The Crystal Palace At Sydenham
After the Great Exhibition closed, the "Crystal Palace" was re-erected in Sydenham. Jones was given joint responsibility, with Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877), for the decoration and layout for this new incarnation which opened in 1854 as a permanent venue for education and entertainment. Jones and Digby Wyatt envisaged a series of ‘Fine Arts Courts’ which would take the visitor through a grand narrative of the history of design and ornament. Jones had the opportunity to re-visit his work at the Alhambra by building a luxurious re-creation of the famed palace in the ‘Alhambra Court’. He also designed the Egyptian, Greek and Roman courts. For its first thirty years, the Crystal Palace at Sydenham welcomed approximately 2 million visitors a year, which is roughly equal to the number of visitors the V&A receives annually at South Kensington today. The Crystal Palace was destroyed by a fire in 1936, and was never rebuilt.
Read more about this topic: Owen Jones (architect)
Famous quotes containing the words crystal and/or palace:
“The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car—no wings for it—and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)