Freeman, Kelly Miranda; (2020) Skeletons of Iron and Bone: The making of a metaphor and the architecture of natural-history museums in England and France. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis considers the metaphor ‘skeleton’ in architectural language, particularly during the period before 1900 when the term ‘skeleton construction’ was first applied to high-rise buildings. Taking this metaphor as its point of departure, it works to bridge the gap between nineteenth-century conceptual models of architectural thought (particularly regarding neo-Gothic architecture) and a practical and cost-effective material with which to build: iron. It also takes into account the discourses of art, engineering and natural history, within which the metaphor of the skeleton permeated. The skeleton worked as a model for abstract concepts, but it also referred to the invisible entity that supported the living body, as well as the transformed remains of animals such as those displayed in natural-history museums. The thesis investigates the kinship between the animal skeletons and the iron framework of two prominent nineteenth-century natural history museums: the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Galerie de Paléontologie et d’Anatomie comparée in Paris. It argues that the interaction between these buildings and the specimens they contain had an important role to play in the establishment of the ‘skeleton’ metaphor in architecture. The transformation of the material of bone into the material of iron is also analysed in architectural discourse, particularly in the writings of John Ruskin and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. The thesis also discusses late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physiological and engineering research into the stability of bone and iron. Following the anthropologist Elizabeth Hallam, it uses the notion of articulation – both a linguistic term and a word to describe assembling bones into a skeleton – to critically engage with the concept of the skeleton in these buildings and the discourses that surround them, thus generating new material conceptions. I propose that this critique of the skeleton is crucial for a re-consideration of nineteenth-century organicism.

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