Design Discussion Week 3: The Crystal Palace

The Industrial Revolution was a transformative period of technological advancements that leading to significant changes in manufacturing, urbanization, and society. It played an important part in paving the way for how the modern world is by introducing many important processes that can be traced back to the time period. Without the Industrial Revolution, we might not be where we are today as a society. One of the products of the Industrial Revolution was the Crystal Palace, the host of the very first World Expo and a key building in architectural history for its monumental size and many technical innovations in its design and construction, of which paved the way for more complex prefabricated designs that are even seen in the modern world.  

There are some similarities in my process for building a spaghetti bridge and the how the Crystal Palace was created. In the video, it is said that the Crystal Palace would be a temporary building and needed to be built simple, cheap as possible, and economic to build within a short time. This is similar to the concept of the spaghetti bridge project in which it is temporary as it will be used until it breaks from the having weight put on it. It is simple as the requirement for the bridge is to come up with a light and simple design that maximizes the amount of weight it can hold. It is cheap as the material used is uncooked spaghetti noodles. Lastly it is economic to build within a short time as the project time length is only a week. One more similarity between the Crystal Palace and my spaghetti bridge is the use of triangular shapes to make my bridge light but strong with minimal material used. Triangular shaped structures are the core to both my bridge and the Crystal Palance to achieving a minimal but strong structure. 

Linking back to the Industrial Revolution, one of the many processes affected positively by it is mass production, the manufacturing of large quantities of standardized products. After doing some research on it, I have discovered two techniques used to in today’s mass production. The first is automation, which machines instead of humans are used to streamline manufacturing systems that increase production greatly while minimizing error. The second technique I found is computer aided design (CAD), which is used to design product in a 3d using a computer, which then can be used to mass produce any given design. This all wouldn’t be possible without the Industrial Revolution introducing the foundations that these techniques would evolve from.