The technical record of the Crystal Palace: twenty-eight large plates of plans, elevations, sections and details drawn from the working drawings of the contractors, Fox, Henderson and Co., with a text explaining how the parts were made and assembled.
Joseph Paxton (1803–1865), head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, sketched the building in June 1850, after the Building Committee of the Great Exhibition had rejected all 245 designs sent in to its competition and produced an unpopular brick design of its own. His design was accepted in July, and the contractors Fox, Henderson and Co., with glass from Chance Brothers, made and erected it between the late summer of 1850 and the end of January 1851. The Exhibition opened on 1 May 1851 and closed in October.
Downes’s plates show the whole system: the 24-foot grid of hollow cast-iron columns, which also served as drainpipes; the cast-iron and wrought-iron girders in lengths of 24, 48 and 72 feet; the ridge-and-furrow roof of glass panes 49 inches long carried on wooden sash bars, with the Paxton gutters that took rain from the furrows inside and condensation from the glass; and the timber ribs of the arched transept. Cowper’s text explains how the parts were made by machine, numbered, and raised by a small number of men with simple tackle.
The book, part by part
I The plan and the module
The building of 1,848 by 408 feet on a 24-foot grid; the nave 72 feet wide, the stepped aisles, the galleries; the transept over the elms.
II The roof and glazing
Ridge-and-furrow glazing, the sash bars and the Paxton gutter; the arched roof of the transept.
Rules: The ridge-and-furrow roof
III Erection
The making of the parts, the order of assembly, and the glazing wagons that ran along the gutters.