Site studies

Some inspiration for site studies - look for books in the library:

EMBT - Miralles Tagliabue Architects

muf architecture & art

Sophie Calle

Witherford Watson Mann's project Bankside Urban Forest - pdfs here

Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps.
Apply yourself. Take your time.
Note down the place: the terrace of a café near the junction of the Rue de Bac and the Boulevard Saint-Germain
     the time: seven o'clock in the evening
     the date: 15 May 1973
     the weather: set fair
Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what's worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you?
Nothing strikes you. You don't know how to see.

You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.

The street: try to describe the street, what it's made of, what it's used for. The people in the street. The cars. What sort of cars? The buildings: note that they're on the comfortable, well-heeled side. Distinguish residential from official buildings.
The shops. What do they sell in the shops? There are no food shops. Oh yes, there's a baker's. Ask yourself where the locals do their shopping.
The cafés. How many cafés are there? One, two, three, four. Why did you choose this one? Because you know it, because it's in the sun, because it sells cigarettes. The other shops: antique shops, clothes, hi-fi, etc. Don't say, don't write 'etc'. Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven't looked at anything, you've merely picked out what you've long ago picked out.

Force yourself to see more flatly.

Practical exercises from Species of Spaces by Georges Perec

Walking London

Walking is the method, memory and photography the tools to be used to conjure
up what is no longer visible but yet still present and prescient in the terrain.
   Ken Worpole, from a review of Towards Re-Enchantment by Evans and Robson


View Tuesday 30th November 2010 in a larger map

Our walking route is in red - the riverside route in orange is also a good walk. The Thames Clipper from Woolwich Arsenal to London Bridge is also recommended.

Reading London - some links and resources

To lose oneself in a city - as one loses oneself in a forest - that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its centre.
   Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle

some London writing:

London, A Biography, Illustrated London and Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd;
many books by Iain Sinclair, exploring psychogeography, impressionistic and peripheral, sometimes semi-fictional portraits of London, including Lights Out for the Territory, Downriver and London Orbital;
novels in which London is brought to the fore include Mother London by Michael Moorcock; Little Dorrit and Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens describe places we visited on the walk and the site, as they were in mid-19th Century.

This stretch of the Thames from London Bridge to the Albert Docks is to other watersides of river ports what a virgin forest would be to a garden. It is a thing grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by the confused, varied, and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore, not according to a planned purpose, but as if sprung up by accident from scattered seeds. Like the matted growth of bushes and creepers veiling the silent depths of an unexplored wilderness, they hide the depths of London’s infinitely varied, vigorous, seething life. ... But London, the oldest and greatest of river ports, does not possess as much as a hundred yards of open quays upon its river front. Dark and impenetrable at night, like the face of a forest, is the London waterside. It is the waterside of watersides, where only one aspect of the world’s life can be seen, and only one kind of men toils on the edge of the stream. The lightless walls seem to spring from the very mud upon which the stranded barges lie; and the narrow lanes coming down to the foreshore resemble the paths of smashed bushes and crumbled earth where big game comes to drink on the banks of tropical streams.
   Behind the growth of the London waterside the docks of London spread out unsuspected, smooth, and placid, lost amongst the buildings like dark lagoons hidden in a thick forest. They lie concealed in the intricate growth of houses with a few stalks of mastheads here and there overtopping the roof of some four-story warehouse.
from Chapter XXXI of The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad, available on-line

BFI Southbank's Mediatheque has some excellent archive film, for example in the London Calling collection.
In addition to London and Robinson in Space, there is now a new Patrick Keiller film - Robinson in Ruins - which moves the narration from London and the South-East to the middle of England. Not so much London, but should be interesting nonetheless.


Site:

http://www.savethemoorings.org.uk/
Anatomy of a Garden: Downings Road moorings, The Guardian, Saturday 13 September 2008
Personal webpage on Jacob's Island http://www.hsomerville.com/meccano/Articles/JacobsIsland.htm
Personal webpage tracing the route of the Neckinger http://lndn.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_lndn_archive.html
Webpage on Bermondsey http://www.hidden-london.com/bermondsey.html
Urban75 walk, 2006 including photos of Chambers Wharf before demolition (huge empty site to the east of our site, awaiting redevelopment)
curious 360-panorama below Chambers Wharf, BBC


Further afield:

Map of London 1868 by Edward Weller
Cary's New And Accurate Plan Of London And Westminster 1795
Horwood - London, Westminster & Southwark, 1792-9 - very detailed map
The Booth Poverty Map, 1898-99
PortCities pages on the history of the Port of London

Three sites of Thames and docks walks, accompanied by mp3s:
A Thames Walk With Iain Sinclair
http://www.memoryscape.org.uk/Dockers.htm
http://www.portsofcall.org.uk/

Proposals for the King Stairs Park to the east of the site:
http://www.saveksg.com/
http://consense.opendebate.co.uk/files/thamestunnel/2-Kings_Stairs_Gardens.pdf

The big freeze of 1962: photos


Precedents and places:

Nestworks by 51% Studios
Bankside Urban Forest at WWM site and BetterBankside
Dalston Eastern Curve by J&L Gibbons and MUF, on the same site as the Wheatfield and Mill by EXYZT last summer.
Dalston Roof Park at the Bootstrap Co.
Roots & Shoots

Eagle Street Rooftop Farm and The High Line, both in New York.


Ideas and miscellaneous:

http://www.urbanbees.co.uk/
http://vanishingbees.co.uk/
http://www.blackredstarts.org.uk/
BBC How to Help House Sparrows
London Wildlife Trust: The Cockney Sparrow Project
http://ispot.org.uk/
London Sound Survey - http://www.soundsurvey.org.uk/
Museum in Docklands and Museum of London, both free entry
Thames Discovery Programme - archaeological project
Fruit City - fruit tree mapping in London
City of Cranes - short film
The Urban Birder
Forestry Commission: the Trees and Design Action Group and the London Trees and Woodland Framework

Let us know of any other good links and we'll add them here.

This year Unit H explores the future of cities: people are an increasingly urban species with the majority of the world population now living in cities. We ask how these ever-expanding cities could enable other species to thrive alongside us – and the ways in which this would be mutually beneficial, creating new strategies for urban living.

We will be working along the course of the Neckinger, one of London’s many lost rivers, uncovering the rich layers of history and use so that the past might provide clues for future architectural propositions. We will look in detail at how the physical fabric of buildings is occupied as well as how groups of people have chosen to construct alternative communities outside the mainstream of city life. We will ask what cultivation and harvesting might mean in the city and how to persuade the “Cockney” sparrow to return to its namesake.

Using both digital and analogue processes we emphasise an understanding of the proposals over time – between day and night, seasonal and longer-term cycles. This complements the unit’s ongoing interest in representations of temporal and ephemeral aspects of architecture – exploring a hybrid combination of film, sound, photography and drawing.