Monday, November 1, 2010

Crystal Palace in Madrid Spain


Crystal Palace or Palacio de Cristal in spanish, is a glass pavilion inspired by The Crystal Palace in London and designed in 1887 by Ricardo Velázquez Bosco.
Modeled on London's Crystal Palace of the 1850s, Madrid's greatest wrought-iron and glass-domed Industrial Revolution structure was launched just 30 years later to stage an exhibition of Philippine tropical plants. It stands in the heart of the Retiro Park, reflecting charismatically in a small lake inhabited by ducks, grey lag geese, and black swans, and forms one of Madrid's most enduring bucolic images.

The Crystal Palace, which was built in 5 months, is considered one of the best examples of architecture in iron and glass in Spain. This singular building is 54 metres long, 28 metres wide and 22.6 metres high at its highest part, and stands on a brickwork base decorated with a fine ceramic frieze.







http://www.madrid.com/madrid_tourism/madrid_monuments/crystal_palace_in_madrid_spain


This exemplar of architecture represent the fragility in the exterior material  in this case glass holded by the robustness of the structure. These two aspects represent crearly the conceps, in a simple view it look like a fragile building  but it's just because of the perception that we had about glass like a very fragile material.

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