Models and Re-elaborations in Late Nineteenth Century Architecture: The Great Tower for London Competition

This paper explores the notion of plagiarism and re-elaboration of architectural form in the late nineteenth century (when the profession of architecture emerged), and the ensuing dispute between the École des Beaux-Arts and the École Polytechnique in Paris, which established a permanent split between architects and engineers. The proposed methodology involves the analysis of the international design competition for the Great Tower for London (1890), which describes the rise and the fall of the glorious plan to build a colossal steel tower in England. Sir Edward Watkin, the promoter of the project, was a member of parliament and a powerful railway entrepreneur. His aim was to build a landmark celebrating his company in an amusement park near Wembley station, which was built to serve this park. In retrospect, it is clear that the submissions were influenced by a model (Eiffel Tower), which was to be overtaken in terms of elevation (rather than formal evolution) and other formal prototypes already cross-referenced in the history of architecture—either real (Tower of Pisa) or imaginary (Tower of Babel). Watkin’s tower offers the opportunity to investigate a century-old design competition, the main archetypal forms of that period, their relation to the applicant’s geographical background, and their costs and materials. From the sixty-eight proposals, the winner of the competition was a three hundred sixty-six meter copy of the Eiffel tower. This leads directly to the idea of architectural prototype: as a new cultural object, the Eiffel Tower, like Crystal Palace, was neither meant to communicate its originality nor its author’s style (the creation process), but rather its ability to be a model, namely the social consequences its construction would disclose to the entire world. An intrinsic objective of this research is to revisit, through a specific case study, the innovation of architectural form in the landmark as representative of common utopia: What was the importance of originality in a late-nineteenth century design competition? In the age of European industrialization, how did architectural bureaucracy treat landmarks differently from today? Today we experience distributed creativity, fragmented answers to customized issues. Is common utopia finally dead?