From Disruptive Transformation
to Organic Transformation
Cities are always in transition, absorbing the new and adapting the old. The new Crossrail transportation infrastructure, with 42km tunnelling digging its way through London, will have a significant impact on the local communities and areas above the ground. The urban changes are rapidly transforming the current situation and will allow extra 100.000 daily visitors. Analysing the wider context, as well as material details, this project explores an alternative to balancing the speed of the transformative process with an acknowledgem¬ent of the current and past. By occupying and reconstructing the hidden, excavated and industrial area at Tottenham Court road, this project allows for new interpretations of the site’s history. The found remains of previous occupiers, in this instance a factory, starts to affect and transform the urban landscape, where old material informs new pathways in relation to its programmatic uses.
By installing a visual connection between the physically separated city organisms, as well as the unseen and seen, this project relates the new developments with the underlying factors impacting the street scape, behaviors and new life above ground.
An alternative to balancing the speed of urban changes and their transformative process, going from disruptive transformation to organic transformation, where the pace becomes a harmonious relationship between the built and the unbuild. The trapped treasure opens up to reinvent new spaces, both below and above, protecting and revealing, with a clear distinguish between the different times of architecture, where the old city becomes a map of a new journey.
Site view from the top of Centre Point, London
View looking down to the Crossrail platform 30m below
Crossrail section, Tottenham Court Road
Ruin drawing, erased landscape
Plan sequence
Material texture, distinction between different times of architecture
Axo, connections to the surrounding city
Site overview
