Was This The First "Green Building"?

The Dazzling Crystal Palace

“The Crystal Palace was once the world`s largest building and its lightest, most ethereal one. Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but for someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling --- indeed, giddying. The arriving visitor`s first sight of the Exhibition Hall from afar, glinting and transparent, is really beyond our imagining. It would have seemed as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a soap bubble. To anyone arriving at Hyde Park, the first sight of the Crystal Palace, floating above the trees, sparkling in sunshine, would have been a moment of knee-weakening splendour.”  Bill Bryson --- Popular American author

The word evanescent` means to disappear gradually; vanish; or fade away.  In common parlance—“now you see it- then you don`t.”

The name Crystal Palace should be familiar to followers of English football. The Crystal Palace FC was established during 1861 and was represented at the founding meeting of the Football Association in 1863. The club banner displays a goshawk and linked to an extra-ordinary building originally erected in Hyde Park and later re-erected in Crystal Palace Park, where the club is based. The Crystal Palace FC is popularly known to its followers as the eagles or the glaziers.  Crystal Palace Park was also the venue for some twenty FA Cup finals played between 1895 and 1914 when thousands of fans flocked there to support their teams.

The Bryson quotation refers to one of the most remarkable buildings ever constructed. After the death of William IV in 1837, the eighteen year old Victoria became heir to the British throne. She was crowned Queen of Great Britain during 1838 and married her first cousin Prince Albert of Saxe- Coburg-Gotha in 1840.This royal wedding heralded the growing importance of the expanding  British Empire. To gain and sustain the support of the British people, the German born Prince Albert focused his energies on promoting and advancing Great Britain`s position as the foremost nation in the world, particularly in respect of the advancement of the arts and science.

Henry Cole,  a British  public official of the time, visited the Paris Exhibition during the 1840s and was determined to initiate a similar exhibition in London--- but bigger, better and with a greater international flavour. Cole was an astute individual and is also remembered as the inventor of the Christmas card --- a way of encouraging people to use the new penny post. Cole persuaded Prince Albert and other notables involved with the Society of Arts to support the construction of the “Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of the Industry of All Nations” as it became officially known.

A committee was appointed to realise this important goal and on 11 January 1850 held their first meeting with the aim of launching the Great Exhibition on 1 May 1851, less than 16 months away. This meant that the largest building ever had to be planned and built before the opening of the proposed Great Exhibition. This committee then did what most committees do when confronted with a challenge --- they appointed another committee with terms of reference to come up with a suitable design for a project to be constructed within this almost impossible time-frame and on a constrained budget.

The famous engineer, Isambard Brunel was a member of the committee, who then proceeded to design a structure requiring 30 million bricks to build ----let alone whether it was feasible to lay that number of bricks within the envisaged time. A commentator described the proposed structure as a “vast, low, dark shed of a building, pregnant with gloom, with all the spirit and playfulness of an abattoir.” To complicate matters, Brunel who had a history of designing and constructing projects of heroic proportions, insisted that the building be topped with an iron dome approximately 60m across --- striking but looking weird on a single-storeyed building intended to stand for less than six months. It was a text book exercise of the committee designing a camel rather than the desired horse. It would have been sheer folly to proceed.

Into this awkward situation entered the most unlikely person, Joseph Paxton, the head gardener of Chatsworth House estate. Paxton was born into a poor farming family and at age fourteen commenced work as an apprentice gardener. He soon distinguished himself and at age twenty was running an experimental arboretum for the Royal Horticultural Society.  Not only was he a gifted landscaper and horticulturist but also a good businessman. When he heard that the commissioners of the Great Exhibition were struggling to find a suitable design for a hall to house the Great Exhibition, he suggested that something similar to a hot-house could suit the purpose. Despite considerable misgivings, he was allowed to prepare a design for an exhibition hall which was to be erected in London`s Hyde Park.

Paxton produced his design in less than ten days. The proposed structure was in the form of a goliath iron frame covered in more than 300,000sq.m clear glass. Its interior measured 92,000sq.m and was 564m long, with an interior height of 39m. The design, importantly succeeded at ensuring the saving of a much admired avenue of elm trees in Hyde Park, as the structure could be erected over the trees. The project had to succeed because Britain could ill afford failure resulting in a loss of face which was unacceptable to the proud but touchy Victorians.

The virtue of Paxton`s design was that its components could be prefabricated and fitted together to form a giant iron frame on which to fix the glass. It required no bricks, mortar and little in the form of foundations. It was an innovative face- saving solution and a radical departure from anything ever built before. Once the commissioners gave permission to proceed, the work from start to finish took just under thirty- five weeks and the project was completed within an agreed budget. By the end of 1850 over two thousand workmen were engaged on the site, erecting the cast iron girders and wrought -iron trusses and 400 tons of glass cladding. There was a neat touch on Paxton`s part when the finished structure was exactly 1,851 imperial feet long in recognition of the year 1851. A columnist writing for the satirical magazine Punch called the structure “The Crystal Palace” which found immediate popular acceptance.

Queen Victoria took a keen interest in the construction of the building, which she was due to open but became concerned about sparrows nesting in the roof of the partly completed building. Nobody could provide a solution of how to get rid of the birds without causing damage to the glass. In desperation, she turned to the eighty-two year old Arthur Wellesley, the famous Duke of Wellington of Waterloo fame who said of his troops before the battle; “This army is composed of the scum of the earth. I don`t know what effect these men will have on the enemy, but by God they terrify me”. Typical of the man, the Iron Duke`s response was succinct and to the point, “Sparrow-hawks,  Ma,am”.  He was right, by the time the Crystal Palace was opened by the Queen, the sparrows were gone.  This is the link to the hawk depicted on the banner of Crystal Palace FC.

Despite the resistance of the National Treasury and the dismissive attitude of the British Parliament, the Great Exhibition opened with a flourish and housed some 19,000 exhibits sourced from all over the world. The exhibits included a Jacquard loom, an envelope machine, tools, kitchen appliances, steelmaking displays, and  a reaping machine from the United States which were viewed by 6,200,000 visitors during the duration of the exhibition--- many of them from Europe. The attendance was astonishing given the demographics of the time. Germany had a population of 34,000.000 followed by France with 33,000,000, the United States with 23,000,000 and Great Britain lagged with 20,800,000. China with its 433,000,000 inhabitants was already the most populated country in the world.

Commercially, the Great Exhibition was a huge success and realised enough profit for the purchase of land and the construction a number of public buildings on a grand scale. These embraced the Albert Hall, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum--- a marvellous legacy. Public opinion was that a permanent home be found for the Crystal Palace after the conclusion of the Great Exhibition.

It was decided to move the building to a new park near the affluent suburb of Sydenham Hill, in the south of London, in an area with many large imposing villas. On its re-erection the building was enlarged and divided into a series of courts depicting the history of art and architecture from ancient times to the Renaissance and forming part of a magnificent 200 acre Victorian theme park. The centre piece of the building was the Centre Transept which contained the world`s largest organ. The re-located building was opened by Queen Victoria on 10 June 1854.

For eighty years Crystal Palace was the central feature of a new pleasure ground, including a restaurant and a menagerie as the favourite resort of middle-class families. In later years, the Crystal Palace became closely associated with the development of television when John Logie Baird established his television enterprise there. Based in the south tower (which served as an antenna), the Chrystal Palace and other buildings in the park housed four fully equipped TV studios and the Baird Television Company.

Sadly, the Crystal Palace was destroyed in a devastating fire during 1936 and all that remains are the wrought iron gates of the building which were moved to the entrance of Kensington Park. The Duke of Wellington died at age 83 during 1852 and was given a magnificent State Funeral. The Iron Duke is buried in St Paul`s Cathedral next to another British hero, Admiral Lord Nelson. Prince Albert, the Royal Consort, died in 1861 aged 42. Isambard Brunel, the builder of the Great Western Railway and other engineering projects of monumental proportions died during 1859 and during 2002 was placed second in a BBC poll of the “100 Greatest Britons”. Sir Joseph Paxton became a highly respected member of the British Parliament and died in 1865 aged 64.

They were outlived by Queen Victoria, who was born in 1819, and was on the throne for more than 60 years. There was a distant link with the aged Queen, when the Durban Master Builders Association was established at a meeting in held on 1 February 1901, in the Victoria Café corner of Gardiner and Pine streets, the  night before the Queen`s funeral in London. The Victoria Café was a well-known Durban landmark and was sadly also destroyed in a fire.

Pieter Rautenbach