Le Corbusier despide al Crystal Palace

"The Crystal Palace no longer exists. What has disappeared with it was not a curiosity, but one of the great monuments of nineteenth-century architecture. That century had a strange destiny. It engendered the architecture of the modern world, exemplifying it in immense and splendid structures. This architecture was the fruit of discovery, or the joy of creation, and of enthusiasm. The mind of man suddenly began to compass unguessed and amazing perspectives. The iron and glass which were furnished by the rising new industries allowed unprecedent forms to be evoked, dimensions such as one may say architecture had never known. I mean the dimensions of those vaulted buildings and huge covered markets that were as light within as fields seen under the open sky. They were built of iron and glass. The international exhibitions of that age of discoveries offered fruitful opportunities for realizing structures of this kind. In London as in Paris stupendous palaces were raised…but these were fated to gather about them all the worst excrescences of the successive stages of a rising tide of bourgeois revulsion. While the new world was being born the forces of reaction rose en masse. Academism invaded government departments, the schools and institutions. Never had architecture sunk to such a low ebb. The most baneful temper prevailed. It gained the day, and as a result those magnificent vaults of iron and glass which had been the heralds of a new age were demolished right and left. By some miracle the Crystal Palace still remained as a last witness of that era of faith and daring. One could go and see it, and feel there how far we have still to go before we can hope to recover that sense of scale wich animated our predecessors in all they wrought."

"The end of the Crystal Palace. Le Corbusier laments the demise of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, a London landmarck which was dramatically consumed by a great fire in November 1937"

The Crystal Palace. A tribute. By Le Corbusier
Architectural Review vol LXXXI, 1937, p72
Reproducción: Architectural Review, the first 100 years, mayo 1996

Editado por el arq. Martín Lisnosvky