The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Joseph Paxton · an exhibition hall of iron, glass and timber, scored as one work: the building raised in Hyde Park, London, for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the same building taken down and re-erected, enlarged and altered, on Sydenham Hill from 1852 to 1854, read as it is recorded, since no part of it stands · cast-iron columns, hollow and serving as downpipes, under cast- and wrought-iron girders and trusses; timber gutters, sash bars and floors; a ridge-and-furrow roof of glass; the whole plan governed by a bay of 24 feet; in Hyde Park 1,848 feet long and 408 wide, seventy-seven bays by seventeen, stepping up in tiers to the nave, crossed at the middle by a transept three bays wide under a semicircular vault of laminated timber about 108 feet high at the crown, raised over a row of mature elms; at Sydenham larger, the nave vaulted, more transepts, Fine Arts Courts within and two water towers without · designed by Joseph Paxton, head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, in June and July 1850; built by Fox, Henderson and Co., the engineering much of it Charles Fox’s; glass by Chance Brothers of Smethwick; decoration and colour by Owen Jones; for the Royal Commission of the Exhibition · at Sydenham, Paxton with the Crystal Palace Company, the courts by Owen Jones, Matthew Digby Wyatt and others, the water towers by I. K. Brunel · as it stands: nothing; burned in a single night on 30 November 1936, the water towers taken down in 1941; what remains on the hill is the park, its terraces, steps, sphinxes, statue bases, a subway and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s dinosaurs of 1854, which record the site and not the building
Mode
Exhibition hall as manufactured system; the conservatory taken to the scale of a nation’s monument, then made permanent as a palace of leisure
Mythos
The garden under glass, the trees taken in; the fairy palace of crystal; the cathedral’s nave and crossing turned to a secular use; after it, the crystal palace of the finished rational world
Phase
Designed June and July 1850; erected from late September 1850; opened 1 May 1851; the Exhibition closed 15 October 1851, about six million visits; re-erected at Sydenham 1852 to 1854, opened 10 June 1854; a public hall for concerts, exhibitions and leisure, a naval depot in the First World War; burned 30 November 1936; the water towers taken down 1941
Presentation
In Hyde Park a stepped rectangle of iron and glass, 1,848 feet by 408, crossed by a vaulted transept over elms; at Sydenham a longer, vaulted building with more transepts, the Fine Arts Courts inside and Brunel’s water towers feeding terraced fountains; now drawings, lithographs and photographs, and a park
Register
Extent and light: a nave of a third of a mile with its end lost in haze, light everywhere and no wall, the vault over full-grown trees
Scale
The largest public building of its day, set out on one bay; industry, commerce, empire and the paying crowd under one roof
Governing Proposition
Asked for the largest covered hall in the world, to be raised in months on a park lawn and removed after, a gardener made it as goods are made: parts cast to pattern, bolted and glazed from their own gutters, every bay the same, the whole plan the repetition of one bay set by the glass. The wager of the building is that a public monument need not be built of mass and time, that a structure can be a system rather than a mass, and that a hall made in this way could be the nation’s monument. It won the wager, was made permanent on another hill, and the system that let it be built in months let it burn in a night.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Great Exhibition of 1851 needed a building, and by the summer of 1850 it had none. The Building Committee of the Royal Commission had rejected all of some 245 entries to its competition, and its own scheme, of brick and crowned by a dome, had proved unpopular. The site was a lawn in Hyde Park, the opening fixed for the following May, and the hall was to be taken away afterwards. Joseph Paxton, head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, made his first sketch of a building on blotting paper during a railway board meeting, and designed it in June and July 1850.
He had built its ancestors. At Chatsworth he had raised the Great Stove with Decimus Burton, and in 1849 to 1850 a house for the giant lily, whose roof and principle the new building took; at Kew stood Burton and Turner’s Palm House. These were engineers’ structures, glasshouses and sheds, not counted as architecture. The public building was masonry and style, and the Committee’s domed scheme was its local form. Paxton proposed the conservatory system at the scale of the largest public building in the world, and the Commission accepted a gardener’s design over the profession’s.
The stake was paid in public. There were fears that the building would fail under wind, under hail, under crowds; its galleries were tested before opening by marching troops. The Exhibition’s whole credit rested on a building that did not exist eleven months before it opened. Fox, Henderson and Co. took the contract, with Charles Fox responsible for much of the detailed engineering, and Chance Brothers of Smethwick made the glass. Erection began in late September 1850, and Queen Victoria opened the building on 1 May 1851.
Movement II
One bay of 24 feet governs the plan. The building in Hyde Park was 1,848 feet long, seventy-seven bays, and 408 feet wide, seventeen bays; it covered about seventeen acres of ground. The bay derives from the glass: the pane set in Paxton’s ridge-and-furrow roof, two panes’ run to a ridge, so that the pane governs the bay and the bay the whole. Order and method are the same thing here. The module is how the building looks and how it was made.
Every part answers two needs. The cast-iron columns are hollow and carry the rainwater down; the timber gutters drain the roof and carried the trolleys from which it was glazed. Cast- and wrought-iron girders and trusses span the bays; sash bars and floors are timber. The parts were made off site to standard patterns, bolted and wedged together on a dry site, and checked as they came. The erection was planned as a sequence and completed, with the transept, in some five months. It was a building made as goods are made, in quantity, to standard, by machine and contract, and the speed was itself the message.
Owen Jones coloured it: primaries set to the iron, so that at a distance the structure read as a single tone. Inside, the nave was a perspective of a third of a mile whose end was lost in haze, with light everywhere and no wall. The building stepped up in tiers from the outer aisles to the nave, galleries in the middle tiers, and a crowd of tens of thousands moved through it in daylight among the goods, with no interior wall to direct it. The iron details are workmanlike rather than refined; the system, not the joint, carries the art.
Movement III
A row of mature elms stood on the site, and the public would not let them be felled. The building took them in. At the middle of its length a transept 72 feet wide, three bays, crosses the whole building under a semicircular vault of laminated timber about 108 feet high at its crown, raised to clear the trees. It is the one place where the site compelled the form, and the result is the building’s strongest figure: Eden under glass, a garden enclosed with its trees.
The vault obeys the same law as the flat roofs around it. It is set on the module, three bays wide, and glazed in the same system, so that the two most distant elements of the building, the ridge-and-furrow of the nave and the curve over the elms, are one construction. The plan they make together is a cross, a nave and a crossing, and contemporaries named them as a cathedral’s, turned to a secular use. At the crossing stood Osler’s glass fountain.
Punch gave the building its name. Accounts of 1851 speak of fairyland and of the sublime by quantity, and the elevation they record is of extent and light more than of any single moment. The Exhibition closed on 15 October 1851, after about six million visits. It became at once the type of the exhibition building, answered in New York in 1853 and in Munich’s Glaspalast in 1854, and after them in the exhibition halls of Paris; it shaped railway sheds, markets and arcades.
Movement IV
The building was taken down and raised again on Sydenham Hill from 1852 to 1854, by Paxton with the Crystal Palace Company, and opened on 10 June 1854. It was larger, with a vaulted nave and more transepts, and it was no longer temporary. Freed from that need, it was enlarged by choice: more vault, more height, the grandeur of the vault carried through the whole nave. The parts there are permitted, not compelled, and the enlargement added grandeur more than precision. It is scored with the Hyde Park building as one work, credited where it earned and charged where it cost.
Inside the iron frame stood the Fine Arts Courts, by Owen Jones, Matthew Digby Wyatt and others: Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Pompeian, Alhambra and Renaissance, the architecture of the past reproduced under glass, the Alhambra court Jones’s own. Outside, Brunel’s two water towers fed terraced fountains, and in the park stood Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s dinosaurs of 1854. Read one way, the neutral frame contains every style and its law is the law of the museum. Read another, two physics meet, one of system and one of historical representation, and the building does not reconcile them; the form there frames the knowledge rather than being it.
Sydenham made plain what the building disclosed: the commodity and the past offered under one roof to a paying crowd, leisure, spectacle and empire as a single condition. For 82 years it served as a place of concerts, exhibitions and public leisure, and in the First World War as a naval depot. Its mythic life ran beyond it: in Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? a dwelling of glass and iron is dreamed as the future, and in Notes from Underground Dostoevsky made the crystal palace the figure of the finished, rational world that his underground man refuses.
Movement V
The building burned in a single night on 30 November 1936. The timber of its gutters, sash bars and floors, the timber and glass that had let it be made in months, let it burn in hours; that weakness was in the making, and it is charged to the building’s endurance. Brunel’s water towers outlived it and were taken down in 1941. Nothing of the building stands. On the hill are the park, its terraces and steps, sphinxes, statue bases, a subway and the dinosaurs, which record the site and not the building, and the name, which a district and a football club still carry.
The form survives in record: the plans, the engravings, the lithographs of 1851, the photographs of Sydenham, and the first sketch on blotting paper. It survives whole in its governing idea, because the idea is a system of repeated parts, fully drawn and photographed; and it survives as a type, answered and copied for 175 years. The Glasgow School of Art (8.3), whose interiors burned in 2014 and 2018, keeps a shell; the Barcelona Pavilion (8.7), another exhibition building lost, was rebuilt on its site from its record. The Crystal Palace has neither, and is weighed for what it is: a form wholly in record, ninety years without a body.
Its delayed reach is the largest part of it. The historians of modernism claimed it as the first building of the new age, and the curtain wall, the modular grid and prefabricated construction descend through that claim; the Eiffel Tower (8.7), the other iron monument of an exhibition, stands whole beside it, and Centre Pompidou (8.4), a building of exposed, serviced system, is among its descendants. The building that proved a monument could be made and unmade was unmade, and its lesson stands without it.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on purpose, structure and site, and in Hyde Park the subtractive test finds little to take. The purpose was a vast covered hall, raised in months on a park lawn and removable after it: hence parts made to pattern, bolted and wedged rather than built; hence the module, compelled by the pane and by a gutter that drains and carries the glaziers. The hollow column that is also a drainpipe is the building’s character: each part answers two needs. The transept was compelled by the site, by elms the public would not let be felled. What yields is first the ornamental surplus, decorative arched ribs and finials, a small matter; and second Sydenham, where the building, freed from being temporary, was enlarged by choice rather than need, its parts permitted and not compelled.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Disclosure through space as much as through contents. What the building made visible is the industrial order as a place: a building made as goods are made, in quantity, to standard, by machine and contract, and assembled at a speed that was itself the message. It disclosed that a public monument need not be built of mass and time, and that interior space can be nearly without boundary, its edges lost in light and the frame dissolved. Sydenham made plain the rest: the commodity and the past offered under one roof to a paying crowd, leisure, spectacle and empire as one condition. That can be stated and holds. Held short because much of the disclosure was carried by the exhibition and the crowd, and the building’s own statement is closer to a demonstration than to a meaning about how people live.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The record is of elevation, often and widely felt, and the frequency is high: the effect is the whole interior, not one moment. The nave a perspective of a third of a mile, its end lost in haze; the transept vault over full-grown trees; light everywhere and no wall; Osler’s glass fountain at the crossing; the colours of Owen Jones’s scheme, primaries set to the iron so that the structure read as a single tone at a distance. Accounts of 1851 speak in the language of fairyland and of the sublime by quantity, and at Sydenham the vault ran through the whole nave. Held where it is because the elevation is of one kind, the sublime of extent and light, and because it now reaches anyone only through description, lithograph and photograph, which are evidence but cannot be tested by a visit.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The archetypes are real, and some are built. The garden under glass is the type the building grew from, and in Hyde Park Eden was enclosed with its trees taken in; the cruciform plan with its vaulted crossing over the elms is a structure, not an allusion, and contemporaries named the nave and transept as a cathedral’s, turned to a secular use. But much is evoked: the name of crystal palace was given by Punch, and the building’s most potent mythic life came after it, in Chernyshevsky’s dream of a dwelling of glass and iron in What Is to Be Done? and in Dostoevsky’s answer in Notes from Underground. That is reach the building earned, and it is credited under Pressure on Tradition; as myth built into the plan, it is less.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance: the public building of masonry and style, the Building Committee’s own domed brick scheme its local form; and beside it the glasshouse and the railway shed, engineers’ structures not counted as architecture: Paxton’s Great Stove at Chatsworth, with Decimus Burton, his lily house of 1849 to 1850, and Burton and Turner’s Palm House at Kew. The departure: the conservatory system taken to the scale of the largest public building in the world, prefabricated and assembled to a deadline, and made the official monument of a nation. The lily house supplied the roof and the principle, a proven path that holds the figure off the top. But the stake was paid in full view: a gardener’s design over the profession’s, public fears of wind, hail and crowds, galleries tested by marching troops, and the Exhibition’s whole credit on a building that did not exist eleven months before.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Substitute the form the Committee proposed, masonry walls and a dome, and the building can no longer say what it says: that a structure can be a system rather than a mass, that space can be measured by repetition of one bay, and that a monument can be made and unmade. The form is the knowledge. The module is both the building’s order and its method of production; transparency is both its light and its claim. Use is changed by the form: a crowd of tens of thousands in daylight, among goods and trees, with no interior wall to direct it, is a different experience of a public building. Held below the top because at Sydenham the form became a frame for historical courts, framing the knowledge rather than being it, and because the vault and finials keep a residue of style.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the evidence is long. The building has been re-examined for 175 years: by Bucher and Semper in its day, by the historians of modernism, Giedion and Pevsner, who made it an ancestor, by Walter Benjamin as a site of commodity and spectacle, and since by writers on glass and Victorian culture and by historians of prefabrication and of the exhibition. It yields on several levels: structure, production, the crowd, empire, the history of transparency. Held short because the yield is now drawn from record and idea, since no one can return to the building, and because much of it concerns what the building signified, the Exhibition and the age, more than the depths of the form, which, being a system of repetition, is quickly grasped.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Field: British and European building in the mid nineteenth century, and the tradition of the public building after it. The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of possibility: a large public building conceived as a kit of standard manufactured parts, built by system and schedule, its order generated by a module, its enclosure glass; the architecture of production rather than of masonry. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: immediate and lasting. It became the type of the exhibition building, answered at once in New York in 1853 and in Munich’s Glaspalast in 1854, and in the exhibition halls of Paris after; it shaped railway sheds, markets and arcades. Its delayed reach is larger: modernism claimed it as the first building of the new age, and the curtain wall, the modular grid and prefabricated construction descend through that claim, which runs partly through historians and is discounted.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Weighed as record, on form, then use, then fabric, and this is the lowest axis on the page. Form survives only in record, in plans, engravings, the lithographs of 1851, the photographs of Sydenham and the first sketch; legible and whole in its governing idea, and outliving the conditions that made it as a model copied and answered, the strongest of the three. Use is lost: about 83 years as a public hall in two places, and 90 years gone. Fabric is lost almost entirely: Hyde Park’s iron went to Sydenham, and Sydenham’s burned in a night; what remains records the site, not the building. Survival was weakened from within, since the timber and glass that made the system made it burn. Presence, a district, a football club and a type, earns at most a tenth.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Structure and engineering are the making, and the making is load-bearing. The command of the medium is exact: a module derived from a pane; a roof that drains, glazes and is maintained from its own gutters; columns that carry and drain; parts cast to pattern and checked on site; an erection planned as a sequence and completed, with the transept, in some five months; the galleries tested before opening. Owen Jones’s colour gave the iron a single reading, and the laminated timber vault of the transept is an elegant answer at its span. Held below the top because the iron details are workmanlike rather than refined; because timber gutters, sash bars and floors left the building combustible, a weakness in the making itself; and because at Sydenham the enlargement added grandeur more than precision.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs the Hyde Park building more completely than almost any building of its age: the bay of 24 feet, the pane and the gutter, from the smallest part to the whole plan. The two most distant elements, the flat ridge-and-furrow roofs of the nave and the semicircular vault of the transept over its trees, obey it: the vault is set on the module, three bays wide, and glazed in the same system. The law is tested at Sydenham, where Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Pompeian, Alhambra and Renaissance courts stand inside the iron frame. Read one way, the neutral frame contains all styles and its law is the law of the museum; read another, two physics meet, system and historical representation, and the building does not reconcile them. The range is wide, and that tension holds the figure.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Many orders are held: industry and labour, in the means of making as in the goods shown; commerce and the market; the nations of the world and the empire, set out in their courts and bays; the state, in the Royal Commission and Prince Albert’s project; the natural order, in the trees, the gardens and fountains, and at Sydenham the prehistoric displays in the park; history, in the Fine Arts Courts; class and the crowd, in the shilling days and the excursion trains; leisure as a public order. The frame holds them together in one place, more than most buildings hold. Held below the upper figures because much is contained rather than built into the form: the household, the body, the sacred and death are absent, and the world appears as display.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, then The Made at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.8 and The Living Form at 8.7. A public building conceived as a kit of standard parts, its order generated by one bay, answered at once by the exhibition halls of two continents and claimed later as the first building of the modern age; a making in which every part answers two needs and the erection itself was designed; the conservatory system staked, in public, as a nation’s monument; and a form whose method of production is its order and whose transparency is its claim.
Limiting Dimension
The Imperishable at 7.0, then The Encompassed at 7.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0. The first: nothing stands; the form survives whole in record and as a type, but use is lost and the fabric burned in a night, and the timber that made the system made it burn. The second: industry, commerce, empire, the state, history, the natural order and the crowd held in one frame, but contained more than built, with the household, the body, the sacred and death absent. The third: a garden under glass and a cathedral’s plan built, the crystal palace of myth largely evoked and earned after the building. Next above them, The Bottomless Well at 8.1: a yield drawn now from record and idea.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 and The Imperishable at 7.0 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Imperishable, 7.0, half a point below 7.5; every other axis it governs clears it, the next lowest being The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.3, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the Crystal Palace as documented in plan, section, contemporary description, lithograph and photograph. No plan, image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the building of Joseph Paxton as one work: the hall raised in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the same building taken down and re-erected, enlarged and altered, on Sydenham Hill from 1852 to 1854, with its vaulted nave and transepts, its Fine Arts Courts and Brunel’s water towers. Sydenham is credited and charged to the work, not to Paxton alone, and the collaboration of contractors, engineers, glassmakers and decorators is not charged. What stands where the work was: nothing. The building burned on 30 November 1936 and the water towers were taken down in 1941; the work is read on every axis as it is recorded, and on The Imperishable for its survival in record, as a type and as a site. The fires and the demolition are weighed there, and the timber construction that let it burn is charged there as the building’s own. Context only: the contents of the Exhibition, except where the building was made to hold them; the park at Sydenham, its terraces, sphinxes and Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’s dinosaurs, which enter only as remains that record the site; and the literary life of the name after the building, credited as reach. Nothing is quoted, and Dostoevsky is given in substance. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the size of the pane and whether it was the largest made in quantity, the number of panes and columns and the weight of iron, the area under glass, the cost, the dimensions of the Sydenham building and the number of its transepts, the date of the water towers, whether fire struck the Sydenham building before 1936, the names of the Building Committee, who first proposed the vault of the transept, the theory behind Owen Jones’s colours, contemporary descriptions not held word for word, the critics of the building in its day, the use of its profits, and the cause of the fire of 1936.