Victorian Disruption During the Victorian period the universal system of classical design was finally disrupted, and by the opening of the twentieth century it was seldom used, though it was still understood by a few architects, and magnificently employed by the greatest of them - Edwin Lutyens. This interruption was in every way as disastrous as the 'Italianate' phase of sixteenth-century taste; but unlike that early period of the English Renaissance, it did not represent a preliminary and chaotic fumbling with new forms to prepare the way for a new system of design; it merely led to greater and more fantastic chaos. The industrial revolution accelerated the debasement of design; the eyes of the English died some time between 1830 and 1880, and people soon sank to the level when they 'mistook comfort for civilisation'. Only slowly and painfully did the nation recover its sight, and it is still more than half blind. The new and promising materials and techniques for handling them, introduced by the first industrial revolution, were misused: the machine was never allowed to do its splendid best; the mechanical production was largely used to simulate articles and patterns that had formerly been made by hand, and cheapness and quantity dominated the ideas of industrialists. To produce goods cheaply was excellent; they were produced badly, not because it reduced (heir price, but because it was thought necessary to make them 'look rich', which gave machine-made things a vulgar reputation. The term 'cheap and nasty' became current, while 'machine-made' was a term of abuse. The English genius for design and the English tradition were unconsciously expressed in new ways. Although they never recognised it, some of the great engineers of the nineteenth century were industrial designers of a high order, and such things as locomotives and the appliances and architecture of railways, the signal cabins, and some of the stations, the great bridges and viaducts, preserved the English tradition of design. Only when engineers were impelled to be 'artistic' did they debase their standards and deface their work. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was housed in a building that was a triumph of industrial design. Paxton, one of the great though unacknowledged industrial designers of the time, designed the first large-scale prefabricated building of wrought and cast iron and glass. But inside that building the depth and breadth of Victorian ignorance were shamelessly apparent, though nearly everybody was delighted with the contents. Nearly every exhibit produced in England showed that as the Victorians had mistaken 'comfort for civilisation', they had also mistaken ornamentation for design. The whole conception of design had changed; people responsible for making things thought merely of 'applying' art, of lacquering over surfaces some form of decoration, looted without understanding from the past. Many influences had combined to produce this age of confusion, but the mischief was done chiefly by the Romantic movement, nourished by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, so discreetly misleading about the Middle Ages, and kindled to the bright gleam of sentimental enthusiasm by the missionary zeal of John Ruskin, preaching salvation through Gothic forms and cursing with ceremony and conviction the classical system of design. That movement was accompanied by the active ignorance of manufacturers, and the uncritical taste of the new and very vulgar rich, and the increasingly prosperous and equally vulgar middle classes. People with money to spend were delighted with all the complexities of form that arose from confusion of ideas; it was the best of all possible worlds. Certainly it was a great age of literature, of enterprise, of exploration, like that earlier age of confusion, the Elizabethan; but there was no appreciation for form and colour; the ineluctable darkness that only the blind know and endure had descended; but with this difference, the Victorians had no idea that they had lost their sight. But presently a great man reminded them. Article Victorian Disruption was readed 210 times.