Artifacts from a Competition

Sometimes going through your old files in your hard drive is an interesting process, the deeper you go the more memory links between your archive and your mental image of the information stored there are damaged or even broken. As a result what you can actually find in the folders of your C drive is -often- not what you were searching for in the first place.

By the same token going through an image folder in my computer today ended up in an adventure of (re)discovering artifacts from different projects and proposals of the recent past. The illustrations I am sharing are sketches done for the Thamesmead waterfront masterplanning competition a joint venture from Peabody and Lendlease 2 years ago. As a small team of professionals (me, John Prevc, Felix Robbins and John Puttick) under the umbrella of HOK London office we opted to present more of a mosaic of small interventions rather an uber-solution. Hence the plethora of small sketches pretending to be framed in "postnotes" or analogue "photos" glossy paper.

Sketches like the one above highlight conditions that -nowadays- are deemed problematic yet still prevalent in our cities. Retail will be confined within the secure perimeter of a Mall, Land will be spend in surface parking, flood barriers of any kind (not only against water), urban sprawl and monofunctional neighborhoods. Even though we acknowledge the problem the Root cause analysis is -to put it politely- limited. In the last 20-30 years we (architects, urban planners, developers, municipalities etc.) tend to anchor our narrative(s) around the words of "sustainable growth", "place making", "carbon footprint" "public participation" and rightfully so, architecture or urban design could "theoretically" play a pivotal role to alter our perception of society and how it could function better and for more people. We could see ourselves more like saviors-solution providers and our design output active ingredient of "positive change" rather than a marginalized profession entertaining the social superstructure with aesthetics, irrelevant theories about design and "l'art pour l'art" messages.

The reality though is less forgiving to our profession. Could the nice renderings change the economic realities that underpin spatial design? Could a zero carbon footprint solution for a building to coexist with a "bad" design, or even not designed at all, just engineered? Soon we realized what "placemaking" has to offer to a community maybe is not enough to counterbalance the negative impact of gentrification. In Manfredo Tafuri's book "Architecture and Utopia" Architecture as a profession is unable to escape the gravitational forces of capital, rendering it nothing more than a tool to extract surplus value. The same applies to the cynical yet accurate description of the real estate industry in the book by Ambrose and Colenutt "The Property Machine"

How come and there is an abundance of optimism among the circles of all participants in the production of space? Is it naivety? Or a consensus to bypass a proper root cause analysis? There is a strong motivation for the later for all the professions included to portray their role as important. For the academics to produce information (rather than knowledge) that is relevant to the industry, the new architects to support ideas of their role as pivotal ,with AI breathing down their neck maybe(?) the developers assure investors for the importance of their value to the circulation of capital and transformation of land as primary-valuable commodity, the municipalities to sell the idea of achieving better quality of life for their constituents through design-place making rather than better salaries, political reformation, infrastructure etc. It is a win-win situation where spatial transformations have a big visual impact (softening the cost of marketing) yet minor or even negative for the majority.

In that respect the past of Thamesmead is rich in artifacts of a different (almost) opposite nature. Of invisible infrastructure and "unpleasantly" visible buildings-fossils. Reminding how much more impactful is a sewage pipe or the political framework rather than the actual design of a masterplan, building, landscape.

There is no better example to highlight the paradox of architecture than a highly ornamented Victorian Pumping sewage station. Do we think that this infrastructure would have performed less without the cast-iron ornaments and the eclectic detailing of the interior? Do they have an impact on the rate of excrement extracted from the sewage system of central London? Could we draw parallels with the todays pseudo scientific justification of the role of architecture or Urban design on the production of space?

My archiving system -as you can tell by now- is convoluted and irrational, both inside my head and in my laptop, a purging and cleaning exercise on a Saturday morning the 11th of March 2023 became a platform for small confessions triggered by artifacts and sketches three years old.