Robert Smirke (architect) - Innovations and Writings

Innovations and Writings

Smirke was a pioneer of using both concrete and cast iron. Examples of his buildings in which he used concrete foundations include: Millbank Penitentiary, the rebuilding of the London Custom House and the British Museum. Also he used large cast iron beams to support the floors of the upper galleries at the British Museum, these had to span 41 feet. A critic writing in 1828 in The Athenaeum stated "Mr. Smirke, is pre-eminent in construction: in this respect he has not his superior in the United Kingdom". James Fergusson writing in 1849 said "He was a first class builder architect, ....no building of his ever showed a flaw or failing and ....he was often called upon to remedy the defects of his brother artist."

Another area where Smirke was an innovator was the use of Quantity surveyors to rationalise the various eighteenth-century systems of estimating and measuring building work.

In 1806 he published the first and only volume of an intended series of books Specimens of Continental Architecture. Smirke started to write a treatise on architecture c. 1815 and although he worked on it for about 10 years never completed it. In it he made his admiration for the architecture of ancient Greece plain. He described it as "the noblest", "simple, grand, magnificent", "with its other merits it has a kind of primal simplicity". This he contrasted with the Architecture of ancient Rome which he described as "corrupt Roman taste", "An excess of ornament is in all cases a sympton of a vulgar or degenerate taste". Of Gothic architecture he described as '"till its despicable remains were almost everywhere superseded by that singular and mysterious compound of styles".