The Crystal


The Crystal is a building on Royal Victoria Dock in east London that contains a permanent exhibition about sustainable development. It is owned by the Greater London Authority and operated by Siemens. It is part of the Green Enterprise District policy that covers much of East London. Using solar power and ground source heat pumps to generate its own energy, it has set a high benchmark for sustainability.

Design

The Crystal was designed by Perkins+Will and Wilkinson Eyre Architects, with Arup Group who were the building and civil engineers, and Townshend Landscape Architects who designed the public realm. Event Communications were the Exhibition Designers, responsible for the interpretive planning, exhibition design and creative direction, graphic design, media direction and construction management for the exhibition spaces. The building was the first to achieve the highest sustainable building accolades, platinum and outstanding respectively, from the world's two leading accreditation bodies, LEED and BREEAM.

Public realm

The entire site is 18,000 square metres in size and the surrounding landscape was designed to be a sustainable urban landscape to help encourage a shift in the social ideology, making ‘sustainability’ more attractive and allowing people to participate in social activities within the site, which includes local food programmes and community gardens to help foster this principle.

Infrastructure

The building is a showcase for sustainable building technologies. At the heart of this are the building management system and KNX infrastructure. The building control devices, such as lighting, windows, blinds and heating, are connected using the KNX protocol. The building has over 2,500 KNX connected devices.

Potential usage

In order to save £55M for the Greater London Authority over the course of five years, in June 2020, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has announced he is consulting on relocating the headquarters of the Greater London Authority from City Hall to The Crystal.

Gallery