Le CRYSTAL PALACE ou le TEMPLE du CAPITALISME

London is a city that is agitated day and night, endless like the sea. This screaming, this screaming of the locomotives, these iron paths placed above the houses and soon under the houses. This audacity of the spirit of business, this appearance of disorder which is in fact the bourgeois order carried to its supreme degree. This polluted sieve, this soil fed with coal, these squares and these magnificent parks, these monstrous corners of the city like Whitechapel with its half-naked, wild and hungry inhabitants. The city with its millions and its universal commerce. The crystal palace, the universal exhibition. Yes, the exhibition is shuddering. You feel this terrifying force that brought together here in a single herd all this infinity of people from all over the world. You feel this titanic thought. You feel that something is achieved, that there is a victory, a triumph. You even start to be afraid of something. Wouldn't this really be the ideal achieved? You ask yourself, wouldn't this be the end? All this is so solemn, so victorious, so proud that it starts to oppress your breath. You look at these hundreds of thousands, these millions of people whose great fleas and cults are here, submitted to the whole world. People who all came with a single thought and who press themselves, without noise, obstinately and without saying anything, in this colossal palace. And you feel that this is where something has definitely been accomplished. Yes, accomplished, finished. It's a kind of biblical painting, something about Babylon, like a prophecy of the apocalypse that is accomplished before your eyes. You feel that man must put a lot into his eternal spirit of resistance and denial in order not to let himself be taken, in order not to submit to the impression, not to bow to the fact and not to worship Baal. THE OCCASIONAL EXHIBITION In this travel story entitled Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, published in 1863 in the magazine Le Temps, Fedor Dostoevsky describes his discovery of Western Europe. And it is during his short stay in London that the Russian writer testifies to his obligatory passage to the great attraction of his time, the Crystal Palace, built on the occasion of the 1851 Universal Exhibition. And this story, he testifies to the sideration, the word is not too strong, by which this building struck its century and its contemporaries. And if it does not arouse great interest today, the Crystal Palace has yet embodied both the completion and the beginning of something. Every civilization has its architectural marvels, its extraordinary achievements that mark the history of humanity. And if it does not resist all the perils of time, it remains nevertheless in the memories. The seven wonders of the ancient world only subsists the Pyramid of Cheops, and Notre Dame de la France Médiévale has recently made us a few frayeurs. But these marvels are not only exceptional monuments, they embody above all the genius of a people and an era, the completion of the highest degree of its know-how, which demonstrates the culmination of an architectural system, that is to say a complete synthesis between art and technique. And the idea that I submit to you here is that the Crystal Palace is one of these marvels. The marvel of the British capitalist power during the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, that of iron, coal and steam, which preceded that of concrete, oil and electricity. During the building of the palace, Karl Marx wrote The bourgeoisie of the world erects its pantheon in modern Rome, where it exposes, with a proud self-satisfaction, the gods that it has created itself. What prompted 6 million visitors to see the Universal Exhibition in 1851, is both its content and its content. And we will see that the nature of the palace is perhaps closer to the machines exposed than to traditional architecture. Because the Crystal Palace is an industrial system. It has reason to be only by and for industry. To understand why and how London erects a marvel to the glory of industrial civilization, we must go back to 1849. The exhibitions presenting products from the industry at the national level are not new. They have been regularly organized in France since 1798 to create emulation around technical innovation. So the British crown wants one, but at the international level. It is planned for 1851 in Hyde Park. A commission in charge of the organization is set up. A competition for the exhibition pavilion is launched and its program is defined. The building will be temporary, that is to say demolished at the end of the event. It must therefore be simple, as good a market as possible, and built in one year. The call for the project is widely spread and in the space of three weeks, 245 candidates will be submitted, including 38 from abroad. But despite this large number of submissions, the commission rejects them all. In its eyes, they are all too expensive, too massive or out of date. But perhaps the commission simply asked for the impossible. As a result, the press mocks what seems to be a fiasco. The chroniclers denounce one of the greatest farces, fraud and absurdity that the world has ever known. Furious architects ask for indemnity. Of these 245 candidates, let's mention two disruptive proposals, as we say in the Startup Nation, two avant-gardists who had sensed that the challenge could not be met through traditional Freemasonry. These are the Irishman Richard Turner and the Frenchman Hector Oro, who both submit designs entirely made of iron and glass. These are industrial materials, deemed inappropriate for architecture. And the idea of building entirely of iron and glass architecture, well, it did not exceed the stage of fantasy. These two proposals are indeed saluted for their audacity, but are still far from being overpriced. And so, as time goes by, and as the situation seems to fall into a deadlock, the commission turns to more exotic solutions. And it is not an architect, but a gardener who holds the attention of the commission. So be careful, not a gardener with his rake and his straw hat, no, but rather a landscaper designer of green spaces for the large areas of English nobility. You know their love for picturesque gardens. And this gardener is already renowned at the time. It is Joseph Paxton. And so, shortly after meeting the commission in early June 1850, our gardener scribbles a conceptual drawing. Then, two weeks later, he delivers a first sketch. And what he proposes is a staggering project. A gigantic transparent palette of iron and glass. 563 meters long by 124 wide by 39 meters high. An exhibition area of ​​nearly 100,000 square meters, divided into two levels, which makes no less than 13 football fields of covered surface. And all this for the modest sum of 150,000 pounds of the time, that is, 20 million euros today. To give you an idea, it is not even a thirtieth of the cost of the new Olympic Stadium in Lyon. The proposal is unanimously adopted by the committee. But now, Paxton has eight months to finalize his plans and build the building to open the exhibition in time. But then, how can he achieve such a feat? Well, the famous gardener has done a lot of research and development in the past for the construction of tropical greenhouses. He has developed many new modular construction techniques, that is, the assembly of prefabricated and standardized elements, so that they can be produced in large numbers and allow for combinational variations. Today, modularity is part of our daily life and seems out of place to us. But at the time, it was a new concept. It is only allowed by the emergence of industry, which allows production in series, which allows prefabrication and standardization. In 1850, the foundry was already produced in quantities that could be called industrial, although some refining processes are still to be invented. As for the greenhouses, a whole new process allows for the obtainment of beautiful flat and standardized windows, which allow their generalization in architecture. It must be understood that 10 years earlier, the Crystal Palace would not have been technologically conceivable. If you have seen the two previous episodes of this series, you know that in the second half of the 19th century, architecture is in full revivalism of historical styles. And yet, the shape and proportions of the Crystal Palace are not subject to a certain artistic culture, but to the dimensions of the 25 by 120 cm squares made by the stained-glass windows, that is to say the largest available at the time. And it is the whole of the design that is inferior to standardized industrial elements, elements with no ornamentation, to the optimized installation method that prefigures tailorism. And it is certain that the idea that architecture can respond not only to a program, but also to a more abstract problem of design, comes from a totally modern mind. In this, we can say that Joseph Paxton is a designer rather than an architect. He integrally moves the constructional question on the territory of engineering and technical feasibility. And that's completely new, it's a revolution. Which makes Paxton the very first industrial designer of architecture. Modularity is therefore the key to success. Paxton starts from a structural-constructive system typical of iron architecture, the portique. This fundamental unit of the project is composed of two vertical columns of 24 feet high, carrying a horizontal beam of 24 feet long. The design is therefore organized on a three-dimensional frame of 24 feet long, that is, 7.30 meters. And we can already guess the new specificities that this system allows compared to traditional construction. It is a structure that is not mass-produced, but that is assembled. The portiques are self-supporting, which means that they support themselves without reinforcement. We can abstractly extend this system to infinity, not only in surface, but also in height, by superimposing the portiques. With very few additional elements, a unit of facade, a staircase, beams that measure a multiple of trams, etc. We can vary the structure as we wish. We can assemble the structure, dismantle it, reassemble it, but also rearrange it. The version validated by the committee is overall rectangular, 77 modules long for 19 modules wide, and three levels of flat roofs that overlap in a grid in order to have a better wind resistance. It is divided in its middle by a transept, covered by a cradle vault that culminates at 51 meters high. The metal frame is thus composed of 3,300 columns and 2,224 beams prefabricated in cast iron. But wood also plays a major role in the structure, and we will see later that it will have its importance. The floors, the roofing, the roofing of the cradle vault and some 205,000 frames of glazing are made of wood. The whole is covered with 300,000 glass tiles. All elements are mass-produced, and thanks to its scale savings, the assembly of the building should be extremely fast and cheap. And so, in July 1850, the Hyde Park site begins on the wheelhouses, in a hurry. The work is organized around two superb orbs, spared by the terraced works and integrated into the project. The method is rodé. We start by sawing the columns manually using cranes, pulleys and ropes. When a pair of columns is erected, a beam is threaded, which is bolted to the first one. Then two other columns and three beams are reattached to form a self-supporting square. A crane is finished. The cranes are moved and each crane is mounted one after the other. The frantic rhythm of the assembly, following that of the foundry, the site is in a taut flux. Once demoulded, the beams and columns are chiseled and then assembled on the site, sometimes in less than 18 hours after leaving the factory. It doesn't take long, we don't wait to finish the ground floor to lay a floor and mount the successive floors in pyramids. This stacking is completed at 51 meters high by the vault of the transept, composed of 16 wooden grooves. They were put in place by pair and thanks to the simplicity of the design, the vault was assembled in a week. You now understand why I say that the Crystal Palace is more of an integrated industrial system than a building. The building is more of a machine than an architecture, its construction is more of a assembly line than a workshop. And 5 months after the start of the work, the 4,000 tons of iron making up the palace are assembled. There are 3 comfortable months left to arrange the exhibition. Paxton is acclaimed around the world for his exploits and is made a knight by Queen Victoria in recognition of his work. Can you imagine the intellectual overthrow that this proof of concept had to impose on his contemporaries? They must have had the same stars in their eyes as in those of your little cousin unleashing his first Lego for his 6 years. But Paxton's system also has its limits. The most retentive minds point out the fact that a greenhouse, however large it is, does not make architecture. That it is impossible to go completely from Freemasonry to Faire Habitat. In this regard, it is interesting to compare Paxton's Crystal Palace to the Saint Geneviève Bibliotheque in La Brouste, which I talked about in the previous video of the series. Both were inaugurated in the same year, 1851, but offer two distinct paths towards modernity. We will put the exhibition aside for a moment to finish dealing with the architectural question. It was therefore scheduled for 6 months, after which it was necessary to decide on the future of the palace, destined to be dismantled. And remember, one of the characteristics of this structural system is that it can be dismantled and reassembled, or even rearranged or enlarged if you have additional elements. And that's where it gets funny, we have an architect named Charles Burton who proposes to rearrange the palace into a 50-story tower, thus culminating at more than 300 meters. And I find it funny that the first skyscraper ever imagined did not need to be invented, it naturally declined from the standardized assembly system. Well, obviously, Burton's proposal is not credible, Paxton's elements are not designed to withstand such a load, not to mention wind resistance. More realistically, we have a consortium of businessmen who propose the dismantling and reassembly of the palace in the southern outskirts of London, in Sydenham. But of course, it's not funny if we rebuild it identically. The Crystal Palace, second version, certainly incorporates most of the original elements of the first, but transforms and extends the system to such an extent that it makes it a fairly different structure in shape, and above all, much more massive. The building goes from 3 to 6 levels, and the transept is greatly enlarged. The main entrance arch is framed by a new facade and served by a set of terraces and stairs. The main gallery is redrawn and covered with a birch bark, and two large transepts are added to the ends of it. In the end, the reconstruction of Sydenham will have cost nine times more than the first structure, for a fairly monstrous result, quite far from the transparency and lightness of the original. But let's go back to the Universal Exhibition. The people who succeed and the people who are nothing rush into the excitement, coming from London itself, the four corners of the kingdom, and abroad. It was inaugurated in great pomp on May 1, 1851 by Queen Victoria. Great Britain and its imperial colonies occupy half of the exhibition space, the other half hosting other countries, France being the first foreign contributor. The exhibitions are grouped into four categories. The raw materials, the machines, the manufactures and the liberal arts. 100,000 objects from all over the world are exhibited. Weeks would not be enough to go around it. The queen herself makes 34 visits to the exhibition. The intention is to present progress as the key to a better future for the world. But by comparison, it is above all the occasion for the Albion father to expose his technological superiority. The British crown exhibits the mythical Koh-i-Noor and Darya-i-Noor, the most beautiful and big diamonds in the world. The Tara brooch, a Celtic jewel of the 7th century, recently exhumed. Australia brings Maori craftsmanship. India, a lavish throne room and a sumptuous elephant room. The spices of Trinity and Tobago embolden the air of a conquered exotism. Further on, the French manufacturer's know-how forces respect. Lionesse silk, porcelain of severs, furniture balls, tapestry of obusons and goblins. While America shows off its technological audacity. Agricultural machines, iron bridge, prototype of a certain Mr. Colt's revolver and rubber statues of a certain Mr. Goodyear. But British innovations have the beautiful part. Telegraphic telecopier, daguerreotype, machine to vote, microscope, a fire truck, a gigantic hydraulic press, musical instruments, watchmaking, surgery, a lens stop light, a barometer with real teeth, and the technological nail of the exhibition, a 5-meter focal length telescope. Further on is the machine room. They can be observed in operation since they are moved by belts, powered by a boiler outside the palace. We can see the whole process of cotton production, from spinning to stifling. To meet in the crowd, we give ourselves a meeting point. For some, it will be under one of the two orbs imprisoned under the superstructure. For others, near the spectacular crystal fountain, 8 meters high, and whose water is scented with the water of Cologne. There, from this profusion of wonderful objects, we make a stop at the bar where we de-alter ourselves to the shrubs. Unless we sit down for a moment to listen to the great organs playing. During 141 days, 6 million visitors from all over the world rushed to the Great Exhibition of All Nations, the equivalent of a third of the population of the United Kingdom. In an article entitled The Great Exhibition and the Little One, Charles Dickens compares the wonderful English machines, their power, their speed and their precision, to the coarse mechanisms of Chinese printing that have never been improved since their invention. And by the same token, the writer compares modernity to the West and the secularity of the Celestial Empire, to which he mockingly mocks archaism and fatuity. The exhibition was indeed the collective awareness that, as Dostoevsky relates so well, something had definitely been accomplished, finished. And this something is both the superiority of the machine, the domination of the capitalist system, the globalization of tourism and trade relations, the advent of the society of the show. What is celebrated in 1851 is the rapid and crushing triumph of modernity as a model. From this golden age of the time of Queen Victoria and imperialist capitalism, a subgenre of science fiction has seized by a step aside in Uchronia. What if the first phase of the Industrial Revolution had been the last? What if the history of science had been completed with the steam engine? It is the experience of thought proposed by steampunk, a fictional genre and an aesthetic trend. And far from being just a cosmetic based on gear, high-form and aviator glasses, steampunk is an amplification of all the components of the Victorian era. The technological marvel, the social fracture between the working class and the bourgeoisie, the new relationship between man and nature based on its maximized exploitation. And in my opinion, there is a cinematographic work that was able to put all the markers of steampunk in the picture, it is the Japanese animation film Steam Boy, directed by Katsuhiro Otomo in 2004. This Uchronia takes place in an alternative time, during an alternative Universal London exhibition. And despite the spectacular overhaul, let's say, rather essential to my taste in the last part of the film, the Crystal Palace is the exact replica of its reconstructed version of Sydenham. Proof that reality is sometimes more moving than fiction. After the London triumph, many countries envied England and dreamed of having their own Crystal Palace. It will have inspired that of New York, built in 1853 and destroyed by fire five years later, that of Munich, built the same year and destroyed by fire in 1951. As for the original, well, the original second version of Sydenham, it disappeared in the same circumstances, on the night of November 30, 1936. We said it, some structural elements, but above all the floors were made of wood. And the melt has the annoying tendency to, well, melt quickly. Which makes this kind of building a real butter mode on straw. A few 400 firefighters and 90 trucks could not do anything against the flames. And in a few hours, it was all over. The disappearance of the Crystal Palace provoked the remorse of a society in a declining mood and on the brink of an imminent world conflict. It made Winston Churchill say, this is the end of an age. Wow, good atmosphere! Here, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If so, subscribe so as not to miss the next episodes. If you think that the Vulgar on the Archive deserves to exist on YouTube, join the very select club of my tippers. A very big thank you to you. And I'll see you very soon for a new history of architecture.