Design - 159 years later ...

1851 vs 2010

159 years later ...
Crystal Palace @ Hyde Park London
UK Pavillion @ Shanghai China


The Crystal Palace

London England

Architect : Joseph Paxton 1851

The Crystal Palace at Hyde Park London was built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, where it displayed over 14,000 exhibits, was the first in a series of World's Fair exhibitions of culture and industry that were to be a popular 19th century feature.

It was a huge iron and glass building, The Crystal Palace was built not only to house these exhibits, but also to be a focal point for the spectacle. Its purpose was to evoke a sense of grandeur and power, especially for the host nation, Britain.

A rebuilt and expanded version of the building that originally housed the Great Exhibition of 1851, it stood in Sydenhan from 1854 until burn down in 1936, and attracted many thousands of visitors from all levels of society.

Yesterday ...

Today ... 159 years later

UK Pavillion
Shanghai World Expo
China

Architect: Thomas Heatherwick 2010

The pavilion is an enclosure that throw outwards from all sides, a mass of long radiating cilia. The center piece of the pavilion is the seed cathedral, a six storey high cube-like structure, pierced by approximately 60,000 x 7.5m long slim transparent acrylic rods which sway gently in response to any wind movement. During the day each of these rods act like fiber optic filaments, drawing on daylight in order to illuminate the interior. At night, light sources at the interior end of each rod allo wthe whole structure to glow from the outside.

the union jack is visible on the exterior

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