Palm House at Kew Gardens
"Sir Joseph Paxton (1801-65), who achieved fame with his all-glass, prefabricated — and incomparable — Crystal Palace Exhibition Hall of 1851, was the protagonist of glass in architecture. His conservatory at Chatsworth (1837; now, like the Crystal Palace, destroyed) was one of the great glass pioneers. Inspired by Chatsworth, and by the eager searching of the times, Decimus Burton and Richard Turner designed the much larger Palm House in London's Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where they were the supervising architects. Palm House is 363 feet long by 100 feet wide and rises to a height of 66 feet. Besides educating visitors in the natural world, one of the functions of English greenhouses at the time was to display the exotic range of plants and flowers that flourished in the British Empire."