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 mad...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2017 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) |
| Repositorio: | RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia |
| Idioma: | español |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/86190 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/86190 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Historia de las estructuras análisis estructural construcciones históricas hierro de fundición hierro forjado exposiciones universales/internacionales Crystal Palace edifcios de fundición Nueva York. COMPOSICION ARQUITECTONICA |
| Sumario: | 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 previous experience acquired, and the development of calculation methods for designing metal structures. This research thesis aims to explain the role of the New York Crystal Palace (1853) in the development of the first metal-frame buildings and the following steel-skeleton skyscrapers in the United States. The building has been studied from different perspectives. A first line of study analyzes the building in depth, from its conception to its construction. This process includes a research on the different types of materials and iron used for the structure, incorporating factors such as the iron-making process and the state of the industry at the time. The structure of the building and its most representative elements have also been analyzed, combining original calculation parameters -which have been the result of a parallel research- with modern calculation methods, in order to understand the state of the engineering science at the time. A fourth line of investigation covers a macro-study to classify hundreds of cast-iron buildings erected during the second half of the nineteenth century in the city of New York; the ultimate goal of this investigation line is to confirm the influence of the Crystal Palace in the subsequent metal structures. |
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