EL CRYSTAL PALACE DE NUEVA YORK Y SU CONTRIBUCIÓN A LA HISTORIA DE LAS CONSTRUCCIONES METÁLICAS

At the beginning of the 19th century, iron, as a structural material, started to be used in the most developed countries, such as the United Kingdom and France. In 1851, a building called the Crystal Palace was built for the London Universal Exhibition; it was the first large-scale building ever made with iron structure and glass. Following the success of both, exhibition and building, several cities carried out projects to build their own crystal palaces to held new international exhibitions: Dublin and New York in 1853 and Munich in 1854, built magnificent exhibition buildings using this innovative structural system. In New York, the Crystal Palace was built in the preamble of the American Gilded Age (1870-1900), a period of great economic and industrial growth. The city of New York quadrupled its population from 1850 to 1900, evolving from a regular city built up of small masonry buildings to the pioneering city of high-rise architecture, developing the first skyscrapers, and becoming a building technology benchmark. The key element that allowed such urban growth was the development of metal structure buildings, which started to be built after the Crystal Palace (1853). The two-story building had an octagon-shaped floor plan of 120.3 meters of diameter; two higher central galleries defined the two major building axes, intersecting in the center at right angles. The intersection was crowned with an unprecedented thirty-meter diameter dome. It was the first building of this size in the United States to be entirely built of metal structure; completed in 10.5 months, demonstrated the possibilities of this constructive typology. The economic expansion during the period after the construction of the building required a large number of industrial buildings to house new companies. Metal-frame buildings made possible this development and boosted the metal construction industry. These first buildings defined a new architectural typology, the cast-iron architecture, that allowed larger spans, reducing cost and time while using the most advanced materials of the time. In the 1880s, the cast iron buildings began to decline due to the appearance of the first more-than-ten story buildings, made with and hybrid iron-masonry structure. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, a combination of three factors enabled the construction of the first skyscraper buildings that would start to define the unique New York skyline: the introduction of affordable steel, the