History
Exhibition and conference centre
The Crystal was built as part of the Green Enterprise District policy that covers much of East London.[5]
The building was designed by Perkins+Will (fit-out, design leader) and Wilkinson Eyre Architects (shell and core), with Arup Group who were the building and civil engineers, and Townshend Landscape Architects who designed the public realm.[2] Event Communications were the exhibition designers,[2] responsible for the interpretive planning, exhibition design and creative direction, graphic design, media direction and construction management for the exhibition spaces.[6] 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[7] and BREEAM.[8]
When it opened, the Crystal contained a permanent exhibition about sustainable development, and was owned and operated by Siemens. In 2016, Siemens sold the building to the Greater London Authority, who acquired it to use as a base for the Mayor of London’s £3.5bn project to regenerate the Royal Docks. After Siemens vacated the building in 2019, it was used by the Royal Docks regeneration team but large parts of the building remained empty.[3][4][6]
City Hall
In June 2020, the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan announced that he was consulting on relocating the headquarters of the Greater London Authority from the then City Hall in Southwark to The Crystal in order to save £55 million for the Greater London Authority over the course of five years,[3] The decision was confirmed on 3 November 2020; Newham Borough Council gave permission for a change of use for the building in December 2020.[9][10] The move was completed in the third week of January 2022, delayed from previous planned opening date in December 2021.[11] The building was renamed “City Hall” in December 2021.[1][12]
Architecture
The entire site is 18,000 square metres (200,000 sq. ft.) 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.[13]
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.[14]
