HTS essay 1 "The Crystal Palace"
Emmanouil Stavrakakis History and Theory Studies 07/12/2018
The Crystal Palace; A Greenhouse or A Palace
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Description
The Crystal Palace was built in the southern end of Hyde Park in London. It was lo- cated just below the Serpentine river facing the main street between the park and Kensington.
It stretches horizontally along the street, its plan forming a parallelogram of 1,848 feet long
and 408 feet wide. The whole length of the building is occupied by a main avenue through the center which is 72 feet wide. Passing into the west entrance you would directly face the wholelength of the avenue flanked by smaller ones on both sides, the left one being narrower at 24feet wide while left one extending to 48 feet. Going further into the avenue you would notice that in a point about the center of its length a transept of the same width intersects it, dividing itinto two main parts, the west wing and the east wing. The first two smaller avenues on the westwing reach a height of 43 feet whereas the ones on the east wing go up to 23 feet. The transept, whose main purpose was to include two mature elm trees inside the Palace, reach a peak height of 108 feet. There are two other groups of trees enclosed in the building, roughly on the two extremes of the northern part, making room for open courts. The circulation in the Palace is organized through three main entrances, the main one in the center facing the south front which is accessible through the Kensington street and one at either end of the building on the west and east wing respectively. Such limited amount of entrances is intentional as to avoid large num-bers of staff officers. There are however fifteen exit doors placed at frequent intervals in orderto afford ample opportunities of egress for visitors.
Considering how the Crystal Palace was built in 1851, a time when the industrial rev- olution was thriving, its designer Joseph Paxton constructed the whole building using prefab- ricated pieces of iron and glass. The columns making up the avenues where the Palace is split are constructed by hollow-cast iron, standing 24 feet apart from each other and rising at three different stories. In order to divide the greatest height into three stories, short connecting-pieces are introduced, between the different lengths of the columns, supporting girders in horizontal tiers. The fact that all girders are similar in depth and appearance creates a type of lattice-like work which despite of its great strength manages to look light and elegant.
The whole length of the building is occupied by galleries extending in four parallel lines above the sides of the smaller avenues. They are supported by the lower tier of the girders where the building reaches more than one story high. The galleries are only intercepted by the transept, where they continue around its ends. There are also many cross galleries connecting the parallel lines uniformly on both sides of the main avenue, which rises undisturbed through all its length. The whole iron structure of the crystal palace is connected by prefabricated glass panels mak- ing the building a mesmerizing sight to behold from the outside while on the inside achieving a uniformly lit Palace which many have described as fairytale-like.
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Figure 1
Peter Berlyn, and Charles Fowler, Jnr. Engravings by George Measom (1818-1901). - The Crystal Palace: Its Architectural History and Constructive Marvels. https://archive.org/details/crystalpalaceits00berl
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The Crystal palace was the outcome of a design competition meant to produce a building which would house the great exhibition as well as showcase the manufacturing achievements of the industrial age. It was quite important for this building to represent the economical power of Victorian era England and through its grandeur make a statement to all the countries participat- ing in the event. It was built in a very short period of time in Hyde Park by a self-made gardener called Joseph Paxton.
It is however its identity as a place which makes room for interpretation that I will explore in this essay. As phenomenologists and especially Heidegger would depict it, the Crystal Palace is exactly a Place; a space defined by people’s experience. Because of the expanse of the exhibition it hosted, as well as the influence it had on the Victorian era, there is still a symbolic charge retained by it.
In 1951 the crystal palace stretched horizontally through around 21 acres of Hyde park, engulfing trees and everything on its way within its massive structure. It was indeed an enormous steel building composed of modular glass sheets whose ratio of relatively thin skeleton to wide glass panels acted like a transparent skin in order to maximize space and allow as much daylight as possible creating an illusion of translucency. As you went inside through the gallery it would seem like the palace knew no end, almost surrendering to a monotonous row of columns and beams. Its design was indeed based on straightforward mathematical lines following standard units with calculations consisting of multiples of eight. What added to the surrealism of the palace was the use of interchangeable materials such as identical sash bars, gutters, columns and girders. It was these same attributes which formed an almost inseparable connection between the palace and a greenhouse. Joseph Paxton was himself firstly a gardener and then an architect so it comes as no surprise that he would look up to nature for inspiration, as he has also agreed “Nature has provided the leaf with longitudinal and transverse girders and supports that I, borrowing from
it, have adopted in this building.”1 What he is referring to in his comment, is the leaf of a gigantic lily he helped nurture while he was working as a gardener in Chatsworth. The lily was growing so fast that he had to build it a new greenhouse which would adhere to the plants needs. What made this greenhouse one of Paxton’s most interesting ones and ultimately his source of inspiration was its efficient structure borrowed by the formation of the leaf itself. When designing the glasshouse, Paxton had to take to consideration the environmental requirements of the water lily, exposing it to intense heat and sunlight. While the objective when designing the Crystal Palace was quite the opposite, to keep it cool and ventilated while occupied by large groups of people, the principles he followed were identical.
Figure 2
Picture of the giant leaf of a water lily
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As George Chadwick accounts for the direct relationship between Paxton’s greenhouse and the Crystal Palace: “the same roofing system, the same method of enclosing the sides of the building, the same conception of a framework and a covering, the same principles of roof drain- age through the hollow structural columns, the same slatted floor; the only difference is one of size”.2 And it was indeed an aspiration of achieving full environmental control of what was to
be a self-contained biosphere that determined the construction technique as well as the internal organization of the Crystal Palace. It was a first attempt of this scale to adapt what was a tradition in agricultural greenhouses to human habitation instead of plant. One of the first accounts of the project for the great Exhibition in the Illustrated London News of 1850 briefly described Paxton’s plans of reusing the Palace as a winter garden suggesting at his aspirations of utilizing glasshous- es in terms of human functions.
These ideals together with his notions of non-hierarchical order and uniformity resulted in an open plan structure of identical bay frames at a sequence with no internal partitions which was able to fulfill the requirements for flexibility, free flow and unhampered views. How- ever, Paxton’s original concept of uniformity was partially altered due to the addition of a round glass vault over the transept which allowed for a group of mature trees to be included inside the Palace. By using iron and wood in the making of its slim large span framing system, the Palace’s physical structure resulted in a filigreed three-dimensional frame achieving a minimum obstruc- tion to day light. Going back to its resemblance with the water lily greenhouse, the horizontal part of the roof of the Crystal Palace was built using ridge and furrow glazing making it possible for a significantly deep area on the ground to be covered and receive proper day light.
Figure 3
Original article from the Illustrated London New referring to Paxton’s proposal
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Nonetheless, apart from lighting, there were other factors to be taken to consideration regarding the environmental control of the Palace. Ventilation, for instance, played a major role in the comfort of the building considering the system would have to deal with issues such as hu- midity, heat and smell in a public space occupied by large crowds of people. There were two main construction techniques which contributed to the air-flow in the building, one being the ventila- tion system composed of continuous horizontal rows of ventilators located in the top section of the vertical facades as well as additional ones at the lower level in most of the bays and the other being the air entering the space from the gaps between floor boards below the ground floor which in total consisted of an area of 40,800 square feet of opening. All the same, many articles and let- ters published on The Times at this period suggest that Paxton’s system at controlling the indoor environment was not completely sufficient, especially during the hottest days of the exhibition.This did not, however, detain people from visiting not only the Crystal Palace but Paxton’s other works as well. Indeed, many royals visited his greenhouses and especially his great conservatory, some remarking they had never observed a more magnificent view having such mesmerizing effect on the eye. The “fairyland” illusion created by the 12000 lights displayed, must have been a bewitching thing to observe which was later intensified in the crystal palace.
However, regardless of its similarities to a greenhouse the building which housed the world exhibition of the 19th century carries the title of the Palace. Going back to its two main materials; glass and iron, one might observe that their physical properties put in the context of the crystal Palace are rendered symbolic. Consisting of almost 300’000 glass panels the building is a standing monument to glass. The name thus supports the most significant material and its strik- ing quality of transparency. We do just the same approach the subject of typology in the context of symbolism. Germain Boffrand was the first to introduce the concept that certain types of build- ings become symbols of their functions by virtue of their charactere (1667-1754). In this line of thought we could make a comparison between Foucault’s examination of how a transparent space can make for a more controlling environment than a dark dungeon and The crystal palace whose most significant feature was transparency. What brings these two concepts together is not their transparency, but rather the use of transparency to convey power. In the first case, Foucault imag- ines a new space which reverses two of the main principles of a dungeon – to hide and to deprive of light-, but preserves the concept of enclosure, as he said “Visibility is a trap” (Foucault 2013).
Figure 4
a) Panoptic space within the Crystal Palace, in John McKean, Crystal Palace (London: Phaidon Press, 1994).
b) N. Harou Romain. A prisoner in his cell, in Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin Books, 1977)
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That follows in his logic that the prisoner must be sure of the possibility of being looked at, but never know for sure if he is, and this in itself holds power. The same principle applies
to the Crystal Palace in a less menacing specter. Even though it was meant to exhibit industrialmanufacturing the focus quickly shifted to its visitors who so became the center of the exhibition.It was a crowd of mixed classes orchestrated in what seemed to be an almost borderless spacearound a specific display of industrial goods, all under the tension laced veil of power exerted bya hyperbolic publicity.
As far away as a dungeon and a Palace stand from each other, the comparison shows that a building may be labeled not only as a matter of physical material, but of what it communicates to the people and that a typology might be just as symbolical. As Quatremére de Quincy pro- posed imitation as the common starting point for any process of artistic production so the crystal palace started its life as a greenhouse imitating a water lily which then went through the process of transforming its typological value through a symbolic function to what people know today as the Crystal Palace.
to the Crystal Palace in a less menacing specter. Even though it was meant to exhibit industrialmanufacturing the focus quickly shifted to its visitors who so became the center of the exhibition.It was a crowd of mixed classes orchestrated in what seemed to be an almost borderless spacearound a specific display of industrial goods, all under the tension laced veil of power exerted bya hyperbolic publicity.
As far away as a dungeon and a Palace stand from each other, the comparison shows that a building may be labeled not only as a matter of physical material, but of what it communicates to the people and that a typology might be just as symbolical. As Quatremére de Quincy pro- posed imitation as the common starting point for any process of artistic production so the crystal palace started its life as a greenhouse imitating a water lily which then went through the process of transforming its typological value through a symbolic function to what people know today as the Crystal Palace.
Figure 5
People of different social classes meeting inside the Crystal Palace, in Punch (1851)
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Notes
2. Hollister, Paul. “THE GLAZING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE.” Journal of Glass Studies 16 (1974): http://www.jstor.org/stable/24188017.
Bibliography
Paulson, Ronald. The Georgia Review 30, no. 3 (1976): 730-36. http://www.jstor.org/sta- ble/41397291.
ROWLANDS, MICHAEL. “NOTES ON THE MATERIAL SYMBOLISM OF GRASSFIELDS PAL- ACES.” Paideuma 31 (1985): 203-13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23076461.
Auerbach, Jeffrey A. 1999. The Great Exhibition Of 1851. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hobhouse, Hermione. 2002. The Crystal Palace And The Great Exhibition. London: The Anthlone Press.
Heidegger, Martin, and David Farrell Krell. 2008. Basic Writings. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Thought.
McKean, John. 1994. Crystal Palace. London: Phaidon.
Briggs, Asa. 1979. Iron Bridge To Crystal Palace. London: Thames and Hudson.
Brown, William Edward, Miron Grindea, and Paul B Redmayne. 1943. Changing Britain. Bourn- ville, Birmingham: Cadbury Brothers
Kohlmaier, G. and Sartory, B. (1991). Houses of glass. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Davies, P. (2015). Joseph Paxton (1803-1865). [online] Architectural Review. Available at: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/reputations-pen-portraits-/joseph-pax- ton-1803-1865/8692413.article [Accessed 5 Nov. 2018].
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