated iron had surely led the writer into effusion about a subject otherwise unlikely to bring praise. And one might also think that a history of corrugated iron is one of the more unlikely subjects to be brought out in a colorful coffee-table book. There are many surprises in Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier (W. W. Norton & Company) by Adam Mornement and Simon Holloway, architectural historians who are enthusiasts for a material that provides shelter for millions and also is being used in upscale modern buildings with surprisingly beautiful effect. The authors say that corrugated iron has met diverse challenges of affordability, portability, utility, and strength, "but despite its many virtues, corrugated iron's contribution to society has rarely been acknowledged." Corrugated iron is everywhere, and because of this it has become invisible; this book is a handsome corrective to bring it back into view.

Corrugated iron was invented by Henry Robinson Palmer, Architect and Engineer to the London Dock Company, in 1829. He foresaw that the material could be used both as cladding upon an architectural framework and arched to make free-standing spans for roofing. Corrugated iron had advantages that innovative architects could use. The brilliant engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel adopted it early, and designed London's Paddington Station to be roofed in the material, with the corrugations running horizontally. There are no tie rods and no longitudinal beams between the rafters, because the corrugations in the roof provide tensile strength. Corrugated iron was used on lighthouses, whaling stations, and agricultural buildings. Prefabricated houses were designed with corrugated iron roofs and walls, and there are many illustrations here from catalogues from which people ordered such houses. Here also are pictures of the houses themselves, many of which are still being used. Most corrugated iron dwellings, however, were meant to be relatively temporary structures. Gold rushes in America, Australia, and South Africa proved to be workshops for such use, when living in tents was just too temporary a housing solution. There is a whole chapter here on churches made from corrugated iron, showing many of them of rural simplicity, but others with some Gothic splendor. Corrugated metal was not restricted to buildings; it was used to build boats, and the World War I Junker aircraft of Germany had wings of corrugated aluminum.

Corrugated iron will never escape completely its association with poverty. There are plenty of pictures here of shantytowns from all over the world, where corrugated iron is an architectural staple for improvised homes. There are other pictures of Nissan huts (the American version was the Quonset hut) used for wartime dwellings, and Buckminster Fuller used corrugated iron in a low-cost circular house called the Dymaxion Deployment Unit. The many pictures in the book's final chapter, though, show that corrugated metal has a place in the cladding of skyscrapers or in the homes of millionaires. Frank Gehry, for instance, has used it, and many of the modern buildings shown here are housed in huge loops or barrel forms of the material. It is used not only for its capacity to support and protect, but also as a sort of architectural sculpture. Many of the new and innovative buildings made from corrugated metal are from Australia, which has drawn on a tradition of using corrugated iron in the gold fields; there is no chance that these handsome, large houses of whimsical shape are going to be mistaken for shanties or for mobile homes. Corrugated iron is one of the most-used inventions humans have come up with, and paupers and tycoons are all taking advantage of it. Here is an intriguing history, full of colorful pictures, of an important architectural tool.

5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful book, September 6, 2009

By 

Mrs. Kim E. Jones (victoria, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Corrugated Iron (Hardcover)

This book has some wonderful photographic illustrations and is very descriptive. Great source of historic information whilst we were researching for a job in Australia.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A letdown, November 17, 2009

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SEWELL STAINED GLASS - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Corrugated Iron: Building on the Frontier (Hardcover)

Disappointed in this book. Oh, it has great photos and I loved the early English country churches but I did not need to see any photos of slums. I found only about 20% of the buildings were in the US, curious since a nice Lake/Flato pony barn is pictured on the cover. Their few buildings represented have more elaborate coverage on their own website. I was hoping to see more ideas that I might be able to incorporate and would pass the local building code.