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Unbuilt & Theoretical Designs
Carpet Factory, Kidderminster
Below a long, inflatable, translucent arc, carpets flow – before heading for floors elsewhere.
Intensification of the Thames Estuary
A strapline instigating visions of places of uncomplicated simplicity, where the ‘cybernetic forest’ dreamscape of the time is further integrated in new estuarine island territories with sea air and sand castles for all ages.
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Needing first to move eastwards out of London towards the Simple Sea, two existing islands become testbeds, with high speed connections to Europe, and shuttles back upriver to Anxiety. Thameside landscapes hint at boardwalk lifestyles.
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One island take its cue from Malé, with infrastructure, streets, squares, density, compactness, adaptability and choice; while the others tip a hat at Bornholm or Usedom, where life productively idles along.
Offices and Factory, London Bridge
Although a smokeless zone, free of coal smoke and industrial pollution since 1956, Tooley Street ‘breathed’ of a passing world 40 years before the Shard was complete. A modest tower and print works linked up with London Bridge Station.
A 1970s exercise in urban regeneration with a market at its heart.
Cooperation-led development in Kentish Town
Library, Tehran
Synthesising ideas and archetypes from Iranian architectural history with the ideal forms of a contemporary national library, a sloping covered thoroughfare (fixed at the east by a ziggurat for rare books, and a stepped water garden at the west for reflection and conversation) leads to informal areas such as eating and periodicals – and primarily to six main reading rooms, each with a roof garden.
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Roughing out the ziggurat. Shadows on a carte-de-visite.
As the River Mersey rises with sea levels; as Greater Liverpool takes on governmental shape; as politics shapes up to forward thinking; as resources focus, existing sandbanks are engineered into an Island of Joy.
Silicon Island, Liverpool
Disabled Persons Centre, Gwent
Considered as an ideal enclave with a distinct cultural identity, the plan gathers together day users, long-term care provision, indoor community spaces and varying pursuits in the open air.
Loyal to its purpose, the piece seeks to extoll the virtues of specialness.
A full-height street layer has a ‘visa shop’ at ground level, a gallery of great British art on the bel étage; the shadier, more secretive world of communications above. Vehicular access – one to the basement; the other to the raised inner courtyard bookend the ‘shop.’ This layer is of stone, deep reveals and hardwood.
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Interiors are simple white. Commencing a special sequence, a ramp leads up past an oxidised copper-clad sloping wall to a Glass Courtyard.
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The ramp squeezes up between the sloping wall and a planted party wall before arriving in the Glass Courtyard at the centre of the building. Cantilevered structural slabs leave the facades of the courtyard unencumbered. Courtyard parties become coveted evocations of Britishness.
British Embassy, Berlin
Operation Desert Flower, Spain
Spinning out from an architectural competition, a 12-page paper considered how an architectural piece could set about reversing growing, human-induced world-wide desertification. Using southern Spain as a case in point, where climatic conditions characteristic of the Sahara are expanding northwards, effectively turning southern European regions like Spain into a desert-like environment, an inhabited architectural machine (where young people would spent six months of their lives in residence, taking on the sins of their fathers and mothers) gets to work. Payment would be in Valencia oranges, with free return flights to Murcia International Airport.
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Desert is converted in an arc that in time spreads fertility outwards.
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The residential machine distils sea water; propagates and nurseries insects, plants and trees; houses research, feeds distilled water to subsurface drip irrigation systems (SDI), with smart technologies (IoT sensors, AI, satellite imagery) providing precise, automated water and nutrient delivery directly to root zones, minimising waste; maximising yield. Breakout spaces abound. Around 10,000 of these machines would get things started.
Galleries are galleries are galleries – but there are few, if any, with a Children’s Story Tower. Having tramped around often enough with their adult minders, taking in the strokes of the likes of Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Vasily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, they ached for an IKEA drop-off, so asked, demanded, to enter the foot of the Story Tower. Within, magic and play reigned, the strokes of their own masterworks thriving.
