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The Crystal is a building on Royal Victoria Dock in east London that contains a permanent exhibition about sustainable development. It is owned and operated by Siemens. It is part of the Green Enterprise District policy that covers much of East London. The site is 18,000 square metres in size at the west end of the dock. Using solar power and ground source heat pumps to generate its own energy, it has set a high benchmark for sustainability. The building is the first to achieve the highest sustainable building accolades from the world's two leading accreditation bodies, LEED and BREEAM, Platinum and Outstanding respectively. It is the most sustainable building in London.
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Design
The building was designed by Perkins+Will (Fit-Out, design leader) and Wilkinson Eyre Architects(shell and core) with Arup Group Limited who were the building and civil engineers, and Townshend Landscape Architects who designed the public realm. Event Communications were the Exhibition Designers responsible for the interpretive planning, exhibition design and creative direction, graphic design, media direction and construction management for the exhibition spaces.
Public Realm
The surrounding landscape was designed to be a sustainable urban landscape to help encourage a shift in the broader 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. The landscape is public open space and is managed by the London Borough of Newham.
Infrastructure
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, which makes it one of the largest deployments of KNX in a single building.