‘Power Palace Park’ is the reimagining of the Crystal Palace Park in London as an energy generating landscape that negotiates between 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 creates 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 former glories.
Methods: The project was carried out in a hybridised style I have continued to develop, with intricate, thematic hand drawings working in symbiosis with ceramics and surrealist renderings.
The project was developed within the context of the Bartlett School of Architecture.
KOOZ What prompted the project?
SS Growing up, Crystal Palace Park has always had an air of mystique that comes from its incoherent mix of burnt-out ruins, sphinxes, 70’s concrete stadiums and dinosaurs. The wider question of how the ‘Crystal Palace’ should be succeeded is one that has threatened the ‘sanctity’ of the park as a site layered with conflicting visions, as if regeneration or ‘improvement’ will eliminate its very attraction and relevance. Countless proposals for the new ‘Crystal Palace’ have fallen by the wayside for lack of purpose, with Joseph Paxton’s original glass and steel behemoth standing as a beacon for former British colonial influence, having once hosted many a national exhibition but falling almost synchronously with the empire. The project questions how the new Crystal Palace can be interpreted to address contemporary national issues to provide a template for international practice, and hence become a symbol of modern Britain’s global success and innovation.
KOOZ What questions does the project raise and which does it address?
SS First is considering what the new ‘National Exhibition’ showcases- the ‘Green Industrial Revolution 2050’ plan was one such starting point, a ten-point scheme to push the UK to the forefront of global climate action through achieving ‘net zero’ and creating a quarter of a million jobs. The Crystal Palace is to become the embodiment of these new technologies and research, questioning how architecture and landscape can be used to test, educate, and demonstrate these innovations. Being a park at risk of partial sale to developers, as is the case across the country, the project proposes the ‘expo’ to highlight the role of public green space within this ‘revolution’, speculating how it could generate renewable energy and design the building with features that create a single, interconnected ecosystem with the landscape.
The project also questions the notion of ‘building’ within nature, and the experiential and psychological value of public parks. Strict civic legislation about what can and cannot be built on the park, as well as the form of what a new Crystal Palace must take, guides the materiality of the project to investigate the ‘hyper natural’. This takes the form of ‘constructed’ rurality, inspired by the park’s location in the historic Great North Wood, using tree-cast ceramics, mirrored surfaces, rammed earth, and red conductive steel as methods of embodying the multiple histories and purposes of the park, resulting in a mixed use hotel and civic building that could legislatively be considered ‘parkland’. This is also in response to the gargantuan scale of the original, which if rebuilt would wipe out nearly 1/4th of the existing green space.
KOOZ How does the project approach the funding crisis public parks face in the UK?
SS The funding crisis primarily comes from cash-strapped councils being unable to pay for public parks’ maintenance, stressed even further by the pandemic. The solution is to make the parks pay for themselves through energy-generating systems that both integrate and create new augmented landscapes that function as a machine ‘powered’ by the Crystal Palace building itself. It does this by retrofitting existing buildings on site with solar and wind power, using the park’s varied geography to create a hydroelectric battery, extensively laying down GSHP’s, and resurfacing concrete car parks as growing spaces to feed a circular economy of carbon-capturing biochar production from both the crops grown on site and civic green waste from nearby areas. As Crystal Palace Park is so varied in uses, materials, and landscape ‘typologies’, it proves an ideal testing ground for these technologies to be rolled out nationwide in different types of green space. Through calculations, the park will be able to power up to 350 homes per year, and will be ‘profitable’ in the long term between 5 to 20 years.
KOOZ How does the project challenge the 2050 Green Industrial Revolution?
SS The Green Industrial Revolution served as a starting point of this project and an anecdotal anchor for the ‘pomp’ of the future Crystal Palace and National Exhibition. The project challenges the scheme by its very proposal of using the ‘Public Park’ as a tool to spearhead novel forms of energy generation, for this typology is overlooked in favour of man-made conditions such as housing and transport. The project also aims to visualise a scheme that, on current indication of governmental incompetence, may fail to ever materialise- if the new Crystal Palace becomes a living showcase for the plan, there may be more opportunities for investment and innovation. Almost as if that’s what Joseph Paxton had intended.
KOOZ What role can and must architecture and the architect play within this Revolution?
SS The G.I.R is so wide-ranging that most directives aimed at more sustainable architecture work towards its goals of carbon-net zero in 2050. As part of the construction industry and hence one of the most carbon-intensive parts of the economy, architecture must lead in creating circular economy models of construction as well as building performance.
Creating changes to infrastructure itself can be a destructive process, while systems such as wind turbines and solar power can also be unsightly, with methods to soften visual ‘pollution’ having been contrived at best. The industry needs to look past greenwashing and the outcome in isolation, instead focusing on the process of getting to that result- something that for example the Part Z initiative is looking to do with embodied carbon and building life-cycles. Architecture must also continue to find new ways of relating to the natural world, in tighter, bleaker environments to develop an ‘infinite, restorative rurality’.
KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imaginary?
SS The architectural imaginary, particularly in some of the drawings that have sparked this project, offers an opportunity to test out design and materials that may be impractical or visionary. However, by laying out these ideas on paper, one can easily set a challenge to resolve individual parts and hence narrative-driven illustrations can result in answers to serious contemporary issues.
The drawings in this project have developed ways of depicting intangible things such as carbon capture through folkloric representation, owing to the mythology of the site and the number of interlinked stories that can be read. Connections are made by studying the drawings in detail, and by hybridising ‘glossy’ rendering techniques, a contrasting new drawing method is found. Whether this has been successful yet, I’m not sure, but I hope to progress this in the future.
Bio
Sarmad is an architectural designer, illustrator and music + visual artist from SE London. His work explores notions of ‘artificial/performed rurality’ and ‘nature’ through ersatz materials, surrealism, and physicalising legislation, questioning the real and perceived value of such conditions. Employing layered, real-world narratives and large-scale hand drawings as a tool to disseminate ideas, the ‘Power Palace Park’ project has won a number of awards including the WCCA and Ken Roberts drawing prizes, and has allowed these methods to attempt to solve ‘grounded’ contemporary challenges. Sarmad is continuing a hybridisation of the media used in ‘Power Palace Park’ into his new work exploring dual British-Pakistani notions of landscape, an overarching body that incorporates his background in electronic music with duo ‘SE25000’ and the potential relationships of sampling, architecture, and drawing.
