Greenhouse (“The Great Conservatory”) of 1837 at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, 1836-40. The Crystal Palace was the largest building in the world, but because it was constructed of modular, prefabricated, and standardized cast iron columns, beams, girders, and trusses and glass panes, it took only seventeen weeks to construct.įig. Joseph Paxton, a gardener and designer, provided the plan for the building based on his large greenhouses, including the “Great Stove,” the conservatory he built at Chatsworth to house the exotic plants of the Duke of Devonshire (fig. The reflective, transparent, and varied visual properties of the cast iron and glass building provided the exhibit with its popular name, the Crystal Palace.

Reconfigured into the new forms of cast iron and plate glass in the crucible of the Industrial Revolution, they were now available in large quantities and became not just the products of industrialization but one of its driving forces. The enormous structure was made almost entirely of iron and glass, ancient materials hitherto available only in limited quantities and chiefly for small luxury items. The exceptional nature of the exhibition was underscored by the architecture of the building in which it was housed (fig. It attracted more than six million visitors by the time it closed six months later and immediately spawned the cultural phenomenon of the world’s fair. A display of arts, inventions, and products of industrial manufacture from countries around the world, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations was the first international exhibit of the technical achievements and consumer goods of the industrial era.

On a spring day in 1851 in the city of London, more than two years before the Crystal Palace exhibition opened in New York, an unprecedented exhibition conceived on a massive scale opened to the public, and in many ways the world would never be the same.

New york city 1940 minecraft map