The combination of cheap cast and rolled plate glass with prefabricated iron framing produced a new architecture of light, weather-protected public space. Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, erected in Hyde Park for the 1851 Great Exhibition, enclosed 92,000 square metres in a modular iron-and-glass frame assembled in months. The same technology produced the glazed shopping arcade and gallery, from Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (1877) to the great Parisian passages and railway-station train sheds. These structures gave cities sheltered, daylit interior streets.
Iron and glass created the covered arcade, exhibition hall and station shed, inventing the modern enclosed public interior and prefiguring the curtain wall.
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