The Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace

The Crystal Palace was an enormous cast-iron-and-glass exhibition hall designed by the gardener turned engineer Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first great international world's fair, conceived by Prince Albert and Henry Cole. Erected in Hyde Park in only about nine months, the building stretched 1,851 feet long with an interior height of 128 feet, roughly three times the volume of St Paul's Cathedral, and was glazed with 293,000 panes of glass manufactured by Chance Brothers. Paxton's modular, prefabricated construction system, built around a patented ridge and furrow roofing method he had developed for greenhouses, allowed the structure to be assembled with unprecedented speed and later dismantled and re-erected. The building's scale, transparency and industrial method of assembly made it a landmark in the use of iron and glass as primary architectural materials, prefiguring later modernist emphasis on prefabrication and structural expression. After the exhibition closed, having drawn six million visitors, the Palace was relocated to Sydenham Hill in south London, where it stood until destroyed by fire on 30 November 1936, an event witnessed by roughly 100,000 spectators including Winston Churchill, who reportedly remarked that it marked the end of an age.