Cracking the Glass Ceiling of a Crystal Palace: The Jacob K. Javits Convention Center

When Hillary Clinton accepted her 2016 presidential party’s nomination, she announced that the Democrats “just put the biggest crack in that glass ceiling”¹ (italics added by author for emphasis). On the days leading to the election, journalists remarked that she would spend the election night under the largest glass ceiling in New York City, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center by I. M. Pei and Partners (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). The architects’ inspiration for this 410,000 square-foot convention center made of steel space frame and sheathed in glass was Crystal Palace, an exhibit hall commissioned by Prince Albert to showcase Great Britain’s achievements and potentials in free trade. A monumental feat of prefabricated construction, Crystal Palace was designed by Joseph Paxton. Paxton was a greenhouse designer of modest background who, with his boundless imagination and propensity for efficiency and spectacle, rose through the ranks to win the admirations of the British nobility. In Victorian England, glass conservatories, by which Paxton’s design of Crystal Palace was directly influenced, were associated with republican ideals. With light entering the building from every direction, glass pavilions left no one space privileged.² Isobel Armstrong, a scholar of literary and cultural criticism, in her book Victorian Glassworlds asserts that the 20th century conservatory, also known as a nursery and a forcing house (for creating hybrid species), was “predicated on violence and nurture, beauty and coercion.”³ Tellingly, from its conception, the Javits Center was associated with the exhibition of objects and people, civic ideals, and the duality of beauty and coercion.

Clinton’s loss subsequently generated various uses of this metaphor, including “Highest glass ceiling remains intact after Clinton’s stunning loss,” and “cracked, but intact.”⁵ Crystals and glass have historically been associated with spiritual, personal, and social metamorphosis. ’ Clinton’s team appropriated the

FIGURE 4.1 Interior of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center by I. M. Pei and Partners.

Photograph: Thomey Lieberman. Pei, Cobb, Freed and Partners (1986).

story of her transformation to a crystalline building. Furthermore, the election night’s suspense, enchantment, and near-triumph of the disadvantaged are all elements of fairy tales, which describe the collective dreams of a culture. This chapter examines the social, material, and cultural intertwining in the glass ceiling metaphor. An analysis of the material properties of glass, the technical advancement in recent years, and the cultural context of fictions offer complex readings of this metaphor.