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Joseph Paxton: The Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition 1851
Paxton’s remarkable career - starting as a humble gardener’s boy at age 15, by diligence and what one can only describe as genius, he became the Chief Gardener at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chiswick Gardens. Here his work was spotted by the Duke of Devonshire, and Paxton became the Head Gardener at Chatsworth House, one of the grand houses and gardens of England. Paxton, through his fascination with creating the ideal conditions for growing vegetables, flowers and trees, developed a considerable skill in engineering, designing and building a large glass and wood Conservative Wall and an even larger Great Conservatory (started 1837), made of cast-iron and glass - a glass-house some 227 feet by 123 feet (69x37 metres). A Royal Commission was set up in 1850 to plan The Great Exhibition - a showcase of British Industrial and technological talent to be held in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, central London. The requirement was for a temporary building, and after several months of prevarication, and manouvering by Paxton, the Commission accepted his design - which was made from pre-fabricated cast-iron structural components, as well as thousands of sheets of glass. The resulting Crystal Palace was huge - 1,848 feet (563 metres) long, 408 feet (124 m) wide and 108 feet (33 m) high - large enough to hold and display the thousands of artefacts chosen to exemplify British industrial might. The building fulfilled the brief perfectly, and became the first ‘modern’ building in Europe - some 40 years before Gustave Eiffel’s Tower, and 60 years years in advance of Walter Gropius’ Fagus Factory - both landmarks of modern architecture.
The dominant style of architecture in the early 19th century was neo-Classicism - borrowing the tropes of power and stability from the classical buildings of Greece and Rome - the geometries of the Golden Section, columns in the classical orders - little surface decoration. The Victorian aesthetes wanted their burgeoning nation - and nascent Empire - to echo the glories of times past. Another emerging style through the mid-century and beyond was to borrow ideas from the Gothic Renaissance of the 10th and 11th centuries (the era of great cathedrals), and so we have the hyper-decorated neo-Gothic architecture of Westminster Palace, so applauded by John Ruskin. Both these forms - and the later more elegant Palladian style so beloved of Prince Albert - were backward looking. So despite having a name straight out of Le Morte d’Arthur, Paxton’s beautifully austere Crystal Palace is a radical, forward- looking, conception of what new forms the new materials of industrial cast-iron and plate-glass (and later of course steel and glass) could assume. Paxton became a most unlikely Modernist hero.