My projects attempt to create influence in the urban & city environment. Exploring this through my final year has led me to focus on ecological, sustainable & productive masterplans, interested in exploring how different natural materials are used across these schemes.
For London, a city that industrialised very quickly, there are many heavy residential areas where communities are completely unengaged with the landscape of unintentional zoning leading to a loss of urban rituals over time. However, through integrating with their contexts and environments, these communities can reengage with themselves and their surroundings. The project looks to break the “monotonous residential” area within Putney and allow the community, at risk of losing its identity, to produce new urban rituals. Wetlands, and more specifically, Paludiculture (the process of farming wetlands) have been used as the catalyst for the community, where the adaptable architecture contains facilities for farming the wetlands, and the production of construction materials from wetland crops (thatch, reed board etc.) to be used to adapt and protect the architecture through different seasons, as well as the surrounding buildings, acting as a manifestation and beginning of new urban rituals.
As part of the project, a masterplan has been developed to integrate productive wetland spaces across areas of groundwork with “re-wetting” potential. This exercise was conceptualised while researching the issues with unengaged communities along areas of “monotonous residential” in London. These areas (Putney included) have spaces of identified architectural intervention which facilitate the community’s engagement with the sprawling wetland landscape, through paludicultural farming, ecological research & preservation or otherwise. The masterplan installation shows how the architectural design process follows through onto the masterplan scale and allows engagement from the community in defining the identified interventions inside the productive wetland spaces.
Putney Pier has stood along Putney’s Embankment since the late 1800s, acting as Putney’s original connection to the Thames. In more recent times, the pier is scarcely used and exists as an abandoned monument of its former self. Inspired to reactivate the pier and its surroundings, the design abstracts and flips the traditional British Leisure Pier typology to integrate this into Putney’s artistic culture to inform a program of various galleries. The scheme, with Thames21 as a key stakeholder, looks to reintegrate and activate ecology along the Thames (in line with pedestrian activity on the pier) through the introduction of floating reedbeds around and in the existing pier’s dolphin structures.
In line with AAA Lab’s ideals, the pier’s extension considers a changing climate where flooding has informed an underground “bunker” scheme integrating the use of bioluminescent algae allowing lighting of the spaces and purification of the air within the pier. The architecture considers a future of flooding and adapts to this already prevalent issue within Putney while enabling the artistic culture of the area to thrive.
