Joseph Paxton, a British architect and gardener, designed the Crystal Palace, a structure made of glass and cast iron that measured 563 meters in length and 124 meters in width, covering nearly 93,000 square meters. He completed the design in just 9 days, and the entire building was constructed in less than a year, thanks to a revolutionary modular and prefabricated approach. This method allowed for quick assembly, as the components were manufactured off-site and then put together on location. The design was inspired by the structure of the Victoria regia, a giant water lily native to the Amazon, whose large leaves supported Paxton’s daughter when he tested their strength. The seedling of the Victoria regia was given to Paxton in 1849 after it had been grown at Kew Gardens without ever blooming. A young gardener named Eduard Ortgies took care of the plant, and within two months, it produced leaves with a diameter of 1.4 meters. A month later, it flowered, prompting the need for a larger greenhouse, the Victoria Regia House. Paxton was fascinated by the plant’s natural engineering and tested its structural strength by floating his daughter on one of the leaves, illustrating its surprising durability. The first sketch of the Crystal Palace was directly inspired by the Victoria Regia House. The project had an extremely tight schedule, as the international competition for the building’s design had generated 245 submissions, most of which were either too complex or time-consuming to build. The organizers needed a temporary structure that could be erected quickly, and Paxton’s idea, though initially met with resistance, eventually won approval. Despite differing accounts, all sources agree that the construction was completed in under a year. The Crystal Palace was inaugurated on May 1, 1851, for the Great Exhibition, a showcase of global innovation and industry. Its speed of construction was due to Paxton’s modular design and the use of prefabricated glass panels. The glass was installed using special carts, and one worker could fit 108 panes in a single day. The building featured 3,300 cast iron pillars and had the largest glass surface ever seen in a structure at the time. Paxton claimed the design imitated the organic structure of the Victoria regia, a subtle tribute to Queen Victoria. The building was later disassembled and reassembled in Sydenham, where it burned down in 1936. Its length, 563 meters, was chosen to symbolize the year of the exhibition, 1851, according to the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).