Materializing Through the Skylight

Oz Volume 20 Article 12 1-1-1998 Materializing through the Skylight Wayne Michael Charney [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/oz Part of the Architecture Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Charney, Wayne Michael (1998) "Materializing through the Skylight," Oz: Vol. 20. https://doi.org/10.4148/ 2378-5853.1323 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Oz by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Materializing Through The Skylight: How the Crystal Palace Acquired its Architectural Significance Wayne Michael Charney The raising oftransept ribs as de scribed in The London Illustrated News, December 1850. Whether or not any structure built for a building architectural legitimacy, and construction practices. The Crystal cambered in a manner somewhat equiv a world's fair can ever hope to aspire to how those precepts may change over Palace utilized standardized, pre alent to today's prestressing techniques. 1 any sort of enduring architectural time. So persistent and recurrent are fabricated, mass produced, inter significance that extends well beyond references to the Crystal Palace in changeable parts. The logistics of When it is neither the construction the short life span of the exposition for virtually all histories of modern construction were ingenious to the point process nor a structural detail of the which it was built is a question that has architecture that we are necessarily that even the wooden planks which at Crystal Palace which is assessed as its already been much debated and perhaps compelled to decipher the dichotomy first fenced in the construction site later single most prophetic or significant settled in the affirmative especially for that exists between its original inception found a practical purpose as floorboards architectural feature, then surely it is the some of the more visually exciting and as utilitarian building versus its eventual within the finished exhibition hall. The building's final formal aspect or its experimental contemporary exhibition interpretation as architecture. monumentality of the construction task stunning spatial effect to which we today pavilions. Until recently, however, we can be quantified: 3300 cast-iron turn to justify the Crystal Palace as a had generally agreed that exposition Currently, the Crystal Palace is columns fitted into a foundation of legitimate piece of architecture. It is just buildings, because of their very nature considerecl to be a remarkable and horizontal pipes which doubled as exactly because so much of its bold as temporary structures, could not influential piece of architecture. It has, drainpipes, 2224 principal girders, 205 aesthetic, its transparent walls, its filigree ordinarily be expected to advance with in fact, become somewhat standard miles of wooden sash bars to hold structure and its spectacular light great strides the state of the art and practice for historians to label it a sort 293,655 individual panes of glass in flooded effects of materiality dissolving science of architecture. Such exposition of prototype or great progenitor for all place. This 900,000 square-foot surface into atmosphere have all been revived buildings, rather, were intended to serve that later modern architecture that also area of glass curtain wall and roof countless times in the metal-and-glass only the moment and with rare employs metal-and-glass construction equalled one-third of England's total architecture of this century now coming exception did any one of them stand techniques in any conceptually glass production just eleven years earlier to a close that the Crystal Palace is able our as an unprecedented or substantive significant way,. Although we fully in 1840. The Crystal Palace covered to claim an architectural noteworthiness. architectural accomplishment. How realize that the development of 20th nearly 19 acres of land and enclosed 33 Indeed, in a culture that is today ever, one very singular exception to this century architecture is much too million cubic feet of space at a cost of increasingly mesmerized by the virtual generalization comes to mind-the complicated to be so simply stated and about one penny per cubic foot. The reality of things, Joseph Paxton, designer London Crystal Palace of 1851. It is this that the Crystal Palace stood on end does structural details of the Crystal Palace of the Crystal Palace, might be justifiably building, which housed the very first not render unto us the John Hancock foretold, too, many 20th-century hailed as the originator of an incipient world's fair, and the continually Center or the Sears Tower, it is construction techniques. Cross bracing example of architectural intangibility; changing attitudes toward it over the fundamentally true nonetheless that the of wrought-iron tie rods provided lateral however, both he and most of his last century and a half that will serve Crystal Palace was the first magnificently stiffness along with a rudimentary form contemporaries judged the Crystal as the nexus of our attempts to large-scaled example of all those of portal bracing wherein columns were Palace to be not a masterful display of understand what it is that gives a industrial processes and methods which joined to trusses along their full depths, infinite architectural possibilities but a 48 building substance, what it is that gives are today so much a part of architectural and the trusses themselves were masterpiece of eminently practical Turnock's Brewster Apartments. 1893. Photos courtesy ofCarl W Condit. construction techniques and straightfor century historian James Fergusson, who of Stones of Venice, were "eternally apparently outlandish High Victorian ward utilitarian building. in 1862 published his classic History of separated from all good and great things Gothic architect, wrote in 1862 that a the Modern Styles of Architecture, best by a gulph which not all the tubular "new style of architecture, as remarkable To the Victorian, truly valid rep resents the standard Victorian bridges nor engineering of ten thousand as any of its predecessors, may be architecture-that is, the high art of interpretation of the question, "Though nineteenth centuries cast into one great considered to have been inaugurated" in building-had to satisfy three major an admirable piece of Civil bronze-foreheaded century could ever the Crystal Palace. Incidentally, Harris requirements: it had to be of a traditional Engineering," he wrote, "[the Crystal overpass one inch of."4 It remains a titled his article "What is Arch building type, it had to have been Palace] had no claim to be considered marvelous sentence to utter even to this itecture?"7 Sir George Gilbert Scott constructed of traditional materials, and as an architectural design. " 2 In day, but certainly it no longer stands as wrote in 1858 that the "triumph of it had to convey in its final form a sense Fergusson's mind, the Crystal Palace the universal and irrevocable law which modern metallic construction [was of monumentality or permanence. The lacked some of the crucial elements of Ruskin once thought it to be. In fact, as opening] out a perfectly new field for Crystal Palace failed to meet all three of true architecture, specifically ornament Nikolaus Pevsner has noted, within that architectural development" in a most those criteria: it was an exposition and a sense of durability. It was seriously small group of very few buildings of the self-evident way. 8 Yet in the final building, not a temple or a palace or a deficient in decoration and solidity, and 1850s which did employ the Crystal analysis both of these Gothic tomb; it employed glass and metal Fergusson doubted whether any glass Palace aesthetic and yet were labeled revivalists would probably have shied almost entirely in its construction, not building could ever impart the quality architecture with a capital A, there exists away from the use of Crystal Palace brick or stone; and its skeletal nature of permanence which, he argued, was one to which Ruskin himself had helped techniques except as an expediency in made it look impermanent and fragile, the most indispensable characteristic of (at least indirectly) to give form-the very rare or unusual commissions. its glass skin denied its bulk and any architecture in the strictest sense. University Museum at Oxford.5 Its concomitant substance, and its very wonderful metal-and-glass exhibi-tion Horace Greeley, the prodigious purpose required that it stand Actually, it was the great art critic John courtyard captures some of the feeling American newspaper editor and one of temporarily for only a few months, not Ruskin who had been the first to that its greater progenitor must have the official observers for the United for centuries. How then can we challenge those who had cloaked the conveyed. Ruskin, therefore, could not States at the 18 51 Fair, summed up the explain this paradox? Is the Crystal Crystal Palace with the mantle of have been so blind to the readily whole matter in this manner: Palace to be regarded as architecture architectural respectability. As he so discernible architectonic possibilities or as mere building? succinctly phrased it, the Crystal Palace inherent within the Crystal Palace The Crystal Palace, which covers and was "neither a palace nor of crystal."3 after all.6 protects all, is better than any one thing it Our present attitude regarding that He protested against the delusion that contains, it is really a fairy wonder, and is which is architecture differs markedly Paxton had created a new style of A few of his contemporaries were even a work ofinestimable value as a suggestion from, or is at least significantly broader architecture when he had merely more willing to concede to Paxton's for future architecture ..

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