The Crystal Palace designed by Joeph Paxton, an architecht specializing in Greenhouses throughout England. The name itself signifies Paxtons knowledge of the importance the building would have; but Paxton's aesthetic was completely and proudly utilitarian form, not to be acknowledged for its' beauty, but for the speed in which it could be assembled, and the low cost of the enormous 2,000 by 500 foot (nearly) exhibtion hall. Many contemporaries saw it as neither a palace nor crystal (L. Hunt). Others described the exhibition as resemblencing a "vast lumber room where ... some pathetic, some ludicrous (representational) misuse of labour and ingenuity lie gathering dust."
"Inevitably its initial exploitation lead to confusions, particularly when it was in the hands of speculators anxious to make quick profits from customers who had had no education in taste... the amplitude and lavishness of the style, and hence the indiscrimiate faith in novelty and tricky gadgets." (Nikolaus Pevsner, 1931)
However, enlightened designers early romancers of the machine aesthetic saw the quality of life potentials for industrial objects. Gottfried Semper (1803-1879) an "enlightened German architecture critic" was so inspired by the Crystal Palace as a model for industrial aesthics, in 1852, he published "Craft, Industry and Art". He understood the machine like task that traditional craft demanded when he stated "the machine sews, knits, embroiders, cares, paints, and puts to shame all human skill", where these time consuming tasks can now offer "freedom" for other pursuits. A naive early theme often repeated.
Another enlightened critic and designer, Cole who published Journal of Design (1849-1852), the first journal to deal exclusively with industry and design. He protested the brilliant foral and fauna colored wallpapers and carpets to "Make your carpet a background for setting your furniture ... Heaven and earth and the wide sea cannot obtain the forms and fancies that are here displayed ... like the whimsies of madness."
While the exhibition was officially opened May Day by Queen Victoria, it was Prince Albert who initiated the division between objects of the "raw materials of industry", manufactured objects made from those materials and "the art used to adorn them." This became subdivided into 30 "classes" beginning with "Class I Mining, Quarrying, Metallurgical Operations and Mineral Producets, and ending with Class XXX Sculpture Models (in Architecture, Typography and Anatomy) nd Plastic Art", at the exclusion of all fine art.
This problem was not just a problem of design being seperated utility, but Karl Marx saw this seperation between materials, objects and decoration, as a problem where the industrial worker becomes the insignificant glue in the process of the object.
From "1837 to 1846 the British Patent Office granted 35 patents for the coating and covering of non-metallic bodies." The popular method of covering cheap materials with more expensive materials was well underway, as was 18thc love for floral, decoration and the curve over the line, an adherent pasted over manufactured objects a "horror" to critics such as Ruskins. Industrial critics believed there was nothing natural about the machine, what it produced or what it offered to the value of human life (especially in relation to workers conditions to the basics of polution in opposition to oxygen) and to have a machine carving floral designs is nothing less than a lie and deceit. This simulating effect spread to agriculture as well as utilitarian objects. Between 1830 and 1849 the sugar consumption rose from almost 20 lbs per person to 25 lbs annually.
"In 1805, a writer on architecture in "The New and Complete American Encyclopadia had noted 'the facility with which we may move' as 'a strong incentive to that love of chang' which already characterized Americans. Britain, having changed so rapidly in the great transformation from the 1780's to the 1850's, showed less and less willingness to change in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries."
Until the exhibition, most industries were selling products directly to consumers through catalogs. The 1851 Expo inspired visitors such as William Whiteley and Aristide Boucicault to dream of large retail stores as "universal providers" with large plate glass fronts. The following year Boucicault opened the Bon Marché department store
1822
Liverpool exhibited its' "covered market" said to have been "far bigger and more imposing than the Halles in Paris."
1852
Philadelphia's "American Supremacy at the World's Fair" gave great pride to Americans, althought most of the "showy objects" were improvements of British Industrial designs, not yet would American lead as inventors of industrial design.
1853
New York Exhibition
1855 Paris Exhibition
Palais de l"Industrie'
1867 Paris Exhibition
1876
The Centenial Exhibition was conceived at the Smithsonian Institute 12 years earlier.
1886
The 151 foot Statue of Liberty by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's, was presented to the US by the people of France.
1. Iron Bridge to Crystal Palace: Impact and Images
of the Industrial Revolution, Thames and Hudson Ltd, London.