Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace was a vast prefabricated building of cast iron and plate glass, designed by Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October 1851. Its glass roof and walls made it one of the most influential buildings of the 19th century and a forerunner of modern prefabricated, modular construction.

Origins

Paxton was a gardener and glasshouse designer. He developed his ideas at Chatsworth, where he built the Great Conservatory and a house for the giant Amazonian waterlily Victoria regia after it first flowered there in 1849. That lily house used flat ridge-and-furrow glazing and a cantilevered glass curtain wall; Paxton said the lily's ribbed leaves were an inspiration. His first sketch for the Crystal Palace, drawn on blotting paper at a railway board meeting in Derby, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The roof

Paxton's ridge-and-furrow roof used long rows of glass laid in triangular prisms that shed rain into the valleys between them. Rain ran into timber channels in the furrows. These channels also served as rails for glaziers' trolleys during construction, and the system later became widely known as the "Paxton gutter".

Glass and size

The glass was made by Chance Brothers of Smethwick. Each pane was about 49 by 10 in (1.24 m by 0.25 m), the largest then available, and the whole building's grid was based on this size. Sources cite about 293,000 panes. The building was about 1,848 by 456 ft (563 by 139 m), with an exhibition space of about 990,000 sq ft (92,000 m²). Sources disagree on how quickly it was built, giving both thirty-nine weeks and five months.

Later history

After the exhibition the building was dismantled and rebuilt on Sydenham Hill in south London from 1852; Queen Victoria reopened it on 10 June 1854. It was destroyed by fire on 30 November 1936. The cause is unknown; an electrical fault in old wiring is suspected.

Significance

The Crystal Palace showed that a huge roof could be made of standard, factory-made components and assembled quickly. It remains a key reference in the history of glazed roofs and prefabricated building.