Crystal Palace exists today as perfectly as it ever did; in a set of detailed manufacturing and assembly drawings, and in detailed verbal descriptions of its design, components and processes of erection. For the realist, therefore, it can be built tomorrow, on any reasonably levelled site, with perfect precision.
Designed to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London's Hyde Park, it was erected, briefly brought to life, and then speedily removed. We know this through the recorded experience of its brief production and inhabitation, in words and woodcuts, as well as in chromolithographs and a very few surviving daguerrotypes and calotypes.
This is not a history of the 1851 Exhibition, the begetter of, and setting for, the building. The context for this study also includes other rejected ideas for its building as well as how the actual building was occupied and used. From all this, and the various roles in its production, the author gives us clues as to the nature and formation of 'architecture' and of 'culture' at that time.
Nor is this a study of what became of Crystal Palace once dismantled. A whole area of newly developing south London took the name Crystal Palace; for at its centre, on the summit of Sydenham Hill, the remains of the Hyde Park building landed and were transformed into something quite different.
We remain, inevitably, looking at a subject that is transient, slippery, translucent, immaterial. It seemed to appear, and disappear having transformed those who encountered it, like lightning.
