Joseph Paxton
Joseph Paxton was a gardener who sketched the Crystal Palace on a sheet of blotting paper. His glasshouses and exhibition hall of iron and glass showed how the prefabricated parts of industry could create bright, vast spaces.
Joseph Paxton was born in 1803 in Bedfordshire, the son of a farmer. He began working in gardens early and in 1826, aged just 23, became head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth. There he became the duke’s close friend and confidant. He led large projects in the park, including the great Emperor Fountain. He learned construction by building glasshouses, and he published magazines on gardening and botany.
At Chatsworth Paxton built the Great Stove, a large glasshouse of glass and timber, and a special house for the giant water lily Victoria amazonica, which he was the first in England to bring into flower, in 1849. The ribs of its leaves inspired his structures. When the committee for the Great Exhibition of 1851 could find no solution, he sketched a proposal that became the Crystal Palace, built of standardised parts in only a few months. He also designed parks, such as Birkenhead Park near Liverpool, and Mentmore Towers for the Rothschild family.
Paxton was knighted in 1851 and later became a Member of Parliament. He died in 1865. The Crystal Palace became a symbol of the industrial age and showed that iron and glass could produce a new kind of architecture. Birkenhead Park influenced Frederick Law Olmsted when he designed Central Park in New York. Paxton’s way of building with prefabricated parts and glass anticipated railway stations, department stores and the glass façades of modernism.