The Crystal Palace

The hall for the Great Exhibition of 1851 was built of iron and glass in just a few months. It was more than 560 metres long and assembled from prefabricated parts. The building showed that the materials of industry could create a completely new kind of space, light and endless.

Ahead of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 a competition was held for an exhibition hall, but none of the entries could be built in time. Joseph Paxton, gardener to the Duke of Devonshire, had built large glasshouses at Chatsworth and sketched a proposal in iron and glass on a sheet of blotting paper. It was accepted, and the building was put up in Hyde Park in a few months. The parts were made in factories and assembled on site. The magazine Punch gave it the name The Crystal Palace.

The building was about 563 metres long and up to 39 metres high. It was built on a modular system of cast-iron columns and girders and about 300,000 panes of glass of the same size. The transept had a vaulted roof and was built so high that the great elms in the park could stay inside the hall. Paxton made the roof gutters serve as structural elements and used a ridge-and-furrow roof that he had tried out in his glasshouses. Everything could be taken down and moved, and the hall counts as one of the first large prefabricated buildings.

After the exhibition the building was dismantled and re-erected, even larger, at Sydenham in south London in 1854. There it served as a palace of entertainment and exhibitions until it was destroyed by fire in 1936. The Crystal Palace aroused both admiration and criticism. Many saw it as a work of engineering rather than architecture, but it showed the way for railway stations, department stores and exhibition halls and has been seen as a forerunner of the glass architecture of modernism.