The Crystal Palace was built in under six months.

Engineer Henry Petroski, always a provocative thinker and writer, did some of his best work in the 1985 collection known as To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. Petroski examined a wide array of design disasters and explained how engineering is more of an educated guess than an exact science. And to add context, he singled out some daring engineering feats that succeeded despite their high degree of difficulty.

One such example is the 750,000-square-foot cast iron, wood and glass Crystal Palace in Hyde Park that Joseph Paxton built quickly in the mid-nineteenth century. The edifice was used to house the Great Exhibition, the first World’s Fair. Paxton was a gardener who used innovations in the Crystal Palace that had worked in his greenhouse designs. There were plenty of naysayers who didn’t think it would work, but the building outlived them all. An excerpt:

“One of the most ambitious and innovative structures of the Victorian era was not a bridge or a tower but the vast building constructed to house the Great Exhibition of London in 1851. The story of the Crystal Palace is a fascinating one that bears repeating, for it shows that no matter how innovative an engineering structure might be and no matter how many opponents it may have, the proof is in the putting up and in the testing of it….

Although the true skyscraper did not come into its own until the twentieth century, the Crystal Palace prefigured it in many important ways. The way the light, modular construction ingeniously stiffened against the wind is the essence of modern tall buildings. And the innovative means by which the walls of the Crystal Palace hung like curtains from discrete fastenings, rather than functioning as integral load-bearing parts of the structure, is the principle behind the so-called curtain wall of many modern facades.”