The Steel and brick of the London south bank

@London South bank, Lambeth London

The most obvious, but also the most easy comment about the London south bank that one can give is "fragmented": The entire area can be interpreted as a "layered city":



The waterfront is the first layer. It can be considered as a giant "billboard" with assorted advertisement and ornaments, facing the historical, prosperous city center on the north side. Tourists, or non-residents are usually trapped in the great wall of entertainment and information. There are monumental icons of the entire city such as the London eye, entertaining center such as the Royal Festival Hall, and mixed-use shopping complex such as the OXO Building. For people in the City and the Westminster City, the media wall is somehow, connected to the north bank with the multiple bridges. The first row of buildings are the defensive wall of the city center, segregating the waterfront from the south bank. The Thames River is, to some extends, not separate buildings on the banks, but encouraging the connections between them. Also, it clear the view, provides a visual corridor for the people from each of the banks.

Hidden behind the wall of information and are the region which belongs to large private corporations. This area can be characterized as the "generic", or "grey" area with high level of privacy.

Through the few "slots" between the giant headquarters, people can have a glimpse of the real south bank behind.There is always conflict breaking out on the land of the waterfront of the south bank. The contradictions usually involves the residential housing blocks and financial, giant office buildings. In the past, due to the construction of the Waterloo Station on the south bank, housing projects with moderate and low density were built around the railway station. With the evolution of the London society, currently the territories of residences are gobbled up by trade and marketing business. In traditional residential neighborhoods,

The strange feeling walking on the streets of the south bank. The huge difference in scale between different buildings and programs.

What is the order between the bricks and steel on the south bank? The value of the land? Preservation of the history on the south bank? Architecture or revolution. Should we keep the existing housing project on the south bank?

The Somerset House and the Temple Church

The Temple Church is on my top ten list of the destinations that I must pay a visit during my stay in London. Sure enough, I got the chance to have a glimpse when the professors of the design studio took us on a tour from the Brunswick Center to the North river bank at the beginning of the semester. I was interested in this particular church, oddly enough, due to Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code". The author depicts the Temple Church as the starting point where the modern London City is built from. However, if look at London from the top in the sky, we will discover that the city center (of the North bank) is St. Paul's Cathedral. Also, from the history we can conclude that even before 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London, the two centers of the city have been The Buckingham Palace and St. Paul's in the City: It has never been the Temple. Therefore I'm very curious to find out what is the actual conditions of this mysterious church in the contexts of the present day.

Unlike other major churches in London, the Temple Church is surrounded by parcels of private land that are densely packed with multistory residences and private offices.

Squares in London

I. Paternester square next to St. Paul's Cathedral:

Before the square: 1960s Great London Council project. large office buildings built right next to the ancient church. The modernism thinking: completely ignorance of the context information. In scale, the office complex is nearly as big as the cathedral. Which means the former buildings on the site Formally, it didn't respond to the church. Visually, it decreased St. Paul's impact as the historical icon of the city center.

II. Hidden gardens in the city: Traditional English city gardens before Modernism was introduced. London was consisted of hundreds of small villages. Each has a religious and public gathering spot, like a parish church and the field. e.g Lincoln's Inn Field.

III. Waterfront green belt: south bank walkway:

From Inigo Jones to Social Housing: Covent Garden

For most tourists, Covent Garden usually is not the first places to visit when touring in London.

Covent Garden is located in the junction area of the borough of Westminster and Camden, between the Westminster City and the City of London. Therefore, in the urban history of London, Covent Garden is a relatively younger region in the development history of London city.

In the mind of Inigo Jones, Covent Garden should be an idealized and improved British version of a typical Italian neighborhood: four rows of residential housings surround a central piazza with a church in the middle as the social gathering center.

The idea behind the planning of Covent Garden was to divide separate living communities for London citizens with social incomes. It was meant to be a gentrified neighborhood for the upper middle class. However, rather ironically, when two grocery market were introduced into the central piazza, along with the growth of population in London and the deterioration of the sanitation of the urban environment, wealthy families soon moved out of Covent Garden to the west side of the city and finally into the countryside.

It really came as a surprise to me when I got to know that the Odhams Walk is actually a housing project sits at the center of the dense commercial district. The Odhams Walks is a social housing project dates back to 1960s. It was designed by the Great London Council is as sociation with designer Donald Bull. It created a quite world of gardening, excluding all the noise and crowdedness of the outside world.

One interesting thing about the Council Housing projects is that they always focus on the collectiveness and compactness. They are trying to create a microscopic, scaled-down city within the boundaries of the construction site. Such projects (such as the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Robin Hood Garden, etc.) share some common characteristics: Multiple layers and circulations, heavily exploited ground (multiple ground floors, many of which are hidden beneath the central plaza )

The housing project is constructed above a semi-underground carpark.

The floor plans at the entrance of the Odhams Walk.

The multiple layers of the Odhams Walks enable a diversity of circulations and also plenty of terraced spaces for outdoor gardens. The routes to the top floor were deliberately zigzagged so that the visitor (also the residents) will constantly moving between the interior and the exterior of the Odhams Walk. 

View of the inside of the Odhams Walk

The meandered and significantly different paths on different levels exaggerate the physical area of the project, residents and visitors have to walk constantly between the indoor and outdoor space, sometimes pass through one of the resident's font yard, sometimes