UNIT PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Erased City: Revealing the lost River Walbrook in the Square Mile

Grounded in the concept of the void and referring to Michelangelo's ''Manchester Madonna'' (1497), the project speculates about a possible scenario disclosing new spatial conditions within the dense urban fabric of the palimpsestuous City of London through the technique of erasure.

As an ideological as well as formal exercise, the project forms its polemic and design strategies by borrowing from contemporary urban theories and learning from intuitive site observations. Regarding ideas of a ground zero, base layer, buried trace and investigating technical processes of destruction and (re-)creation, the proposal to reveal the Walbrook Sewer, one of the lost rivers of London, causes an organizational, structural, formal and material recomposition of inhabitable spaces along the waterfront generating political, social and psychological effects. Consequently, the void is understood as a space for new possible physical and conceptual arrangements responding to the rising tides and reviving the dying city.

Contemplated within the contemporary city, the concept of the void asks for bold gestures (gestures which may be understood by a plethora of definitions such as uncovering destruction, perpetual development, planned transformation, basic revelation, heterotopic manifestation, fundamental accentuation, regenerating recreation, hedonistic embellishment, undisclosing expansion , sensory extension, symbolic re-appropriation, satirical amplification) leading to urban strategies proposing new states of being within existing environments, which force the context into the logic of historical space and time.