London - Crystal Palace from south lithograph - V&A postcard

Postcard
• Picture / Image:  Crystal Palace from the south from a lithograph by T Picker
• Publisher:  Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Postally used:  no
• Stamp:  n/a
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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :

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The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and plate-glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's 990,000 square feet (92,000 m²) of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in the Industrial Revolution. Designed by Sir Joseph Paxton, the Great Exhibition building was 1,851 feet (564 m) long, with an interior height of 128 feet (39 m).^[1] Because of the recent invention of the cast plate glass method in 1848, which allowed for large sheets of cheap but strong glass, it was at the time the largest amount of glass ever seen in a building and astonished visitors with its clear walls and ceilings that did not require interior lights, thus a ""Crystal Palace"".

After the exhibition, the building was rebuilt in an enlarged form on Penge Common next to Sydenham Hill, an affluent South London suburb full of large villas. It stood there from 1854 until its destruction by fire in 1936.

The name Crystal Palace came from the playwright Douglas Jerrold. On 13 July 1850 he wrote in the satirical magazine Punch as 'Mrs Amelia Mouser' about the forthcoming Great Exhibition of 1851, referring to a palace of very crystal, a name that was subsequently picked up and repeated even though the building had not been approved at that stage.^[2]

The name was later used to denote this area of south London and the park that surrounds the site, home of the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre. A re-working of the building, known as The Garden Palace, was constructed in Sydney in 1879, but this building too was destroyed by fire. There are proposals, although in early stages, to re-build the Crystal Palace within the Crystal Palace Park.^[3]

The huge, modular, wood,^[4] glass and iron structure was originally erected in Hyde Park in London to house The Great Exhibition of 1851, which showcased the products of many countries throughout the world.^[5]

The Commission in charge of mounting the Great Exhibition was established in January 1850, and it was decided at the outset that the entire project would be funded by public subscription. An executive Building Committee was quickly formed to oversee the design and construction of the exhibition building, comprising Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Stephenson, renowned architects Charles Barry and Thomas Leverton Donaldson, the Duke of Buccleuch and the Earl of Ellesmere, and chaired by William Cubitt. By 15 March 1850 they were ready to invite submissions, which had to conform to several key specifications: the building had to be temporary, simple, as cheap as possible, and economical to build within the short time remaining before the Exhibition opening, which had already been scheduled for 1 May 1851.^[6]

Within three weeks, the committee had received some 245 entries, including 38 international submissions from Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Hanover, Switzerland, Brunswick, Hamburg and France. Two designs, both in iron and glass, were singled out for praise - one by Richard Turner, co-designer of the Palm House at Kew, and the other by French architect Hector Horeau^[7] but despite the great number of submissions, the Committee rejected them all. Turner was furious at the rejection, and reportedly badgered the commissioners for months afterwards, seeking compensation, but at an estimated £300,000, his design (like Horeau's) was too expensive.^[8] As a last resort the committee came up with a standby design of its own, for a brick building in the rundbogenstil by Donaldson, featuring a sheet-iron dome designed by Brunel^[9] but it was widely criticized and ridiculed when it was published in the newspapers.^[10] Adding to the Committee's woes, the site for the Exhibition was still not confirmed; the preferred site was in Hyde Park, adjacent to Princes Gate near Kensington Rd, but other sites considered included Wormwood Scrubs, Battersea Park, the Isle of Dogs, Victoria Park and Regent's Park. Opponents of the scheme lobbied strenuously against the use of Hyde Park (and they were strongly supported by The Times). The most outspoken critic was arch-conservative Col. Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp; he denounced the Exhibition as ""one of the greatest humbugs, frauds and absurdities ever known"",^[6] and his trenchant opposition to both the Exhibition and its building continued even after it had closed.

At this point renowned gardener Joseph Paxton became interested in the project, and with the enthusiastic backing of Commission member Henry Cole, he decided to submit his own design. At this time, Paxton was chiefly known for his celebrated career as the head gardener for the 6th Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth House; by 1850 he had become a preeminent figure in British horticulture and had also earned great renown as a freelance garden designer - his works included the pioneering public gardens at Birkenhead Park which directly influenced design of New York's Central Park. At Chatsworth, Paxton had experimented extensively with glasshouse construction, developing many novel techniques for modular construction, using combinations of standard-sized sheets of glass, laminated wood, and prefabricated cast iron. The ""Great Stove"" (or conservatory) at Chatsworth (built in 1836) was the first major application of Paxton's now-famous ridge-and-furrow roof design, and was at the time the largest glass building in the world,^[11] covering around 28,000 square feet (2600 sq.m.).^[12] A decade later, taking advantage of the availability of the new cast plate glass, Paxton further developed his techniques with the Chatsworth Lily House, which featured a flat-roof version of the ridge-and-furrow glazing, and a curtain wall system that allowed the hanging of vertical bays of glass from cantilevered beams.^[13] The Lily House was built specifically to house the giant Victoria amazonica waterlily which had only recently been discovered by European botanists; the first specimen to reach England was originally kept at Kew Gardens, but it did not do well. Paxton's reputation as a gardener was so high by that time that he was invited to take the lily to Chatsworth; it thrived under his care and in 1849 he caused a sensation in the horticultural world when he succeeded in producing the first amazonica flowers to be grown in England (his daughter Alice was famously drawn for the newspapers, standing on one of leaves). The lily and its house led directly to Paxton's design for the Crystal Palace and he later cited the huge ribbed floating leaves as a key inspiration.^[14]

Paxton left his 9 June 1850 meeting with Henry Cole fired with enthusiasm. He immediately went to Hyde Park, where he 'walked' the site earmarked for the Exhibition. Two days later, on 11 June, while attending a board meeting of the Midland Railway, Paxton made his original concept drawing, which he famously doodled onto a sheet of pink blotting paper. This rough sketch (now in the Victoria & Albert Museum) incorporated all the basic features of the finished building, and it is a mark of Paxton's ingenuity and industriousness that detailed plans, calculations and costings were ready to submit in less than two weeks.

The project was a major gamble for Paxton, but circumstances were in his favour - he enjoyed a stellar reputation as a garden designer and builder, he was confident that his design was perfectly suited to the brief, and the Commission was now under enormous pressure to choose a design and get it built - the Exhibition opening was now less than a year away. In the event, Paxton's design fulfilled and surpassed all the requirements, and it proved to be vastly faster and cheaper to build than any other form of building of a comparable size. Indeed, his submission was budgeted at a remarkably low £85,800 - by comparison, this was only about 2-1/2 times more than the Great Stove at Chatsworth^[15] but it was only 28% of the estimated cost of Turner's design, and it promised a building which, with a footprint of over 770,000 sq.ft. (19 acres, or 7 hectares), would cover roughly twenty-five times the ground area of its progenitor.

Impressed by the low bid for the construction contract submitted by the engineering firm Fox, Henderson and Co, the commission accepted the scheme and finally gave its public endorsement to Paxton's design in July 1850. He was exultant, but now had less than eight months to finalize his plans, manufacture the parts and erect the building in time for the Exhibition's opening, which was scheduled for 1 May 1851. Paxton was able to design and build the largest glass structure yet created, from scratch, in less than a year, and complete it on schedule and on budget. He was even able to alter the design shortly before building began, adding a high, barrel-vaulted transept across the centre of the building, at 90 degrees to the main gallery, under which he was able to safely enclose several large elm trees that would otherwise have had to be felled - thereby also resolving a controversial issue that had been a major sticking point for the vocal anti-Exhibition lobby.

Paxton's modular, hierarchical design reflected his practical brilliance as a designer and problem-solver. It incorporated many breakthroughs, offered practical advantages that no conventional building could match and, above all, embodied the spirit of British innovation and industrial might that the Great Exhibition was intended to celebrate.

The geometry of the Crystal Palace was a classic example of the concept of form following function - 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 Birmingham. These were the largest available at the time, measuring 10 inches wide by 49 inches long. Because the entire building was scaled around those dimensions, it meant that nearly the whole outer surface could be glazed using millions 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 barrel-vaulted roof that stood 168 feet 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 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.

Paxton set the dimensions of this prism by using the length of single pane of glass (49 inches) as the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, thereby creating a triangle with a length-to-height ratio of 2.5:1, whose base (adjacent side) was 4 feet long. By mirroring this triangle he obtained the 8-foot-wide gables that formed the vertical faces at either end of the prism, each of which was 24' long. With this arrangement, Paxton could glaze the entire roof surface with identical panes that did not need to be trimmed. Paxton placed three of these 8' x 24' roof units side-by-side, horizontally supported by a grid of cast iron beams, which was held up on slim cast iron pillars. The resulting cube, with a floor area of 24'x 24', formed the basic structural module of the building.

By multiplying these modules into a grid, the structure could be extended virtually infinitely. In its original form, the ground level of the Crystal Palace (in plan) measured 1848' x 456', which equates to a grid 77 modules long by 19 modules wide.^[16] Because each module was self-supporting, Paxton was able to leave out modules in some areas, creating larger square or rectangular spaces within the building to accommodate larger exhibits. On the lower level these larger spaces were covered by the floor above, and on the upper level by longer spans of roofing, but the dimensions of these larger spaces were always multiples of the basic 24' x 24' grid unit. The modules were also strong enough to be stacked vertically, enabling Paxton to add an upper floor that nearly doubled the amount of available exhibition space. Paxton also used longer trellis girders to create a clear span for the roof of the immense central gallery, which was 72 feet wide and 1800 feet long.

type=printed postcards

theme=topographical: british

sub-theme=england

county/ country=london

number of items=single

period=1945 - present

postage condition=unposted