ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nineteenth-century European preoccupation with the origins of architecture and the role played by prehistoric and non-European forms that can be said to date back to the writings of the ancient Roman architectural writer and theoretician Vitruvius. M. Hvattum observes that G. Semper instead argued for the “poetic ideal” of architecture emerging from his study of the diverse and burgeoning anthropological sources of the nineteenth century. The Crystal Palace, of course, is key to understanding the context in which Semper’s own insights into the origins of architectural forms emerge. The Crystal Palace Exhibition demonstrated how the assembly of objects within a radical architectural frame could enable a systematization of knowledge unimaginable and unrealizable until that time. It is at the Crystal Palace that Pitt Rivers likely imagined a systematic and comparative setting that enabled a more rigorous and comparative science of humankind that inspired him to collect.
