The Crystal Palace was built in the spring of 1851 in Hyde Park, in central London. It housed the first of the great World’s Fairs from May to October of that same year, before being dismantled and reassembled—on a larger scale and with more ornaments—on the outskirts of the capital, at Sydenham Hill. The building was destroyed in a massive fire in 1936.
Joseph Paxton, What Is to Become of the Crystal Palace? (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1851).
Henrik Schoenefeldt, “The Crystal Palace, Environmentally Considered,” Architectural Research Quarterly 12, nos. 3–4 (2008): 283–84.
Francis S. Haden, A Medical Man’s Plea for a Winter Garden in the Crystal Palace (London: John van Voorst, 1851).
Paxton first presented his intention to transform the Crystal Palace into a permanent public winter garden as early as the first public presentation of his project in the Illustrated London News (July 6, 1850, 6). These intentions were further elaborated in an interview published in The Times (July 28, 1851, 6). See also Paxton, What Is to Become of the Crystal Palace?, 1851.
This principle is close to the way Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal approach the use and adaptation of horticultural greenhouses in their architectural projects. See, notably, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, eds., It’s Nice Today: On Climate, Comfort, and Pleasure (Ruby Press, 2025).
While we know that the mechanical ventilation system, operated by the Royal Sappers and Miners, required them to monitor the temperature inside the building using 14 thermometers positioned throughout the building, which they read every two hours, we do not currently have the details of these readings. See First Report of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1852), 67.
First Report of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851. From July 7 onwards, some of the glass panels covering the north and south facades were also removed. All of these facades were reinstalled once the internal temperature had dropped to around 15 °C by the time the building was opened, around July 19. This event was notably reported at the time in The Times. See in particular The Times, June 27, 1856, 5; The Times, July 1, 1851, 5; and The Times, September 16, 1851, 5.
Our model is fully detailed and available here: ➝.
This decision does not mean, of course, that we don’t consider these elements to be important factors in the thermal behavior of the building. It simply reflects the fact that we preferred to exclude variables that we could not model with sufficient precision. In this sense our model is incomplete. But it is rigorous in its attempt to compare two states that are independent from these elements. It is also fully open sourced, and, as such, could be refined by anyone having clear information about them and the ability to carefully model their role.
The data corresponds to the London St. James’s Park weather station, located three kilometers from the original Crystal Palace site. See ➝.
R is the symbol for the thermal resistance of a given material. In any given case, it depends on its thickness, mass, density, and thermal conductivity. It is expressed in m²·K/W.
See Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (Vintage Classics, 1994); Nikolay Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, revised ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Marshall Berman, All What Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2010); and Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). From the very first presentation of the project, Paxton envisaged protecting the facades and cooling the interior of the building by using thick damp curtains: “The draught can be regulated by the use of a thick piece of open fabric which, when kept damp in hot weather, would make the interior of the building much cooler than the outside atmosphere.” Illustrated London News, July 6, 1850, 13.
Other solutions included vegetation and shading systems. Schoenefeldt, “The Crystal Palace, Environmentally Considered,” 286.
Whilst the installation of the east and west facades is, once again, no simple task, the fact that this proposal was arrived at after initially considering the development of shading systems for these facades clearly reflects a simplification of the planned approach. Schoenefeldt, “The Crystal Palace, Environmentally Considered,” 287.
In this sense, the Crystal Palace may be seen as the main precedent in the development of what Reyner Banham called a regenerative mode of construction, in which he saw the main driving force of architectural modernity. See Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London: The Architectural Press, 1969).
