ERASED CITY - Urban Voids : perpetual reconstruction
Throughout history London has gone through numerous moments of destruction such as the Great Fires, the Black Death and the Blitz during WW2, leaving large voids in the urban fabric and forcing the City to regenerate, both in terms of demographics and architecture.
A present-day reading of such moments of destruction are construction sites in which the ground (including archaeological layers) are excavated and carried away. In the City of London, the rapid development of skyscrapers lead to temporary urban voids and modern ruins, ready to be replaced by contemporary developments.
Contemporary urban theories sometimes understand the urban processes of destructive processes as the concept of ‘creative destruction’. This raises the question which pieces of architecture are worth keeping or removing in the city?
The process of 'creative destruction' can, for example, be observed from a top view on Foster + Partner’s (de-)construction site of Bucklersbury House enabling the development of a new 500,000 sq ft European headquarters for the American media company Bloomberg, majority owned by the current Mayor of New York City. Besides the Roman Temple of Mithras, discovered in 1953, displaced and put on display on Queen Victoria Street, the team also discovered the remains of the original St. Stephen Walbrook Church destroyed during the Great Fire of London and rebuild on a nearby location by Christopher Wren.
Although the new scheme would return the ruins of the Temple of Mithras to their original site on the banks of the Walbrook, and would feature a large sloping public courtyard which would allow visitors to walk below grade to view the ruins, this and similar projects are currently disputed due to the global financial crisis.