The Crystal Palace

For the Great Exhibition in London, the gardener Joseph Paxton builds a hall of cast iron and glass, 564 metres long, in just a few months. The parts are standardised and factory-made.

For the first time a monumental building was built like a machine. It pointed ahead to modernism.

The Great Exhibition in London in 1851 was driven by Prince Albert and the civil servant Henry Cole, who wanted to present Britain as the workshop of the world. But an architectural competition produced no usable design, and the committee’s own scheme, a brick building with an enormous dome, was both expensive and impossible to build in time. Joseph Paxton was head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth and had built large glasshouses of iron and glass, among them one for the giant Amazon water lily. He sketched his proposal in a short time, according to the famous story on a sheet of blotting paper during a meeting. The design was published in an illustrated newspaper, and public support helped persuade the committee to accept it.

The contractors Fox, Henderson & Co erected the hall in Hyde Park from cast-iron columns, girders, wooden glazing bars and panes of glass, all in a few standard sizes. The parts were made in factories, transported by rail and assembled on site by teams of workers at great speed, with special trolleys running along the roof to fit the glass. The roof was folded into ridges and furrows, and rainwater was carried away through the hollow columns. So that no large elms would have to be felled, the building was given a tall transept with a vaulted roof that enclosed the trees. Queen Victoria opened the exhibition on 1 May 1851, and over the summer there were some six million visits.

It was the magazine Punch that gave the building the name the Crystal Palace. Many were enthusiastic, while others, such as the critic John Ruskin, held that a glasshouse could never be architecture. The exhibition’s surplus was used to buy land in South Kensington, where the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum were later built. The hall itself was dismantled and re-erected, larger, at Sydenham in south London, where it stood until it burned down in 1936. The idea quickly found successors in world’s fairs, railway stations and market halls. In Sweden there is a clear echo in the Palm House in Gothenburg’s Garden Society park from the 1870s, a glasshouse modelled on Paxton’s palace.