Designed for London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crystal Palace used a repeating system of iron framing and standardized glass panes. Rapid construction made a vast exhibition hall possible. The structure was later dismantled, rebuilt at Sydenham, and eventually destroyed by fire in 1936.
Design
Paxton's modular, hierarchical design reflected his brilliance as a designer and problem-solver. It incorporated many breakthroughs, offered practical advantages that no conventional building of that era could match and, above all, it embodied the spirit of British innovation that the Great Exhibition was intended to celebrate. The geometry of the Crystal Palace was a classic example of the concept of form following manufacturer's limitations: the shape and size of the whole building was directly based around the size of the panes of glass made by the supplier, Chance Brothers of Smethwick. These were the largest available at the time, measuring 10 inches (25 cm) wide by 49 inches (120 cm) long. Because the entire building was scaled around those dimensions, it meant that nearly the whole outer surface could be glazed using hundreds of thousands of identical panes, thereby drastically reducing both their production cost and the time needed to install them.
The original Hyde Park building was essentially a vast, flat-roofed rectangular hall. A huge open gallery ran along the main axis, with wings extending down either side. The main exhibition space was two stories high, with the upper floor stepped in from the boundary. Most of the building had a flat-profile roof, except for the central transept, which was covered by a 72-foot-wide (22 m) barrel-vaulted roof that stood 168 feet (51 m) high at the top of the arch. Both the flat-profile sections and the arched transept roof were constructed using the key element of Paxton's design: his patented ridge-and-furrow roofing system, which had first seen use at Chatsworth. The basic roofing unit, in essence, took the form of a long triangular prism, which made it both extremely light and very strong, and meant it could be built with the minimum amount of materials.
Construction
Fox, Henderson and Co took possession of the site in July 1850, and erected wooden hoardings which were constructed using the timber that later became the floorboards of the finished building. More than 5,000 navvies worked on the building during its construction, with up to 2,000 on site at one time during the peak building phase. More than 1,000 iron columns supported 2,224 trellis girders and 30 miles of guttering, comprising 4,000 tons of iron in all.
Firstly stakes were driven into the ground to roughly mark out the positions for the cast iron columns; these points were then set precisely by theodolite measurements. Then the concrete foundations were poured, and the base plates for the columns were set into them. Once the foundations were in place, the erection of the modules proceeded rapidly. Connector brackets were attached to the top of each column before erection, and these were then hoisted into position.
The Crystal Palace depended on standardized components that could be manufactured in quantity and quickly assembled. Repeating iron-and-glass modules supported themselves, allowing several sections to rise without waiting for the entire structure to be completed. Its comparatively light construction reduced the need for massive masonry foundations. The building’s impressive size therefore resulted from an industrial system of repetition as well as from its designer’s architectural vision.
Relocation and redesign
The life of the Great Exhibition was limited to six months, after which something had to be decided on the future of the Crystal Palace building. Against the wishes of parliamentary opponents, a consortium of eight businessmen, including Samuel Laing and Leo Schuster, who were both board members of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR), formed a holding company and proposed that the edifice be taken down and relocated to a property named Penge Place, which had been excised from Penge Common at the top of Sydenham Hill.
The reconstruction of the Crystal Palace began on Sydenham Hill in 1852. The new building, while incorporating most of the constructional parts of the original one at Hyde Park, was so completely different in form as to be properly considered a quite different structure – a 'Beaux-arts' form in glass and metal. The main gallery was redesigned and covered with a barrel-vaulted roof; the central transept was greatly enlarged and made even higher; the large arch of the main entrance was framed by a new facade and served by an imposing set of terraces and stairways. The building measured 1,608 feet (490 m) feet in length by 384 feet (117 m) feet across the transepts.