Museum of Architecture launches competition to imagine a contemporary Crystal Palace

Architects and budding designers have been invited to envisage a contemporary take on the Crystal Palace with the winning designs to be displayed at a festival in central London this summer.

The Museum of London and former London School of Architecture head Neal Shashore have launched the international competition, which is free to enter and has no restriction on background, qualifications or discipline.

The original Crystal Palace was designed by Joseph Paxton and erected in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, taking just 17 weeks to build. 

The colossal steel and glass structure, 563m long and three times the size of St Paul’s Cathedral, astonished visitors with its scale and revolutionary engineering accomplishments.

More than six million people, equivalent to around a third of the British population at the time, passed through the building’s doors during the exhibition, with the building later being seen as a defining cultural moment of the Victorian era.

It was later dismantled and rebuilt on an even grander scale at Crystal Palace park in south-east London, where it stood for another 82 years before burning down in 1936.

The competition is not asking entrants to restore the lost palace but to propose “what should take its place in the imagination” in terms of a space for cultural exchange and celebratory public gathering in 2026.

The brief asks submissions to consider how contemporary values of sustainability, equity and community would impact the design, calling for a structure that would 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 the scale and ambition of the original edifice could generate energy, provide habitats or be designed for disassembly and reuse.

A winning selection of entries will be exhibited on Exhibition Road during the Great Exhibition Road Festival on 6 and 7 June 2026 to mark 175 years since the Great Exhibition.

The 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 is 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 are asked to submit a complete A2 designed PDF ready to be printed and displayed, and a separate 500-word text and a series of images for press and online purposes.

The deadline for expressions of interest is 1 May with a submission deadline of midday on 19 May. 

Expressions of interests and submissions can be sent to: office@museumofarchitecture.org