Glaswegian Iron Builds Brasil
Glaswegian Iron Builds Brasil
It was twenty-five years ago whilst visiting Belem, gateway to the Amazon, that I had an unexpected architectural encounter. Famous for its colonial architecture and as the site of the Cabanos war of 1835, one of the most important popular social revolts in Brasilian history, it is renowned for its markets in which the limitless bounty of the forest and river electrify the senses. Monstruous armour plated fish that have crawled out of the pages of a childrens’ book on dinosaurs. Spiky iridescent fruit that resemble alien hand grenades. Stalls piled high with magic leaves of every shade of green. In the midst of the sensory mayhem stands the Francisco Bolonha Meat Market. Now fully restored and cleaned, when I first visited, slaughtered animals hung in their entirety from an elegant cast iron structure that was instantly recognisable. For a brief moment in the fly infested melting courtyard, I was back in the old Glaswegian arcades and market-places. And sure enough, there at the foot of the column was inscribed; “W.Macfarlanes and Co. Glasgow.” Thus began my journey into the extraordinary history of cast-iron prefabrication.[1] Macfarlanes was one of the biggest and most specialised producers of prefabricated cast iron structures in the late 19th century. The scale of Macfarlanes’ ambitions knew of no structural or architectural limits - street lighting, toilets, gates, fountains, bandstands, markets - and included a scheme to cover the entire city centre of Glasgow in an iron and glass canopy. There were no geographical limits either. The solitary water fountain at Saracen’s cross in Possil, the location of Macfarlanes’ Foundry that once employed 1400 workers, shows some of the destinations that spanned the world from Madras to Melbourne and Brasil. I am not prone to singing the praises of capitalist industrial adventurers, but there is something remarkable about the idea of prefabricating a structure in the north of Glasgow, dismantling it, dragging it down to the river Clyde, loading it onto a ship and transporting it across the Atlantic. As I was to discover, the journey didn’t end in Belem either, but in Manuas, fifteen hundred kilometres upriver, where I collapsed from the insufferable humidity at the foot of a grand cast iron staircase in the public library, stamped with a Glasgow trademark. The relationship between Scotland and Brasil goes a lot deeper than one might imagine. It was reputedly Scottish engineers that introduced football to Brasil, and one of them David Angus, spent forty years traveling around the country organising the construction of railways including here in Santos, where the embossed columns of the cast iron entrance to the train station celebrate their origins.
[1] The full story of which you can read in the essay Global Iron, available on my website www.jonathancharley.com