\paperw3390 \margr0\margl0\ATXph16380 \plain \fs20 \f1 \fs22 Joseph PaxtonÆs design for the Crystal Palace was significant for its use of standardised prefabricated elements. Th
e building was 1,848 foot long and 456 foot across at its widest point. Paxton had been a gardener rather than an engineer, and for the previous twenty years had been designing greenhouses on a large scale. The novelty of his plan for the \b \cf4 \ATXht10861000 Great Exhibition\b0 \cf0 \ATXht0 building lay not only in its conception but in its implementation. It could not have been erected even fifty years earlier. Interchangeable parts had to be employed, and these were products of the machine-tool
industry. Moreover, plate glass had to be available in huge quantities. Prefabrication was essential and the method of building was modular. Moreover, it was machines which turned out the sash-bars and gutters and laid on the paint. The structure rel
ied for lateral stability entirely on the rigid connection between vertical iron columns and horizontal beams. Brunel, the great engineer and inventor, hoped that the Exhibition building might become the most important exhibit in the Exhibition. Yet th
ere were many influential men of taste who were totally opposed to the possibility of a new architecture based on such methods and materials. William Morris, the critic and designer, disliked plate glass because it let in too much light and dismissed mo
dern engineering as æa horrible and restless nightmareÆ. He went to the Great Exhibition but refused to go round and look at the exhibits, declaring it all æwonderfully uglyÆ. As for John Ruskin, the historian of architecture, the writer and the educat
or, he refused to believe that iron was a suitable material for construction. He described the new railway stations that used the same technology as æalien to architectureÆ, comparable with rat-holes and waspsÆ nests. In Britain the ænew architectureÆ
was not destined to get off the ground for a long time. In America, however, it developed into the skyscrapers based on the steel frame.\par
