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[caption id="attachment_1966" align="aligncenter" width="219" caption="Construction was begun in 1850."]<a href="http://jeanatacc.com/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CPConstruction4.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1966" src="http://jeanatacc.com/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CPConstruction4-219x300.jpg" alt="" width="219" height="300" /></a>[/caption]

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<p style="text-align: center">This image was found at:  <a href="http://www.victorianstation.com/palace.html">http://www.victorianstation.com/palace.html</a></p>
<p dir="ltr" align="center">To get an idea of the scope and construction of the Crystal Palace, see this video put together by a student for a history assignment at:</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="center"><a href="http://youtu.be/Vqs8SGpN3aA">http://youtu.be/Vqs8SGpN3aA</a></p>
<p dir="ltr" align="center">For a slide show of period prints and paintings of the Palace, see this video made by World Star Academy in 2010. Portions of it are made to simulate a tour of the Exhibition.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="center"><a href="http://youtu.be/eqM6PXyp5MA">http://youtu.be/eqM6PXyp5MA</a></p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, soon to be known as Paxton’s Crystal Palace was the first prefabricated building ever constructed. Who knows where our 2100 Time Capsule will take us? And what will we use for shelter when we get there? As a symbol of pride and peace and as a building capable of enclosing 19 acres, built with modular  portable pieces that can be assembled without scaffolding or heavy lifting equipment, this is the architecture to save for our future.</p>
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[caption id="attachment_1965" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="A portion of the interior after openning May 1, 1851."]<a href="http://jeanatacc.com/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Afterwards6.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1965" src="http://jeanatacc.com/2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Afterwards6-300x256.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="256" /></a>[/caption]
<p style="text-align: center">This image was found at:  <a href="http://www.victorianstation.com/palace.html">http://www.victorianstation.com/palace.html</a></p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">The Great Exhibition was an idea conceived by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert. "In 1848 he placed a proposal before British Parliament to set up a self-supporting exhibition of the products of British Industry." (Howell) It was accepted. Prince Albert had two rules for the building. One was that the building must go up quickly. The other was that it must be removed after the fair was over. (Karwatka) The location was to be Hyde Park, London. 250 architectural plans were submitted. "Some 245 entries used masonry and did not obviously meet the requirement. Others would have been far too expensive or simply looked unpleasant. Another group of entries was requested." (Karwatka) Joseph Paxton (1801-1865), a "distinguished horticulturist and greenhouse desgner" (Fiero, 313) submitted his design to the Royal Commission in June 1850. Paxton believed he could build the temporary structure for 79,800. His proposal was accepted in July of 1850. When Prince Albert showed the plans to Queen Victoria he is reported as saying "Look well on these, my dear, for you may be looking at the architecture of the future." ("Industrial Design", 9:514)</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">"On Saturday, May 1st, 1851 (less than a year after Paxton’s proposal was accepted) the inauguration of the Palace of Industry was graced by Her Majesty Queen Victoria and Prince Albert."(Howell) The building that the crowds flocked to was completely manufactured with pieces off-site and the modules brought to Hyde Park to be assembled. (Fiero, 313) The Crystal Palace "was the largest building built to date, a third of a mile long, 450 feet wide, and enclosing an area of almost twenty-one acres. Its skeleton was made of cast iron, not timber, and its outer walls and roof were sheathed in plate glass, (about 300,000 panes) held in place by 205 miles of sash bars." (Marschall) A building made almost entirely of glass quickly gave rise to the name, Paxton’s Crystal Palace. The Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations was housed in a giant greenhouse.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">The Industrial Revolution began in the 1750"s. "The application of steam power to production machinery, the ability to ship goods worldwide, and the rise of the industrious middle classes were some of the many reasons that Britain was the first nation to industrialize. The results were a mixed bag. Industrialization brought misery for those all but forced into mechanized sweatshops and encouraged cities to grow beyond their capacity or ability to provide civilized places to live. Pollution and new forms of accident and disease became rife." (Glancy, 136) It would be understandable if bad morale, amongst the citizenry of England, were one of the reasons that Prince Albert wanted to have this exhibition. The exhibition also would have provided an excuse and apology for British imperialism. Maybe he was also spurred by the conviction that Industrialization had an up-side, as much as by the prevailing winds of nationalist pride indicative of the Romantic era, to build a monument and cathedral of commerce for the Works of Industry as they existed in his time. He did want to showcase what Great Britain had accomplished. By colonization, they had wrested the raw materials of production and had them brought to England for the manufacturing of goods that could now be afforded by the new middle class.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">The Crystal Palace "downplayed the violence of imperialism, instead celebrating the "progress’ and ‘modernity’ produced by colonialism." (Farr, 101) Prince Albert’s intentions may have been to demonstrate Great Britain’s technological competitiveness, but it also gave countries like India and China an opportunity to represent themselves "outside their own territories." (Grafe, 283) "Studies of the Great Exhibition...have recognized that the displays were bound up with the idea that industrial capitalism would generate peace, progress and prosperity." (Young, 344) The Crystal Palace was a physical monument to the ideals of the Romantic era. It was built to heroic proportions and for the pride of industry and nationalism Great Britain desired to show its citizens. (Fiero, 315)</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">"More than 13,000 exhibitors took part." ("Crystal Palace Exhibition", III:274) Exhibits included minerals and goods from as far away as India and China. The United States had it’s own wing. The Kohinoor diamond held "center stage. The 186.5 carat diamond (was) positioned centrally within the Palace. The six foot high cage that housed the diamond featured a system of gas lights which were intended to illuminate the stone from below."(Young, 345-346) Also featured was a display of Samuel Colt’s new invention, made by the new American manufacturing ‘system of interchangeable parts’, the revolving pistol, currently being used from horseback in the wars against the American Indians. ("Samuel Colt", 172) Silks from China, embroidery from the English countryside, a canoe suspended above the Canadian exhibit and many more exotic items from the world outside England rounded out the show.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Tickets were sold ahead and were sold out for the day of the opening. During the nine months it was located in Hyde Park, London, the Exhibition was attended by 6,000,000 visitors. ("Crystal Palace", III:274) This number was helped when the ticket prices were dropped from 4 per person (to attend the opening with the Queen and her Prince Consort) to 5 shillings per person within a month of the opening. (Howell) A profit of the equivalent of $750,000 was made. Afterwards it was disassembled and moved to Sydenham, London, where it remained a tourist attraction for the next 85 years. (Crystal Palace", III:274) The exhibition was meant not only as an advertisement and aggrandizement of British ingenuity, but as an "effort to educate through recreation." (Piggot) And educate it did, in a very profitable and popular way.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">In his book, "<em>The Closing of the Great Exhibition or, England’s Mission to all Nations", </em>the Reverend William Forster "cast the display of raw materials and artifacts set out within Joseph Paxton’s purpose-built Crystal Palace as an embodiment of free-trade and universal peace ideas." (Young, 343) Nikolai Chernyshevsky(1828-1889) was a writer and editor for the radical "Contemporary" in Russia. He visited the Palace in 1859. ("Nikolai Gavilovich Chernyshevsky", 504) Afterwards, Michael Katz wrote that Chernyshevsky’s reaction was that "the elegance, simplicity, harmony, and rationality of the structure would provide evidence of man’s absolute and total perfectibility. The Crystal Palace was the secular actualization of the kingdom of heaven on earth." (Katz, 44)</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Not all reactions were good. Chernyshevsky’s compatriot Fedor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), another Russian writer, visited the Crystal Palace in the summer of 1862. Michael Katz describes Dostoevsky’s reaction as extremely negative. "To him (Dostoevsky), the building represented the triumph of mathematics and engineering: it left no room for man’s whims...it (the Palace) was an emblem of human pride and arrogance; it constituted a threat to human freedom and autonomy."     The Crystal Palace etched itself onto the world’s consciousness, even if sometimes that impression was not always favorable.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">John Ruskin, (1819-1900) "perhaps the greatest art critic of the second half of the nineteenth century, appreciated the Crystal Palace as a feat of engineering, but not as art." (Farr, 66) "Many architects in 1851 would have seen the Crystal Palace as a threat, or if they had no sense of the future, would have dismissed it as a large greenhouse and not proper architecture." (Glancy, 141) Architects of today recognize it as a major milestone in the evolution of architecture. Jonathon Glancy wrote in his book, "<em>The Story of Architecture</em>", that the Palace was the " first large-scale prefabricated building in modern materials the world had seen. (Plate-glass and cast iron were recent manufacturing inventions.) It pointed the way forward to a new way of building, free from style and materials (wood and stone masonry) that had held architecture in their grasp from Mesopotamia to nineteenth-century England. In fact it foreshadowed the great glazed (glass curtained) buildings of the late twentieth-century office atriums and shopping malls." (Glancy, 141)</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">The Crystal Palace’s closest cousin is the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. Built 38 years after the Crystal Palace, the Eiffel Tower was designed and built by Gustav Eiffel as the entrance arch "for the Paris World Exhibition of 1889." (Fiero, 315) Unlike the Crystal Palace, which was built to view the treasures of the known world, the Eiffel Tower was built with the sole purpose of viewing the surrounding landscape. Built by the same new technology as the Crystal Palace and for the same reasons, the Eiffel tower took up 1,064 feet of vertical space; just 787 feet shorter than the Palace was long in horizontal space. It was very convenient that elevators had been invented around the mid-nineteenth century. The Eiffel tower was equipped with an elevator that ran from the 3rd level to the panoramic viewing deck. The Palace had only two levels of flooring with flights of stairs at regular intervals throughout the hall. The Palace was an enclosed space. The Eiffel Tower was all open and decorative metal work. While the Palace took only nine months to build, the Eiffel Tower took the years 1887-1889 to complete. Both constructions were "landmarks of heroic materialism." (Fiero, 315) Both were built for exhibitions. Both were built in the spirit of the Romantic era’s nationalistic pride in their respective nations. The Eiffel Tower is still standing where it was originally built and has become a symbol of the city of Paris, France. The Crystal Palace was moved after October of 1851 to Sydenham, London and "reconstructed there as the focal point of a landscaped park until it was destroyed by fire on November 30th, 1936." (Farr, 66) All that was left was the water fountains that decorated the park and those were destroyed when "in 1941 German bombers (used the fountains) to mark a portal to the city (of London) and were demolished. (Piggot)</p>
The Crystal Palace was a representation of globalization and peace. It made the citizens of Great Britain aware of being more than citizens of London or even England; it made them citizens of the world. That is a sentiment that is still pertinent today with all of its attending anxieties. Was there ever a tribe of people or a civilization that had no awareness of other competing groups? If there ever was, it is gone from known human histories. We could use Paxton’s Crystal Palace as a symbol of world peace and human ingenuity in our future endeavors. It is a powerful testament to our better intentions. It also has practical applications. Built primarily of glass and cast iron, it enclosed entire mature trees. The light the glass let in, was conducive to life within. Capable of allowing up to 80,000 people to stand in its environs, it could become the main building in any new community we might establish. Easily manufactured modules could be built into a useful and magnificent center of community. The plans that Joseph Paxton submitted in 1850 are still relevant today and could be shipped in the 2100 Time Capsule to be built with the stronger materials of our space age. Paxton’s Crystal Palace is the architecture to save in the 2100 Time Capsule for the future of mankind.
<p dir="ltr" align="center">Bibliography</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Banham, Rayner <em>Age of the Masters</em> New York: Icon Editions Harper and Row Publishers. 1975. Print.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Bellis, Mary "History of the Elevator: Elisha Otis" About.com Web. 30 Oct. 2011.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">"Crystal Palace" <em>The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia</em>. 15th ed. Vol. III 1979. Print.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">"Crystal Palace Exhibition" <em>The New Encyclopaedia Britannica: Micropaedia</em>. 15th ed. Vol. III 1979. Print.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Farr, Ed. James R. Vol. 9 "Industrial Revolution in Europe, 1750-1914"<em> </em>Detroit: Gale. 2003. 98-101. <em>World History in Context</em></p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Fiero, Gloria K. The Humanistic Tradition: <em>The Early Modern World to the Present </em>6th ed. Boston: McGraw Hill. 2011. Print.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">"Fedor Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky" <em>Encyclopedia of World Biography </em>Vol. 3. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale. 2004. 504-505. Web. 29 Oct. 2011.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Glancy, Jonathan <em>The Story of Architecture </em>New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing, Inc. 2000. Print.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">"Industrial Design" <em>Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia </em>15th ed. Vol. 9 1979. Print.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Karwatka, Dennis J<em>oseph Paxton and the Crystal Palace</em> Tech Directions 61.5 (2001):8. Academic Search Complete EBSCO. Web. 15 Oct. 2011.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Katz, Michael "The Russian Response to Modernity: Crystal Palace, Eiffel Tower, Brooklyn Bridge" <em>Southwest Review</em> 2008:93.1 44-57. Print.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Marschall, Laurence A. "The Busiest Man in England: A Life of Joseph Paxton, Gardener, Architect and Victorian Visionary" <em>Natural History </em>Sept. 2006: 54.<em> World History in Context. </em>Web. 15 Oct. 2011.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">"Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky" <em>Encyclopedia of World Biography </em>Vol. 3. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 504-505. Web. 29 Oct. 2011.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Piggot, Jan "Reflections of empire: glittering monument to Britain’s colonial achievement or fragile symbol of a fragmenting imperial dream?" <em>History Today </em>61.4 (2011):32+ <em>World History In Context. </em>Web. 15 Oct. 2011.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Raeburn, Michael <em>An Outline of World Architecture </em>London: Octopus Books Limited. 1978. Print.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">Leland M. <em>Understanding Architecture: Its Elements, History and Meaning </em>New York: Icon Editions An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers. 1993, Print.</p>
<p dir="ltr" align="left">"Samuel Colt" <em>Encyclopedia of World Biography </em>2nd ed. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale. 2004. <em>Gale Virtual Reference Library </em>Web. 29 Oct. 2011.</p>
Young, Paul <em>Carbon, Mere Carbon: The Kohinoor, the Crystal Palace and the Mission to Make Sense of British India </em>Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Dec. 2007. 29:4:343-358

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