Crystal Palace

Amid the historicist debates and ‘battle of the styles’ of mid-19th-century Britain, the Crystal Palace was significant in being the first public building not to refer to the past. Paxton’s glass-and-iron palace for the Great Exhibition was a masterpiece of prefabrication, which provoked a contemporary commentator to remark: ‘the Crystal Palace is a revolution in architectural form, from which a new style will date.’