The opening chapter of Bill Bryson's wonderful At Home has a bit about the Crystal Palace: > The Crystal Palace was at once the world’s largest building and it

The opening chapter of Bill Bryson's wonderful At Home has a bit about the Crystal Palace: > The Crystal Palace was at once the world’s largest building and its lightest, most ethereal one. Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but to someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling— indeed, giddying. The arriving visitor’s first sight of the Exhibition Hall from afar, glinting and transparent, is really beyond our imagining. It would have seemed as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a soap bubble. To anyone arriving at Hyde Park, the first sight of the Crystal Palace, floating above the trees, sparkling in sunshine, would have been a moment of knee-weakening splendor. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/20575/at-home-by-bill-bryson/9780385661645/excerpt https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/20575/at-home-by-bil...