Hyde Park

Paxton’s Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851)

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I recently finished reviewing Douglas Murphy‘s debut book The Architecture of Failure (2012). For whatever reason, the review took me much longer than I had anticipated. Nevertheless, I am extremely pleased with the result and have submitted it in the hope it might be published somewhere soon.

As a way of disburdening myself of its unbearable weight, in light of its completion, I’m including a gallery that features some of the more impressive photographs and renderings I was able to find of Paxton’s original Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851). Of course, it is important to make this specification given the widespread confusion surrounding it and a subsequent (heavily altered) iteration of the Palace after the bulk of its materials were relocated to Sydenham, only now with an arched transept running cruciform along it, bisecting the front vault.

For any Russian readers who might follow my blog, I will leave you with an abbreviated version of Dostoevskii’s literary treatment of the subject in Notes from Underground:

Вы верите в хрустальное здание, навеки нерушимое, то есть в такое, которому нельзя будет ни языка украдкой выставить, ни кукиша в кармане показать. Ну, а я, может быть, потому-то и боюсь этого здания, что оно хрустальное и навеки нерушимое и что нельзя будет даже и украдкой языка ему выставить.

Вот видите ли: если вместо дворца будет курятник и пойдет дождь, я, может быть, и влезу в курятник, чтоб не замочиться, но все-таки курятника не приму за дворец из благодарности, что он меня от дождя сохранил. Вы смеетесь, вы даже говорите, что в этом случае курятник и хоромы — все равно. Да, — отвечаю я, — если б надо было жить только для того, чтоб не замочиться.

Image gallery

Rendering of the interior of Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace at Hyde Park
Color rendering of the interior of Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace at Hyde Park
Black and white rendering of the interior to Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace at Hyde Park
Figure 3: Photograph of the interior of Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace at Hyde Park
Photograph of the interior of Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace at Hyde Park
Photograph of Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace at Hyde Park
Photograph of the exterior of Paxton’s 1851 Crystal Palace at Hyde Park
Sketch of the interior of the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851)
Sketch of the exterior of the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park under construction (1851)
Color sketch of the interior of the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851)
Sketch of the interior of the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851)
Color sketch of the interior of the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851)
Color sketch of the interior of the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851)
Sketch of the interior of the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851)
Sketch of the interior of the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851)

Architecture and failed revolutions

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Taken from notes for a review

Untitled.
Image: Elevation and floor plans
for Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851)
untitled2.

Douglas Murphy’s Architecture of Failure (2012)

On Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851) and the failed revolutions of 1848:

[W]here there is self-aggrandizement, fear and doubt is never far away — the Great Exhibition being held in 1851 cannot help but bring forth images of revolutions and insurgency. The Great Exhibition was being organized and formulated in the wake of the failed European revolutions of 1848, and in the UK, the Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law movement threatened to unleash the same turmoil on British soil. In this context the Great Exhibition has been understood as a “counter-revolutionary measure,” as a symbolic plaster over open social wounds, but it was also moving in the direction of economic and political liberalization; “it offered the tantalizing prospect of implicitly supporting free trade but distracting the public from revolution.” It was a path between a volatile working class and a protectionist aristocracy. It is well documented that before the exhibition there were all kinds of worries — of assassinations, of terrorism, of petty violence, of disease, of infrastructural collapse, but it is equally well documented that the exhibition passed without any violence or even significant disruption; the hordes of anarchists failed to materialize. [Pgs. 22-23]

William Edward Kilburn, photograph of the Chartists' meeting at Kennington (1848), under five miles from Hyde Park

William Edward Kilburn, photograph of the Chartists’ meeting at Kennington (1848), under five miles from Hyde Park

Sketch of the interior of the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851)

Sketch of the interior of the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park (1851)

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