The Crystal Palace

                               

The greatest nineteenth-century glass and iron building  was built in London in 1851. It had been decided to hold the    “ Great Exhibition “, to celebrate the greatness of Victorian Britain. The Committee launched a contest to design a proper building: temporary, simple, as cheap as possible, economical to build within the short time remaining before opening- 1 May 1851. Nevertheless, the Committee rejected all the proposals and came up with a standby design of its own, for a brick building in the rundbogenstil by Donaldson, featuring a sheet-iron dome designed by Brunel. Due to the fact that it was widely criticized and ridiculed they didn’t follow that concept either.

After a while, it was reported that a chief gardener ( really an estate manager ), Joseph Paxton , had constructed a conservatory for tropical plants-a greenhouse- all of iron and glass. A meeting was arranged where Paxton proposed to Prince Albert a vast greenhouse of similar construction for the exhibition. Despite uncertainties and protests, Paxton’s proposal was finally accepted and constructed with the aid of the engineering firm of Fox and Henderson.

                      

                             Partial elevations of Crystal Palace

              

        

 Joseph Paxton’s first sketch

              

As they were discovering new materials and ways of construction, the building, soon known as the Crystal Palace, was made up of iron frames, columns and girders produced in quantity as a foundry, bolted together on site, and glazed with sheets of factory-made glass. It was unlike anything ever built before: a vast internal space (it was 1,851 feet long and had an area of more than 800,000 square feet ) with structural elements so slim as to be almost negligible, glass walls and roof. What made Paxton's design so innovative is, in my opinion, his modular, hierarchical design that reflected his practical brilliance as a designer and problem-solver. It incorporated many breakthroughs, offered practical advantages that no conventional building could match and, above all, embodied the spirit of British innovation and industrial might that the Great Exhibition was intended to celebrate. 

Paxton was able to design and build the largest glass structure yet created, from scratch, in less than a year, and complete it on schedule and on budget. He was even able to alter the design shortly before building began, adding a high, barrel-vaulted transept across the centre of the bulding, at 90 degrees to the main gallery, under which he was able to safely enclose several large elm trees that would otherwise have had to be felled- thereby also resolving a controversial issue that had been a major sticking point for the vocal anti-Exhibition lobby.

Interior of the Crystal Palace

       

The airy interior was greatly admired by the crowds that attended the exhibition, so that, when the time came to remove the building, it was decided to dismantle it and reassemble it in Sydenham, then on the edge of London. It stood there until 1936 when it was destroyed by a fire.

Furthermore, the Crystal Palace appears in every architectural history as the first fully realized achievement of what, much later, came to be called modernism. 

As a conclusion, the geometry of the Crystal Palace was clearly a classic example of the concept of form following function: the shape and size of the whole building were directly based around the size of the panes of glass made by the supplier. Thus, the entire building was scaled around those dimensions, it had a grid, which means that nearly the whole outer surface could be glazed using millions of identical panes, thereby drastically reducing both their production cost and the time needed to install them.