WELCOME TO THE DIGITAL TECTONICS DESIGN STUDIO AT THE WELSH SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

Sub-urban London

On average, there are 32 million tonnes of diluted storm sewage discharged into the River Thames annually, mostly through the combined sewage overflows (CSO’s) found underneath many of London’s bridges. There can be up to 60 discharges a year. Thames Tidal Strategy proposed the Thames Tunnel, which would capture the flows of storm sewage from 34 sewer overflow points along the River Thames; one of these points being located underneath Blackfriars bridge where the ‘river’ Fleet runs into the Thames. If the proposal is successfull, The tunnel will run approximately 32 kilometres (20 miles) through the heart of London, and up to 75 metres beneath the River Thames, broadly following the path of the river.

Altshallow, the river was once wide enough to accommodate a fair amount of shipping – a rusty anchor was found as far north as Kentish Town. However, by the 16th century, it had become almost completely clogged up with rubbish and raw sewage. There were increasingly desperate attempts to clean it, all doomed to failure. Sir Christopher Wren even got involved at one point and the lower part of the river was widened into a canal, while the section north of Holborn to the City wall was covered over. Unfortunately, the new canal still acted as a sewage-magnet and the stench became steadily more obnoxious.

In 1732, the authorities admitted defeat and bricked the whole thing over from Holborn Bridge to Fleet Street, and later from Fleet Street down to the Thames. But the river fought back. In 1846, it burst out of its brick casing and engulfed the streets above in a tidal wave of raw sewage.

Although shallow, the River Fleet was once wide enough to accommodate a fair amount of shipping.However, by the 16th century, it had become almost completely clogged up with rubbish and raw sewage. There were increasingly desperate attempts to clean it, all doomed to failure. Sir Christopher Wren even got involved at one point and the lower part of the river was widened into a canal, while the section north of Holborn to the City wall was covered over. Unfortunately, the new canal still acted as a sewage-magnet and the stench became steadily more obnoxious.

In Zambia, the economy is down, the price of fertilisers up and Zambian farmers are tapping into sewage for their vegetable gardens.They will puncture the sewer pipe as it traverses a vacant lot and use the raw sewerage to water and fertilize their vegetables, at the risk of dysentery, typhoid, gardiasis, infectious hepatitis and salmonella…

sewage tapping

2009: 12/06
CATEGORY: Andrew Morrison
2 comments

ARCCA @ Cardiff Uni

Hi people,

I went to a showcase today for the Department of Physics in which they were demonstrating the capabilities of various pieces of equipment around the campus. Of possoble interest was the Merlin/ Condor Computer systems. Basically, Cardiff has one of the most powerful super computer’s in the UK and it is available to use should anyone be interested enough (they should probably promote it a little more). The slight catch seems to be that it is currently using the Linux operating system and the input for the systems is predominantly code. The programs that they have already at their disposal are mostly open-sourced due to licensing restrictions of the research facility. On the plus side there are people there to help, who’re very keen to incorporate research from other schools into the system. Additionally, within the next year they’re hoping to partition both the Windows and Apple Operating Systems on the Super Computer(Merlin). Condor uses the latent processing power of any idle machines on the campus. Look at http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/arcca/ for more details…

Food for thought.

2009: 12/04
CATEGORY: Uncategorized
1 comment

Blackfriars Bridge

I have spent most this week on ‘site’, in and around the area of Blackfriars, London. Blackfriars has two operational bridges at present, the earliest of which is the road and foot bridge (the furthest one on the left in the video), built in 1769 and the other, the rail bridge is used by Thameslink and was built in 1886. The pilars in between the two indicate where the original 1864 bridge stood and are what I intend to inhabit as part of my proposal. By the mid 20th century, the original bridge was considered too weak to carry modern trains and so was demolished in 1985.

Blackfriars are the only bridges in central London to have a direct north south orientation; providing the framework for potentially the ideal urban growing environment.

The video above was taken from Ludgate House, an office building opposite the site. Thanks must go to Katherine Hayes from BD who booked out one of the meeting rooms, without which I wouldn’t have been able to film. What I think is highlighted in the film is the amount of activity which surrounds the site. The static piers depict the remnants of the old London Chatcham and Dover Railway, whilst in stark contrast, the rail and road bridges carry a hive of activity. Perpendicular to all this lies the Thames, a means to ferry passengers from east to west London. These components all contribute to the sites characteristics of an orthogonal and nodal transport interchange.

2009: 12/04
CATEGORY: Andrew Morrison
TAGS: interchange
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The Arcades Project

I spent most of yesterday strolling through the arcades in search of inspiration to potentially inform a site. A bit of further research led me to The Arcades Project, a recent series of studies and events led by local artist Jennie Savage.

Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Das Passagen-Werk [The Arcades Project], her accompanying book Depending On Time (October 2009) documents “through transcribed conversations with small businesses, shoppers, local historians, architects, town planners and developers” the period of change surrounding the colossal new development at St. Davids II, and in turn “the trajectory of consumer culture from the city’s Victorian and Edwardian arcades through to the monolithic mall”.

Spatially, I have always enjoyed Cardiff’s arcades and having spent most of the morning reading the book I certainly have a renewed appreciation. The following is an excerpt from the text:

“In Royal Arcade there is a door marked ‘David Morgan Works Dept.’. Through this door is Pigeon alley which connects with St. Mary Street. Above the arcades semi-derelict rooms and corridors reveal the traces of the David Morgan Department store. Below the arcades is a subterranean city of interlinked basements and corridors. Stepping off the street, the ordered logic of the city seems like a facade for the public. The scale of the city shifts, becoming a maze of corridors, doorways and oddly shaped rooms which do not mirror the known world.”

My thread of inspiration from all this comes not only from the unique spatial experience – the history and delight of the Victorian arcade – but also the potential for exploring and documenting the shift in architecture derived from other factors such as ideology and economics, and the connotation with St. David’s II.

The inital idea is therefore to treat the Morgan and Royal Arcade as a miniature ‘city’; a concentrated environment that can be meticulously researched, monitored and analysed in both the physical and digital sense. The study would also encompass history, providing an understanding of the evolution of various aspects over time. Spatially, the Morgan and Royal Arcade complex is easily defined; it has a total of six ‘gates’ – entry and exit points to the surrounding world. Programmatically, the micro-city will explore a series of relationships between the existing and proposed fields: a hybridisation of physical/virtual space and event, all intelligently curated from the hypothesised, ‘hyperlocal’, situation-aware city.

The architectural expression could exist in a range of constructed forms from the permanent to the ephemeral, even augmented. Analogous to Jenny Savage’s notion of un-’known’ space I aim to play on the idea of a hidden, ‘embedded’ architecture – beyond the relationship between the physical and virtual – that may only be apparent to the city at certain points.

Whilst the study area would be finite, that is not to say that it is only aware of activity within. It would be important to analyse fluctuations caused by other major city events (e.g. match day) and the effect they would have on the micro condition.

The ‘layers’ of the potential analysis/interactions are numerous:

It is important to begin with a detailed survey to gain understanding of the existing physical space which could include many layers both apparent and hidden. It would be interesting to develop an inside-out model of the ‘warren’, highlighting the relationship between public and the private ‘hidden’ space as well as the spaces that lurk outside – above and around, beyond the lines of sight.

An further understanding would involve the accumulation of relevant historical information, of which Depending On Time is an excellent source.

A pseudo-study could include the pattern and frequency of movement through the space along with the historic programme and ‘shift’, given the recent birth of St. Davids II. Hour-day-week fluctuations could also inform the physical/virtual program.

Finally, a brief study of the ‘macro’ condition to highlight any broader event fluctuation.

I am currently reading Feints by Peter Eisenman. I particularly admire his layered compositions and understanding of the diagram…another source of inspiration for this project.

2009: 12/03
CATEGORY: George Metcalfe
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Inserting Images

Blog post images can only be displayed at a maximum of 500px wide. When an image is uploaded to the Media Library it is automatically ‘crunched’ meaning that it is duplicated into different sizes: Thumb, Medium, Large, Full etc. Please use the smallest width available above 500px (unless you do not require full width) and then beneath the ‘Link URL’ box, click on the ‘File URL’ button. When you click on the image within the post, it will now automatically open the full size version in a separate window.

N.B. If your image then appears squeezed, go back to ‘Edit Post’ click on the image preview then on the ‘Edit Image’ button. Under ‘Advanced Settings’ manually change the width to 500px, leaving the height blank. Click on ‘Update’, then ‘Update Post’ and voila.

2009: 12/01
CATEGORY: Uncategorized
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Tracing Urbanity: Rem Koolhaas

I recently stumbled on this short film featuring Rem Koolhaas and an unknown gentleman discussing the boundaries of architecture and urbanism. I think the narrative is wonderfully eloquent: it draws nicely upon the idea of urbanism as being ‘fundamentally generous’ whilst architecture remains ‘fundamentally egotistical’, something I tried to elaborate on in my edit of Centreplan 70.

Koolhaas also discusses the ‘imagining of a number of episodes within a building or within a city and the establishment of relationships between them or the separation of relationships’ and being able ‘to read existing situations … and then find within them the arguments for connecting new architectures to them’. Both threads provide an excellent starting point for my investigation: whether or not these relationships and the resulting arguments can be derived from the open-source, digital city.

The transcript:

I think we are interested in the city, we love the city, but we don’t want to start from scratch.

Urbanism is about creating potential; Architecture is about exploiting potential.

And what is fascinating for me now that we are involved both in architecture and urbanism is to discover that they really are totally different things; that architecture tries to define, tries to limit, tries to exclude other possibilities. If you do an architecture you are forced not only to say what this specific thing is but by saying what it is you also exclude everything it cannot be and I think that is interesting about urbanism, urbanism is just creating potential, saying this should happen, but maybe this should happen and this can also happen here so you simply make a (kind of) very compact or intense version of things that are possible, enable something and then the architect comes and takes something away from that potential you have accumulated and makes his own exclusive statement. (and so) Therefore I think that urbanism is fundamentally generous and that architecture is fundamentally egotistical in a sense.

What a script writer does is to invent a sequence or series of events and episodes and what a good script writer does is to imagine a suspenseful sequence which makes more of his material than you would otherwise think. And I think that in that sense I don’t see architecture or urbanism as fundamentally an issue of design but also the imagining of a number of episodes within a building or within a city and the establishment of relationships between them or the separation of relationships between them because connections are very important but breaks are also very important, ruptures. (and so) For me the two are actually amazingly close in terms of the inner-workings of the profession.

What we are witnessing now is that there is a (kind of) much more dispersed sense of the city and that maybe the greatest city at this moment can be a city where there is a (kind of) maximum comfort and where people in a way are liberated from an overly strong and domineering identity.

We are challenging (the situation) cities in a way maybe more strongly by being able to work with the situation as it exists. I think that that is in a way our strongest force; to read existing situations … and then find within them the arguments for connecting new architectures to them. And so this ability to read the existing situation is, I would say, a new thing in my generation but also something that is particular with our office.