Even in the
sixteenth century, in the palace of the Scottish king, glazed frames were
available only on the ground floor. The upper windows were sealed with paper.
And the frugal
manager of the estate of one English duke took out the glass from the window
frames whenever the owner left the estate. He feared that the wind would break
them.
But this manager
would probably have been surprised if by some miracle three hundred years later
he had got to the London Exhibition in 1851.
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| Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in London |
In Hyde Park, in
the very center of London, he would see a building that looked like a luminous
colossal lantern. Its walls were built of large glass plates inserted into
metal frames. A whole glass palace!
The author of
the project was neither an architect nor a civil engineer. His name was Joseph
Picton, and he worked as a caretaker of greenhouses. When preparations were
underway for the World Industrial Exhibition in London and pavilions were
required, Pexton proposed his design: a house made of glass.
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| Crystal Palace, Interior |
In fact, he did
not come up with anything particularly new. Simply, for many years working in
greenhouses, he better than others appreciated the wonderful properties of
glass. He liked to visit the greenhouse in the winter. On the streets, people
shrink from the piercing wind, and here, in the greenhouse, green palm trees
spread their crowns, banana leaves remind of the southern sun. And what a
bouquet can be made up of bright fragrant flowers - the inhabitants of distant
tropics!
And
all this is separated from the northern winter by just thin glass walls. Joseph
Picton decided that such walls could be used not only in greenhouses but also
in ordinary houses.
