Structural Design for Architecture
Fig. 3.5 Crystal Palace,
London, England, 1851.
Joseph Paxton,
architect/engineer. This
glass-clad framework made
a significant contribution
to the visual vocabulary of
the architecture of the
twentieth century. Unlike
the later buildings which it
inspired, the arrangement
was fully justified here on
technical grounds.54
stations of the nineteenth century. These had
largely been ignored in their own time by the
architectural mainstream but were destined to
exert great influence on the visual vocabulary
of twentieth-century Modernism - rather as the
motifs of the architecture of Roman antiquity,
as interpreted by the scholars of the Italian
Renaissance, had laid the foundations for
Neoclassicism and the Beaux-Arts school. A
well-known example was the famous Boat
Store at Sheerness Dockyard in England
(1858-66) in which aspects of twentieth-
century Modernism were anticipated, but other
types of industrial building, especially the
large train-sheds of the railway termini, were
also important. Extreme versions of this type
of building were the glasshouses - glass-clad
frameworks of timber and iron - which had
been developed for horticultural purposes in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. This particular tradition of frame
building reached its climax with the Crystal
Palace in London (Fig. 3.5), which was built to
house the Great Exhibition of 1851.^1 It was
virtually a cathedral in glass and iron and was1 The designer of the building was the landscape
gardener loseph Paxton.destined to exert a profound influence on the
architecture of the twentieth century.
It is appropriate, in a book which is
concerned principally with technical matters,
to dwell briefly here on the relationship
between technology and aesthetics in the
context of the glass-clad framework. It was, of
course, principally the look of the frame build-
ings of the nineteenth century, and the Crystal
Palace in particular, rather than the novelty of
their technology of construction, which
appealed to the architects of the Modern
Movement. The buildings did, in fact, have a
number of technical deficiencies. The poor
thermal and acoustic properties of the external
walls and the poor durability of the junctions
between the individual panes of glass in the
transparent skins were problematic. The latter
caused leaks to develop, which in turn brought
about a deterioration in the condition of the
structural frameworks of timber and cast iron.
None of these was a particularly serious
consideration in the context of most of the
glass-clad frameworks of the nineteenth
century. The Crystal Palace, for example, was a
temporary building designed to house a very
large exhibition of short duration, and, from a
technical point of view, the glass-clad frame-
work was actually an ideal, and probably
inevitable, solution to the problem posed,