Was it just a given that you would put art into anything you built?
[1] - “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” - Steve Jobs
If you go to the Manchester Museum of Science and Technology, they have cotton looms that have doric columns - there is no earthly reason for that (indeed today we'd use tubular or box section) other than the sheer joy of doing it.
It must have been a hell of a thing to have been alive from 1860 to 1930 (if we exclude all the negatives).
Sure, some was projecting success, or the confidence of their age, but there seems to have been an expectation things would last. As an awful lot has. Half of many city's buildings are well past a century, little built post-war is likely to get that far.
It was an age where they were trying to leave things better - to their definition of better. Now it seems we're in an age of leaving things cheapened, not necessarily cheaper, but more profitable.
I'm not a fan of the current lowest cost beats all fashion.
It houses, if I remember correctly, the largest triple expansion steam engine in running order.
Far more rarely open to visitors, but worth it if the stars align and you're into infrastructure: Its sister Abbey Mills is still a working sewage pump site, now run off much more modern and thus in some sense "boring" electrical pumps but still really fascinating if you're an infrastructure nerd.