In 1850 Paxton was completing at Chatsworth a relatively small new greenhouse to protect the _Victoria regia_, a giant water-lily imported from Africa by the Duke of Devonshire. With its arcaded walls of iron and glass and its flat ridge-and-furrow roof, this seemed to Paxton to provide a suitable paradigm for the vast structure[173] needed by May 1851 to house the Great Exhibition, the first international exposition, which was scheduled to open at that time. The Commissioners of the Exhibition had held an international competition that produced several extremely interesting ferrovitreous projects, notably an Irish one by Turner, Burton’s collaborator at Kew, and a French one by Hector Horeau. Rightly or wrongly, all of them were rejected, and the Commissioners’ own Building Committee, including the chief architectural and engineering talents of the age, then produced a project of their own. Reputedly in large part the work of the engineer Brunel and the architect T. L. Donaldson (1795-1885), this manifestly impractical scheme, a sort of _Rundbogenstil_ super-railway-station intended to be built of brick—the project actually provided the inspiration for Herholdt’s Central Station in Copenhagen of 1863-4, or so it would appear—was already out for bids when Paxton presented in July 1850 his own scheme based on the Chatsworth Lily House. Published in the _Illustrated London News_ and offered with a low alternative bid by the contractors Fox & Henderson, this was accepted and—with much significant modification—erected in the incredibly short space of nine months. [Illustration: Figure 14. H.-P.-F. Labrouste: Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, (1839), 1843-50, section ]