Curiocities - Urban Design Catalogue

BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE UCL

CURIOCITIES Bartlett School of Architecture MArch Urban Design

MARCH URBAN DESIGN

The Bartlett School of Architecture

www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk

CATALOGUE

University College London Wates House 22 Gordon Street London WC1H 0QB UK

2009

Catalogue 2009

MArch Urban Design Catalogue 2008 - 2009 Published in September 2009 by students of MArch Urban Design 2008/2009 The Bartlett School of Architecture University College London Wates House 22 Gordon Street London WC1H 0QB www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk Distributed by The Bartlett School of Architecture Printed at Bookbinders Of London 11 Ronalds Rd London N5 1XJ Copyright 2009 The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. All rights reserved.

Director: Professor Colin Fournier Tutors: Jonathan Kendall, Yuri Gerrits, Robert Dye, Jason Coleman, Denise Murray, Philip Gumuchdjian, Daniel Horner, Edouard Moreau, Adam Lubinksky, Peter Besley, Fabian Neuhaus Course coordination tutor: Graciela Moreno This catalogue was designed by Russell Collin, Stuart Houghton, Yana Golubeva and Ohoud Kamal Cover image design by Aigars Lauzis Many thanks to our sponsors: Robert Dye Associates Bookbinders of London Alliance Facilities Limited Devereux Architects

Preface We have resisted, one more year, the temptation to go off to the other end of the world to study remote cities such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Manhattan or Hong Kong, as we have occasionally done in the past, preferring instead to continue our analysis of London.

The students started by undertaking group research, initiating a number of comprehensive investigations of the city in terms of its historical growth, its geographic and environmental characteristics, its urban morphology, its relationship between built form and open space, its infrastructure systems, as well as its underlying socio-economic, political and cultural variables. The students were then asked to choose their own sites for their design work and to develop individual programmatic agendas. As in previous years, the design project work has been treated as the primary activity around which both research investigations and creative proposals have been organised.

This has led to a particularly diverse set of design proposals, from large-scale development strategies to community-led micro interventions within the city, as well as some radical off-shore proposals. It is always particularly pleasing to note that the work is characterised by wit, invention and the personal idiosyncrasies of the students, stretching and testing the edges of the brief and questioning the terms of engagement with the physical environment. Several projects deal with the pressing environmental issues facing London, such as the imminent threat of flooding, as well as the feasibility of developing urban agriculture to address the critical issues of rising food prices and the carbon footprint impact of London’s poor food-mile profile; and for the first time this year, we have had several design proposals dealing primarily with the poetic, literary, symbolic and even metaphysical dimensions of urban space and with layers of London’s historical palimpsest.

This year has also been particularly interesting in terms of the variety of media that students have used in the development and presentation of their design proposals: several films and animations were produced, ranging from documentary to fiction; there were a number of installations and performances and it has been particularly rewarding to see that physical models have made a significant come-back, demonstrating a greater emphasis on materiality as well as the primordial importance that the course attaches to physical design and experimentation.

With a cohort of 54, this is the largest group of students we have ever had, and they originate from around the world, bringing with them a diverse range of cultures, languages, design skills, academic backgrounds, personal interests and experiences, in keeping with the cosmopolitan cultural diversity of London itself. This has resulted in the formation of six distinct urban design units, usually headed by a pair of tutors, each with a particular teaching sensitivity, adding to the richness of the mix and bringing up to 12 the number of Course Tutors teaching on the MArch UD course.

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition put together by the students at the end of the course. It reveals only the tip of the iceberg of the work that has been produced over the last 12 months, but it gives a fair idea of the quality and diversity of the work that has been undertaken.

This has been a particularly productive year, for which both students and tutors have to be congratulated, and we expect that, on the strength of these preliminary investigations, many of this year’s graduates will stay in London to continue exploring creative alternatives for the future of the city.

Professor Colin Fournier, Professor of Architecture and urbanism.

MArch UD Course Director September 2009

Table of Contents Vasiliki Agrafioti

Are you being served? Shopping Enclaves (Oxford Street)................... 7

Pelin Aksoy

New Meeting Ground on Thames River............................................... 9

Zahra Azizi

Memory & Movement: Creating Urban Curiosity................................. 11

Xiaoxiao Bao

eMotion South Bank.......................................................................... 13

Anna Boldina

Inhabited 3D Park.............................................................................. 15

Mamata Bora

The Urban Ascension.......................................................................... 17

Flora Bowden

Elemental Urbanism........................................................................... 19

Eleni Chliova-Bitzani London Re-public............................................................................... 21 Paul Christian

Re-Inhabiting the Heygate.................................................................. 23

Russell Collin

Second Nature: Reinventing London’s Tidal Riverscape........................ 25

Julie Crawford

Somers Town: Activating the Enclave.................................................. 27

Nasim Erfanian

The Brink: An Ongoing Dialogue Between Land & Water..................... 29

Xufeng Fan

Urban Working Life Hymns................................................................. 31

Zhengfang Zhu Tala Fourazan

Urban Transformation through Interiority............................................ 35

Xenia Georgiou

The Wasteway................................................................................... 37

Yana Golubeva

River Wandle: Armature for Development........................................... 39

Andres Gomez

Feathering Heathrow......................................................................... 41

Sura Hadi

East Greenwich Marsh…..................................................................... 43

Yifeng He

Infection (Upper Edmonton)............................................................... 45

Stuart Houghton

Grafton Gully – An Inhabited Landscape Infrastructure.......................... 47

Chien-Ya Hung

Slow Motion.......................................................................................49

Ruchita Jagzip

Garden Square Punctuators!?,*…........................................................ 51

Dimitrios Kefalos

Harrow on the Hills............................................................................ 53

Chhavi Lal

Hybridising Industrial Ecologies........................................................... 55

Aigars Lauzis

The Island (2034)............................................................................... 57

Lina Liakou

To Defend the Indefensible City............................................................59

Ioanna Pothou Clelia Thermou Ross Loughnane

Infrastructure Incision Regeneration.................................................... 65

Jin Lu

Green Necklace.................................................................................. 67

Fiona McDermott

Crafting Space.................................................................................... 69

Yuko Nakamura

The Algorithims of the City.................................................................. 71

Thomas Pearson

Evelyn’s Ladder.................................................................................. 73

Fiona Perchet

Lond’ON/OFF the hook!: the urban dimension of the financial crisis...... 75

Ohoud Kamal Lang Qin

Heal the Socio-Spatial Gap.................................................................. 79

Pritpal Sahota

Urbanism Enabled.............................................................................. 81

Pablo Sendra

Infrastructures for Disorder: Loughborough Estate, Brixton................... 83

Rohit Sewani

AgroCity............................................................................................. 85

Song Shi

Flood Resistant City............................................................................ 87

Hiroki Shibayama

A Mythic Autobiography..................................................................... 89

SPeeD

Tactile Urban Design...........................................................................91

Christina Tolidou

Water’s Edge The Victoria Embankment............................................... 95

Sheldon Van

University Expansion as an Urban Design Catalyst................................ 97

Vitamin

Nautopia........................................................................................... 99

Qiaojuan Wang

Islands............................................................................................... 103

Xuqiao Wang

Ecological Corridor Network in London................................................. 105

Yichen Wang

Eco-City King’s Cross Central................................................................ 107

Chia-Yun Wu

Blurred-edged City: New Rotherhithe................................................... 109

Muna Yateem

Replenished City................................................................................. 111

Mamata Bora

ar.mamata@gmail.com

The Urban Ascension The project has been inspired by a simple inquisitiveness – What is tomorrow going to be like? If I allow myself to dream and colour my imagination with a very optimistic approach, I would imagine a future where we will have cities powered by alternative energy, which will be economically local and culturally global, with no religion and scarcity of food, where a city dweller will not long every evening for a fresh breath or a break from the everyday commute! But the future of a city holds too many loose threads which could be followed through a logical thinking process to reach entirely different conclusions.

A series of skyscrapers are introduced to London growing alongside the major movement corridors and intensifying density around public transport hubs. This is treated as a solution to accommodate the growing population of the metropolis in a more sustainable way: increasing the density and vertically mixing land uses in these skyscrapers in a three dimensional matrix where home, work and leisure are vertically interwoven into a single neighbourhood.

In an endeavour to make the sky approachable/available to the public and to break the monotony of structure and ownership, a number of interconnected “public realms� are proposed in addition to the ground plane. Land is created in sky with a similar set of rules applied on the ground which would allow the built form of the city to mutate three dimensionally.

Tutors: 16 Jonathan Kendall / Yuri Gerrits

Circulation

Greenscape

Land use requirement

Land use distribution

Mutation of land use due to connectivity

Plan @ 240m level

Plan @ 80m level

Plan @ ground level

Part section

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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