Cast iron made its debut in the construction industry in 1779 with the bridge at Coalbrookdale in England, followed in 1803 by the Pont des Arts bridge in Paris. Metal structures soon began to find their way into textile factories, into stage construction and glasshouses. By around 1845 laminated iron was taking over as a more efficient and economic material than cast iron, heralding a spectacular rejuvenation in the conception of buildings. The central market building in Paris, Les Halles, was erected in 1853 by Victor Baltard and Felix Callet. It was the first building in France to openly display its metalwork. It opened the way for the construction of new types of edifice required by an industrialized society, such as railway stations, markets, factories, large stores, glass-roofed buildings, pavilions and exhibition halls. The use of iron in architecture spread widely, and became one of the most original and spectacular forms of creative expression of the nineteenth century, because of its lightness, its transparency and the elegant way it rises into the air, coupled with its brute strength, its restrained power and its extreme tautness.

The engineer, and his expertise in calculation and construction, came to have an increasingly important role in architecture. The bridge over the Firth of Forth in Scotland, opened in 1889, achieved a record span of 521 metres. There was even talk of a bridge with a span wide enough to cross the English Channel. In Chicago in the United States, steel started to be employed to erect buildings of enormous height.