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Young World
DESIGN MARVEL
Palace in crystal
A.SRIVATHSAN
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Most buildings use glass extensively these days. It was gardener-turned- designer Joseph Paxton who pioneered the idea in London.
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Photo: K. Murali Kumar
At the Lalbagh: Sheer beauty of glass.
Glass glass everywhere and not a brick to be seen. This probably would be the beginning of a new rhyme about our cities and their buildings. Most of the buildings are now glass boxes. The environmentally conscious may squirm at the excessive use glass, but one man may be smiling in his grave — Joseph Paxton, the gardener-turned-designer. Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace was possibly the first building where glass was used in an excessive way. To be precise, Paxton used 900,000 square feet of glass.
Crystal Palace was designed as a part of the 1851 World Exhibition in London. Paxton’s design was not the first choice. The first chosen design was all brick and needed 13 million bricks to be completed. When the permanence of the structure and its location in Hyde park London was criticised, the committee chose Paxton’s design that was modeled on a garden house. The structure was completed in a year and when opened, it accommodated 14,000 exhibitors and 100,000 exhibits. The structure was later dismantled, shifted to a new site in Sydenhams and survived for about 80 years before it was destroyed by fire.
Imitation
The critics of Crystal Palace may have called it a “transparent humbug”, but in certain ways it placed glass as the emphatic modern building material in the popular imagination. It received six million visitors and became a prototype to travel across the world. It turned west and reached New York and when it turned east, it found a patron in Bangalore. The Glasshouse in Lalbagh, Bangalore, is an imitation of Crystal Palace.
Lalbagh was one of the royal gardens created by Hyder Ali in the 18th century and developed by his son Tipu Sultan. Saplings from places as far as Turkey were brought and grown here. In 1856, the British established it as a Government Botanical Garden.
In 1889, John Cameron, the then superintendent of the gardens, built the glasshouse to commemorate the visit of the Prince of Wales. The glasshouses are normally meant to acclimatise plant specimens. But the grandness of the structure compelled an extension of its use to accommodate exhibitions, annual flower shows and as well as political meetings.
The Glasshouse was renovated in 2004. During the renovation, the original glass panes imported from Glasgow were replaced with laminated glass. The original Crystal Palace may have gone, but its Indian version continues to attract visitors.
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