‘Power Palace Park’ is the reimagining of the Crystal Palace Park as an energy generating landscape that negotiates the socio-political mythology of the site, the tension between what is ‘park’ and what is ‘building’, and proposes a quantifiable solution to the ongoing funding crisis public parks face in the UK. An idiosyncratic space with layers of disparate development and history, the new building picks up where Paxton’s original made its name as a national exhibition for the United Kingdom, embodying the government’s ‘2050 Green Industrial Revolution’ to reassert Britain’s ‘place in the world’. Hyper-real materiality, which subverts legislation on what is ‘natural’ and ‘woodland’, and power-generating landscape infrastructure, inform a new series of civic and leisure spaces that simultaneously create local community ecosystems.

The proposal seeks to finally satisfy the impossible brief of a new Crystal Palace, one that celebrates its existing quirks, layers, and conflicts rather than the notion of its former glories.