September 2023
Joseph Paxton, The Crystal Palace, 1851, iron and glass, Hyde Park
The Crystal Palace itself no longer exists, surviving in memory as the name of an area of south west London and a football team. It burnt down in the 1930s having been moved from its original location in Hyde Park, built as a massive hall to display the fruits of British, Imperial and indeed globally manufactured goods for Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851. Somewhat anachronistically, the Victorian élite evidently gathered towards the centre, beneath the barrel vault (added to the original design to save a huge elm from being cut down) surrounded by a display of classically inspired sculpture but the real innovations were in the things made by modern technology: the prototype bicycles, the steam powered machines, the printing presses and so on. A firm ran by Messrs Schweppes provided soft drinks for sale; there were loos (cost: a penny); Thomas Cook’s travel company offered cheap excursions by rail for those living outside London. By the end of the year over six million had visited including one woman who walked all the way from Penzance. Tickets cost 1 shilling if you were working class; £3 if you were a gentleman, £2 if you were a lady. The massive profits paid for the new museums on Exhibition Road: Natural History, Science, the V&A.
The Crystal Palace was only intended as a temporary structure, not really architecture at all. It was designed and built by a gardener, Joseph Paxton, who came up with a proposal that was cheaper and quicker to build than any other. The key was prefabrication. All the parts, iron struts and girders to make the frame, and the glass panes (300,000 of them in all) were made off site to standard sizes and transported in bulk to Hyde Park to be rapidly put together. The result is a building that is transparent; there are no walls. There is no real sense of mass, only volume or enclosed space where interior and exterior permeate. There are no decorative details or flourishes; it was air conditioned. Turn it on its head and it would almost become a skyscraper.
At the same time it was constructed, only a couple of miles away in Westminster, work was underway, slowly and painfully, on the new Houses of Parliament. This was serious architecture: expensive and state funded, a symbol of national identity. Appropriately for a commission of such grandeur, it was built in stone, in a Gothic style which went back to medieval times rooting our political centre in an ancient heritage. But I wonder how many of the eminent Victorians, in their corsets and cravats, who promenaded around the mythological statuary beneath Paxton’s central vault, realised that the architectural future of our cities was actually where they were standing.
The interior