New Crystal Palace Open Ideas Competition

The Museum of Architecture, the Great Exhibition Road Festival and Dr Neal Shasore have launched an open international design competition to rethink the Crystal Palace for contemporary society, considering what it might look like, how it would function and who it should serve.  The competition marks 175 years since the Great Exhibition of 1851, one of the defining moments in architectural and cultural history, inviting designers, architects, students and creative thinkers from anywhere in the world to reimagine the building at its centre. 

When Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace rose in Hyde Park in the spring of 1851, it was unlike anything the world had seen. Constructed from groundbreaking industrial of materials of the time, it was erected in just seventeen weeks and more than six million people passed through its doors during the five months of the Great Exhibition; equivalent to a third of the entire population of Britain. It was a building that embodied the Victorian attitudes to audacious design, modern methods of construction and engineering prowess. After the Exhibition closed, the structure was dismantled and rebuilt on a grander scale in Sydenham, South London, where it stood for another 82 years before being destroyed by fire in 1936. Its loss was mourned as a national tragedy. 

The competition does not ask entrants to restore what was lost but rather what should take its place in the imagination. Participants are invited to think about what a contemporary place of exchange or gathering space could mean in 2026. Who would it serve, what would it be made of and where should it be located. 

Questions of sustainability, equity and community are woven into the brief. The original Crystal Palace was structurally revolutionary but enormously carbon-hungry. A new version should be as groundbreaking for today's world as Paxton's was to Victorian London. Entrants are encouraged to think about materials, embodied energy and whether a building of this ambition could generate energy, provide habitat or be designed for disassembly and reuse. 

The competition is deliberately broad in scope – following in the tradition such ideologies as Archigram's walking cities and Cedric Price's Fun Palace – welcoming proposals that are rigorous in thought and visionary in ambition.

The Crystal Palace competition is free to enter and open internationally, with no restriction on background or discipline. Submissions take the form of a complete A2 designed pdf ready to be printed and displayed, a separate duplicate word file of your 500 word text for press purposes and a series of images as separate 300 dpi files for press and online. 

A selection of entries will be exhibited on Exhibition Road during the Great Exhibition Road Festival on 6 and 7 June 2026, with an expected audience of 60,000 visitors across the weekend.  

Expression of Interest deadline: 1 May 2026 

Submission deadline 12pm 19 May 2026 

Expression of Interests and submissions to be sent to: [email protected]  Please put your name in the heading with Crystal Palace competition (ex. Smith Studio – Crystal Palace EOI or competition submission