Diploma 11. Outline and brief timeline 2010/11.
Radical Remodelling As we stand at the brink of the economical abyss, transport development and speculative commercial housing continue to drive urban regeneration. While property values stumble, construction generally proceeds at a rapid pace, in an effort to complete images of cities based on masterplans that are far removed from reality. But when the construction process stumbles, empty volumes of buildings emerge, revealing textural details beneath the urban fabric. These show us the city as a history of architectural erasure rather than growth. It seems that this incompleteness, often accidentally, creates the most successful public spaces and architecture of our city today. Could we take this phenomenon further and improve the city by making it even more beautifully incomplete? Could we remodel the city by taking apart its rigid structure and colliding different objects and programmes, old and new, small and large, temporary and permanent, until the city functions as a collective expression of life? Diploma 11 continues to be fascinated by the pattern of urban change at the peripheries of London. For us these areas are post-‐infrastructural cities emerging within a city – micro-‐cities. Our approach is empirical. Our fieldwork is based on direct observation and sampling as we reread and redraw taxonomies of the urban field. Our experimentation consists of making and un-‐making physical models of the city, randomly combining them to speculate on new forms of urban architecture beyond the given context. Our design objective is to make familiar objects unfamiliar. At the southeast corner of Royal Albert Dock lies a small community trapped between City Airport and the Thames Gateway. Cross Rail and commercial development are leaping in from the west. The DLR extension across the Thames is underway from the south. On the east side the former Beckton Gas Works, the site for the Thames Gateway Bridge, has now been abandoned. Silvertown East was bombed in 1940 during the Second World War and was further demolished in 1987 by Stanley Kubrick during the shooting of Full Metal Jacket. A ferry terminal and its forgotten foot tunnel, the Thames Barrier, a sugar refinery, a rubber factory, a forest of BT satellites, rows of terrace housing, pubs, churches, schools and North Woolwich Station all have uncertain futures. The design brief this year explores the remodelling of Silvertown utilizing the area’s voids through the recycling of its architecture. We will speculate on alternative service facilities for this small piece of the city that appears to be trapped between trains, ships, lorries and airplanes.A city strip bare. Unit 11 has been preoccupied with developing architectural design strategies for the postinfrastructural landscape learning from the ‘inner-periphery’ of London. The unit will continue to learn from the current city topology. We will explore the city’s potentiality of generating responsive urban components and urban environmental unit that responds to the notion of social sustainability. Our tectonic explorations will speculate new composite structures and material organizations that challenge the notion of permanent and temporality, dynamic and static, transformative and accumulative components. Borrowing the notion of reversal urban engineering we will un-make the architecture of the city. Material studies will be made in non-scale, 1:5 and 1:20 detail components, developing a new vocabulary of forming structures as well as textural expressions, mixing digital analysis and usage of inherent material qualities with combined methods of fabrication.