I think you're overstating things. Victorian Britain featured plenty of naked ironwork. Tower Bridge was a special case, being planted right news to the Tower of London. Unlike so much modern design, it reflects its environment.
The styles went out of fashion long before health and safety came into its own. If they'd remained, it's very likely we'd have found new and safer ways of construction, or employed new materials.
Well you can do it, no worries. We did a design for an extension for a west end stone building that exactly matched the existing facade. Entire 4-storey bays would be layed out on the ground, then bonded to concrete and then trucked to site and stood on end. Completely fake, but it looks right.
The only design philosophy in the Tower of London was whatever best served its purpose as a royal lock-up.
The Victorians had a nostalgic streak a mile wide, sure, but Tower Bridge is hardly representative. The same decade gave us the Forth Railway Bridge.
To call it fake is to assume that there's some authentic standard of that cannot be altered. By this logic the dome of the Pantheon is a fake!
) and affords a show place for effectively a living Museum of erstwhile "suitable"(vom) & Best practice(retch) matching tradition(spit). 
One of the modernists, with the crazy hair has just declared neo-classical architecture a classist tool, which keeps people in their hierarchical place and that modern architecture is about breaking down the class walls and reducing the hierarchy.
What an absolute pile of cunt twattism.
I'd rather see a building built out of something solid, that doesn't look like shit if it gets rained on repeatedly - or gets litter stuck to it, or leak or has absolutely no soul in the name of the class divide.
Why? The style is timeless. The notion that historical styles are somehow outmoded is a recent and bizarre one. The Victorians were happy mixing high-tech with historic designs.
Sackler Library, Oxford
Yep, it opened in 2001, and is in keeping with the Ashmolean. There's no reason we couldn't build in the neoclassical style from scratch, however: I posted up the picture of the Sackler to show that it needn't look like Poundbury. (Not that there aren't some fine buildings in Poundbury, but the place as a whole does have seem a bit too chocolate-box.)
Modernism (with a capital M) was a movement geared towards a synthesis of environment, tradition and modernity... Corbusier's chaise longue is an immediately recognisable example:
An entirely modern piece of furniture, but with hide upholstery that evokes traditional nomadic cultures. It's often referred to as critical regionalism.
