Radical Remodelling

Shin Egashira

Though we stand at the brink of the economic abyss, transport development and speculative commercial housing continue to drive urban regeneration. While property values stumble, construction generally proceeds apace, in an effort to complete images of cities based on masterplans that are far removed from reality. But when the construction process stumbles, empty volumes of buildings emerge, revealing textural details beneath the urban fabric. These show us the city as a history of architectural erasure rather than growth. It seems that this incompleteness, often by accident, creates the most successful public spaces and architecture of our city today. Could we take this phenomenon further and improve the city by making it even more beautifully incomplete? Could we remodel the city by taking apart its rigid structure and colliding different objects and programmes, old and new, small and large, temporary and permanent, until the city functions as a collective expression of life?

Diploma 11 continues to be fascinated by the pattern of urban change at the peripheries of London. For us these areas are post-infrastructural cities emerging within a city – micro-cities. Our approach is empirical. Our fieldwork is based on direct observation and sampling as we reread and redraw taxonomies of the urban field. Our experimentation consists of making and unmaking physical models of the city, randomly combining them to speculate on new forms of urban architecture beyond the given context. Our design objective is to make familiar objects unfamiliar.

At the southeast corner of Royal Albert Dock lies a small community trapped between City Airport and the Thames Gateway. Cross Rail and commercial development are leaping in from the west. The DLR extension across the Thames is underway from the south. On the east side the former Beckton Gas Works, the site for the Thames Gateway Bridge, has now been abandoned. Silvertown East was bombed in 1940 during the Second World War and was further demolished in 1987 by Stanley Kubrick during the shooting of Full Metal Jacket. A ferry terminal and its forgotten foot tunnel, the Thames Barrier, a sugar refinery, a rubber factory, a forest of BT satellites, rows of terrace housing, pubs, churches, schools and North Woolwich Station all have uncertain futures. The design brief this year explores the remodelling of Silvertown utilising the area’s voids through the recycling of its architecture. We will speculate on alternative service facilities for this small piece of the city that appears to be trapped between trains, ships, lorries and airplanes.

Unit Staff

Shin Egashira makes art and architecture worldwide. His recent collaboration experiments include the rebuilding of Alfred Jarry’s Time Machine, How to Walk a Flat Elephant and Twisting Concrete, which intend to fuse the old with the new.

His work has been exhibited in Japan and Europe in venues such as the Spiral Garden in Tokyo and the Venice Biennale. For the last 16 years he has been conducting a series of landscape workshops in rural communities across the world including Koshirakura (Japan), Gu-Zhu Village (China) and Muxagata (Portugal). He has been Diploma 11 Unit Master since 1996.