tower provided an apt backdrop: a tower of books encased in glass, a mock literary edifice bearing the name of a king long dead. We sat in the rectangular booths, our bodies cut off at the shoulders, figurines sinking into the limestone landscape. His smile remained fixed throughout our conversations and every time he left I wondered what would happen once there was no one to observe it. But what he said, peering from behind spectacles that seemed to cloud with endless perspectives of metal and glass, of fountains reaching for the skies, landscapes re-enacting histories of nature, stayed with me. It awaited this moment perhaps: the emergence of my audience of one. An insider to the city, perpetually plotting escape.
This journey starts with a building in more ways than one, and the building I speak of here is key to rethinking the history of the Underground, even if it might not be obvious at first glance. This is the fable, then, the first story of significant buildings you will hear. Quite possibly the last. It is not what you expect, no doubt, but you signed up for deviations the moment you decided to and read my messages behind your father’s back.
It was called The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations and it saw more than six million bodies flow through the crystal frame of its architecture. For the five-and-a-half months that it lasted, one fifth of the population would have visited; a sea of people, the swarming of bodies. It was to reflect the whole world, this crystal frame, and the world would flow through it, filling in waves that peculiar cabinet of curiosities. That’s what Jan said. This was the middle of the nineteenth century, remember, and to collect meant to systematise, classify, a century of such tradition already behind the crowds gathered to observe the spectacle. The Prince’s ‘generic’ division – whose wife had hijacked the century, stamping her name on it – was likened to a living encyclopaedia, an image of the world, Jan told me and smiled. It wasn’t just the objects that underwent the process of classification here, people did as well: living tribesmen, the so-called ‘ethnographic examples,’ transformed into statues by the time of the second Palace.
This second Palace would hold a collection of architectural forms as well, neatly arranged within its crystal frame, a museum of architectural models built one-to-one in scale, another classification yet – of architectural objects this time, in the various forms they assume. And hidden among the exhibits, in the multitude of objects and various carefully listed items, there was ‘machinery in motion’, as the organisers of the exhibition had called it. Housed in the Industrial Courts, it contained displays of manufacturing, and proved to be among the most popular exhibits, Jan said. I nodded, expectant. There were steam engines here, cotton-weaving facilities, ‘portable’ houses even. Motion and mobility was everywhere.
The building itself was a collection of machine-like parts, prefabricated as it was, its columns, beams and girders made of cast iron, the glass laid by a wagon that ran on wheels in special gutters along the roof while it was still being constructed. The speed of construction was like nothing anyone had ever seen before, Jan said and leaned across the table. One week and eighty men, eighteen thousand glass panes lined up, to be put in place.
The palace was a factory and a display cabinet. This building, an architectural object, this veritable technological edifice had been fast-assembled: a peculiar kind of a machine itself. And it could, and indeed did, migrate across London, like all the walking architectures the avant-gardes would later dream up in vain. All the way to Sydenham, south and east of the original Hyde Park location. How could a building that had materialised with such unprecedented speed not resonate with machinery in motion? How could it not be the prototype for what the Underground itself would become one day, when it finally emerged a few decades later?
As I sat there, I knew that Jan hadn’t grasped this yet. None of the army of researchers and historians plaguing this building, none of the distinguished academics stood in front of audiences proclaiming verities (especially when making their words appear relative). They were blind, sightless people. But we know this, you and I, children of the Underground that we are, arrested by its tunnels, unable to leave, even when traversing the city’s surface.
From the beginning, then, there was a building here and there wasn’t one – that is what you should understand as we begin this journey. Time was called on this architectural object from the outset, both of them in fact: the original and its simulated sibling. As for originality, though, the first iteration wasn’t an original at all but a copy itself, and of an unexpected model at that, which was deemed less monumental an edifice than the Palace could ever aspire to be: Crystal Palace had been modelled on a conservatory.
The first exhibition would close on 11 October 1851, Jan continued, oblivious to my reverie. There were talks of dismantling it, of shipping it to New York, for the exhibition that was to take place there the following year (the century littered with similar events). Paxton himself had wanted it to become a garden. Charles Burton proposed it be re-assembled as a tower, one thousand feet in height, a belvedere of sorts and a winter garden, as well a display collection: all rolled into one. Some said it should be turned into baths, others into an extension of the British Museum. It could have become a residence for invalids; a picture gallery; a library; a theatre. A riding school even. Trivial and sublime, a conservatory enlarged out of all proportion, with horses galloping down its monstrous nave. It’s something out of those fictions of science, a parallel history that never happened, just another phantasm to add to the hubris of the century. This was a building of redundancies; it remains so to this day. There are plans to resurrect it once again, a third iteration is on its way.
I kept listening to Jan’s story, hour after hour, day after day, inside a building elusive in its own sprawling ways. The second Palace was planned and executed with even greater speed, he insisted, it came to be twice as large and forty-four feet higher, able to house the Monument to the Fire of London, he claimed. A container of containers, large enough to swallow other buildings, other architectures. It was a monument to architecture itself and would become a monument to fire in the end, to destruction and dissolution, which sooner or later turn on every edifice. Look at the black-and-white footage, at the sky as it screams. Observe the way iron frames melt. Watch the repetition of structural order as it dissolves in the blaze.
We will speak of images later, and I will tell you all you need to know about the way your father’s art is defined by them. But note that, from the very outset, this building was a vision machine as well, a palace made of windows, as the irrepressible wit of journalists had it. A particular, peculiar viewing device. The Palace revolved around the eye of the observer, it constructed the world around it, I mused as I listened to Jan on a late afternoon, watching light filter through the ceiling far above our heads. The second Palace would offer us the Telescope Gallery, a series of cast-iron ‘bull’s eye’ girders, circular and ordered at twenty foot intervals. A tunnel, that is. Do you see it now? The first exhibition had offered ‘the education of the eye,’ Jan said, a slogan that would be taken up by the promoters of the second Palace (Piggott, 2004: 21). And that is exactly what the building did, I thought then, and not because of the displays and exhibits but for its relation to repetition instead, to light and scale.
In many ways, then, it was the object that crystallised key issues of modernity in architecture: through the question of materials, the use of iron and glass, the structural logic that allowed us to dictate ways in which a building can appear, the ways in which it would be perceived. As an object, an architectural edifice, it was a building of modernity par excellence. It embodied key themes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, establishing a paradigm of what was to be seen – from inside as well as from without – and to what extent the line separating the two would become blurred.
But by being an object, the Palace was still clearly identifiable, autonomous if you will. It was, after all, a building. While constructed in and of light, it remained identifiable. This is what I need you to understand: that the Crystal Palace initiated a lineage of highly visible objects of architecture to the point that visibility became their ultimate purpose. Despite its size, its structural logic and formal presence, it demonstrated the impermanent nature of modernity’s architectures. The Crystal Palace
