INSTITUTIONAL FORMS & URBAN LOGICS

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1847 Prince Albert became the president of the Society of Art, between 1847 and 1849 the Prince played a leading part in the mounting of three small exhibitions of ‘Art manufacture.’

These were promoted under the leadership of Henry Cole, an Assistant Keeper at the Record Office. At the end of the 1849 Art manufacture exhibition, Cole approached the Prince with a most ambitious scheme for an international Exhibition of all Nations, - the motivation was for Britain exert its role as a superior industrial empire. This became the Great exhibition held in Hyde Park in 1852, it is sometimes referred to as the Crystal palace, in reference to Joseph Paxton’s temporary glass and cast iron structure in which it was held.

The Royal Commission was set up to administer the exhibition with Albert as the founding president and Cole as its chief administrator. The Exhibition was a complete success. Six million people, a third of the entire population of Britain at the time, visited the Crystal palace. The event was self-financed and made a surplus of £186,000 the equivalent of £17,770,000 today.

This extra revenue was used by the Royal Commission to purchase land to the south of the Festival site in Hyde Park, Albert insisted the land should be useful to the public and provide educational access to the masses. An array of institutions where established including; The Imperial Institute, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. All built in the area to the south of the exhibition. The Commissioners of the Great Exhibition are still sitting today and have made possible one of the greatest concentrations of arts and science institutions in the world. It continues to invest money in educational projects, offering major awards to scientists and engineers for research, design and development.

The area was nicknamed Albertopolis after the Prince and its main focus was to promote both arts and sciences. This concept conjures up Romantic notions from the Renaissance, a polymath such as the great Leonardo da Vinci working on the Mona Lisa whilst simultaneously under going scientific study. The idea that one can be great at many things that the human mind is as vast as the imagination. As another great Albert said:

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Albert Einstein

Or to some it could imply a dilettante who has no real commitment or knowledge in either field. Science and art are often considered opposites, competing forces; has Albertopolis lived up to its original proposal as a polymath center for bringing together the arts and the sciences?

The word polymath comes from the Greek polymathēs, meaning having learnt much. For a very long time in past civilizations from ancient Greece, Rome, China and Renaissance Italy, the polymath was highly valued. It was only with the advent of industrialization that we began to understand expertise as being about the narrowing of knowledge rather than the broadening of it. The specialization and division of labour did not only apply to factory assembly lines but they also to intellectual labour. Although specialization has facilitated human progress in countless fields and is still very important today, has it come at a cost? There is always the danger of developing tunnel vision, a fragmented view of the world and when it comes to the scale and complexity of the problems we currently 1847 Prince Albert became the president of the Society of Art, between 1847 and 1849 the Prince played a leading part in the mounting of three small exhibitions of ‘Art manufacture.’ These were promoted under the leadership of Henry Cole, an Assistant Keeper at the Record Office. At the end of the 1849 Art manufacture exhibition, Cole approached the Prince with a most ambitious scheme for an international Exhibition of all Nations, - the motivation was for Britain exert its role as a superior industrial empire. This became the Great exhibition held in Hyde Park in 1852, it is sometimes referred to as the Crystal palace, in reference to Joseph Paxton’s temporary glass and cast iron structure in which it was held. The Royal Commission was set up to administer the exhibition with Albert as the founding president and Cole as its chief administrator. The Exhibition was a complete success. Six million people, a third of the entire population of Britain at the time, visited the Crystal palace. The event was self-financed and made a surplus of £186,000 the equivalent of £17,770,000 today. This extra revenue was used by the Royal Commission to purchase land to the south of the Festival site in Hyde Park, Albert insisted the land should be useful to the public and provide educational access to the masses. An array of institutions where established including; The Imperial Institute, Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. All built in the area to the south of the exhibition. The Commissioners of the Great Exhibition are still sitting today and have made possible one of the greatest concentrations of arts and science institutions in the world. It continues to invest money in educational projects, offering major awards to scientists and engineers for research, design and development. The area was nicknamed Albertopolis after the Prince and its main focus was to promote both arts and sciences. This concept conjures up Romantic notions from the Renaissance, a polymath such as the great Leonardo da Vinci working on the Mona Lisa whilst simultaneously under going scientific study. The idea that one can be great at many things that the human mind is as vast as the imagination. As another great Albert said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Albert Einstein Or to some it could imply a dilettante who has no real commitment or knowledge in either field. Science and art are often considered opposites, competing forces; has Albertopolis lived up to its original proposal as a polymath center for bringing together the arts and the sciences? The word polymath comes from the Greek polymathēs, meaning having learnt much. For a very long time in past civilizations from ancient Greece, Rome, China and Renaissance Italy, the polymath was highly valued. It was only with the advent of industrialization that we began to understand expertise as being about the narrowing of knowledge rather than the broadening of it. The specialization and division of labour did not only apply to factory assembly lines but they also to intellectual labour. Although specialization has facilitated human progress in countless fields and is still very important today, has it come at a cost? There is always the danger of developing tunnel vision, a fragmented view of the world and when it comes to the scale and complexity of the problems we currently face, has the time come to move beyond the age of the mono-math.?

“When you have a group of people who’ve had a different professional training, a different professional experience, they not only have a different knowledge base, but they have a different perspective on everything.”

Tal Golesworthy Tal Goleworthy an engineer, who fixed his own heart, used ideas borrowed from the garden and aeroplane industry to mend his heart. Persuading surgeons he might be able to improve upon their techniques was not easy, that they may be able to learn a thing or two from engineering techniques. The process took a growing team three years to perfect. The result would be a personalized sleeve that is stitched snuggly around the enlarged vessel, providing structural support and preventing it from growing any bigger. Polymaths like Tal Goleworthy are magnets for collaboration, these are the people who speak different professional languages, who live in different professional communities and can unite those worlds. They are the people who bridge sectors and they are the people who can innovate through cross fertilisation of ideas.

Edward de Bono the physician, author, inventor and consultant, coined the term: lateral thinking - solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. Polymaths are perfectly placed to make those kinds of innovative connections between different realms of knowledge both within themselves and out in the world.

If you were to go to Pirelli gardens in South Kensington today and look at the buildings around the square, designed by Francis Fowke and later continued by Henry Scott . Fowke executed his work in the Renaissance style, he never finished his work on the square - a burst blood vessel claimed his life, it’s a shame Goleworthy’s personalised heart sleeve came decades too late for this victorian engineer and architect. The four sides of the square were built at different times. The Original entrance is through the beautiful door at the far side whose panels symbolise the link between the arts and sciences. The vision on the door was never fully realised for Albertopolis.

Can there be a new dawn for a twenty first century Renaissance man? One that will take us to a brave new age of discovery and fully realized Albertopolis’ mandate?