__1803: __Joseph Paxton is born in Milton Bryan, England. His career will take him from garden boy to gardener to landscape designer to architect-engineer of the largest glass buildings of his day — including London's famous Crystal Palace of 1851.
Paxton built a huge glass greenhouse at Chatsworth between 1836 and 1840 for his employer, the Duke of Devonshire. Queen Victoria knighted Paxton in 1850 not for his architectural accomplishments but for a horticultural achievement: coaxing the huge *Victoria amazonica *water lily to flower in a greenhouse.
Paxton's fame earned him a seat in the House of Commons, and it was there that he intersected with plans for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Royal Society of Arts had promoted the idea of an international exhibition of manufactures and industrial goods, and a royal commission was formed in 1850 to produce the event.
Half of the exhibition would be devoted to Britain and its empire, and the other half to foreign nations. An elaborate system of foreign and domestic committees would select the exhibits and create juries to award prizes to the outstanding entries in the various categories: raw materials, machinery, textiles, other manufactures, fine arts and miscellaneous.
The commission selected a site in London's Hyde Park and held a competition to design the building that would house the exhibition. The building committee, however, found all 245 submissions unsatisfactory and proceeded (as allowed by the rules) to create a composite design of its own.
The ungainly result was a huge iron dome on a long, low brick building. The press had a field day making fun of it, and — worse yet —none of the 19 bids submitted by contractors came in under the 100,000-pound budget (about $14 million in today's U.S. currency). Desperate, the committee lopped the dome off the design, leaving no more than a squat mega-shed.
Paxton told a fellow Member of Parliament that he had an idea for a better building. The colleague promptly introduced Paxton to the head of the commission, who indicated a willingness to look at a new solution. Paxton completed his plans in 13 days, and good thing that was, for a mere 10 months loomed before the planned opening.
The original Paxton design was essentially an immense greenhouse or conservatory, much like the ones Paxton had already built on country estates. Some commentators believe the the ribbed design of the building was inspired by the ribs of the Victoria amazonica.
The structure was to be of iron and glass on a concrete foundation. Its parts would be uniform, the whole building conceived in terms of of 24-foot bays or modules, repeated 77 times. It could be built extremely fast, because it was essentially prefabricated. But this was not yet the exhibition building that would come to fruition.
The royal commission's building committee saw Paxton's proposal as either the salvation or the ruin of the Great Exhibition. Its airy beauty, ease of construction and non-permanence were all in its favor, but it was essentially an experimental building in size and scope. If Paxton's ideas were accepted only to fail, the exhibition itself would fail.
Impatient with the committee, Paxton had his plans published in the Illustrated London News. The public loved it, and the building committee gave provisional approval. Provisional, because three giant elms that straddled the building site were the focus of the remaining opposition to erecting a giant structure in a much-favored park. Paxton was asked if he could somehow spare the trees.
His solution turned a lemon into lemonade. He modified his design to include a massive, glass-vaulted transept at the center. The building would rise above the elms. This is the building that Punch dubbed the "Crystal Palace."
The Crystal Palace would be 1,851 feet long, to match the year of the exhibition. It would be 408 feet wide at the ends and 456 feet wide at the center. The long nave of the cross-shaped structure was to be 63 feet high, and the soaring transept would span 72 feet at the height of 108 feet. The building would cover 18 acres, with a total floor area of 23 acres, counting the interior balconies. Its saw-tooth roof required 24 miles of gutters.
Except for the wooden frame of the transept, the Crystal Palace was built of iron columns and girders of uniform lengths, and plated with almost 300,000 standardized panes of glass. This allowed workers to complete the building a remarkably short period. They laid the foundation in August 1850, raised the first column in September and the first transept ribs in January.
Exhibits started arriving in February, and all structural details were complete at the end of March. April was spent decorating, arranging and otherwise preparing for the State Opening.
The Crystal Palace had been built in just nine months. That and its airy, fairy-tale romantic effect in the greenery of Hyde Park stood in marked contrast to another new palace in London. The Gothic Revival stone-and-wood New Palace of Westminster — better known as the Houses of Parliament — was just nearing completion on the banks of the Thames, after 15 years of construction. (The original Palace of Westminster had burned down in 1834.)
Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, opened the Great International Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations on May 1, 1851. The event was exclusive to season-ticket holders — 25,000 of them.
Pristine and uncluttered machinery competed for attention with florid and ornate Victorian decorative crafts. Almost 14,000 exhibitors displayed over 100,000 exhibits said to be worth more than 2 million pounds (about $280 million today).
That figure excluded, of course, the literally priceless Koh-i-Noor diamond that had come into the possession of the Crown only two years previously. In her journal, the queen called the opening "one of the greatest and most glorious days of our lives."
The public and the press were likewise enthusiastic. In its 141 days, more than 6 million visits were made to the Crystal Palace. Despite a cold, wet summer, receipts of 522,000 pounds yielded a profit of 186,000 pounds ($26.5 million today). The profit has been invested and used to fund charitable works for more than a century-and-a-half.
More than three-quarters of the visits were made on the 80 bargain days, when the admission fee was one shilling. This in a year when a loaf of bread cost half-a-shilling, and a working-class couple could expect to pay 4 shillings a week for rent.
Poverty was rampant in industrial London. Punch, which had named the Crystal Palace, suggested that things would not seem as rosy if the suffering laborers rather than the products of their labors were placed on exhibit.
The Great Exhibition was an early harbinger of globalization, for all its goods and ills. It was also the first World's Fair, followed soon by similar extravaganzas in New York and Paris, and then around the world ever since.
Some sentiment arose to preserve the Crystal Palace as a permanent museum, but Parliament decided in 1852 to dismantle the building. It was sold to the Crystal Palace Company, a Paxton enterprise, and rebuilt in a somewhat altered form at Sydenham in South London.
Paxton died at Sydenham in 1865. A national campaign raised enough money to repurchase the privately held Crystal Palace for the nation in 1913, and it was restored as a resort and entertainment center in 1920.
The Crystal Palace went up in flames in a spectacular blaze on November 30, 1936. It was at the height of the crisis that led to the abdication of King Edward VIII just 11 days later. Many people at the time viewed the loss of one beloved national symbol as a bad omen for the future of the other.
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