Selected concepts include a cloud of mist, a giant sarcophagus and a restored British habitat
A cloud of mist, a two-mile-long timber ring and a decomposing necropolis are among nine winners of an international competition to design concepts for a modern-day Crystal Palace.
The contest, organised by the Great Exhibition Road Festival in collaboration with the Museum of Architecture and architectural historian Neal Shasore, asked what a Crystal Palace should look like in 2026, how it would function and who it should serve.
Joseph Paxton’s original 563m-long glass and steel structure, built for the Great Exhibition in 1851, took just 17 weeks to construct and is considered a landmark engineering achievement of the Victorian era.
But its legacy has been complicated by the building’s function as a vast gallery of the spoils of colonial extraction, often ignoring the communities which created the diverse array of artefacts on display.
The Great Exhibition Road Festival, which will exhibit the winners this weekend, said the nine selected concepts all engaged with the building’s celebrated but controversial inheritance.
Some concepts explore diaspora culture, while several proposals have worked with reclaimed, recycled or biodegradable materials, with many designed to be dismantled, redistributed or absorbed back into the ground.
The Unfixed Palace by Edward Norman is not a building at all, but a field of mist suspended above the footprint of where the palace stood at Crystal Palace Park before it burned down in 1936.
The cloud would hover between three and eight metres, thickening in humid conditions, dispersing in wind and glowing at night, offering a diffuse and uncertain presence in place of the ordered structure built in 1851.
UK Grand Crystal Palace by Jenchieh Hung + Kulthida Songkittipakdee / HAS design and research is a continuous mass timber ring stretching for 1.8 miles around Crystal Palace Park, encircling 210 acres of restored native British habitat.
The proposal aims to redefine architecture not as a monument to human progress but as a living ecosystem in which plants and animals are equal participants.
After the Palace: A Necropolis of Return by Dr Harriet Harriss, Naomi House and Heidi Lu is conceived as a giant sarcophagus built from salvaged rubble, composted textiles and contaminated soil which is designed to slowly decompose, transforming into fertile soil over the course of the exhibition period.
A Simulated Future Civic Framework by Daniel van der Poll envisages a repeatable series of modular structures radiating from the original Crystal Palace footprint, with a huge main building at its centre composed of giant arched forms of glass and steel.
The Great Exhibition Road festival is a collaboration between Imperial College London and some of Britain’s leading museum institutions including the Natural History Museum and the V&A, with an expected audience of 60,000 visitors across the weekend.
The competition was free to enter and had no restriction on background, qualifications or discipline, and was deliberately broad in scope in an approach inspired by Archigram’s walking cities and Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, with the organisers welcoming proposals that are “rigorous in thought and visionary in ambition”.
Entrants were asked to submit a complete A2 designed PDF, a separate 500-word text and a series of images for press and online purposes.
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