COMING SOON... CHAINROCK: USERS' GUIDE

...an alluvial island in the Thames Estuary, recently.

Never go back, they say. They say a lot of things, however, and it's best to lead by example. It's best not to lead at all in fact. Going back is not necessarily negative, it depends what way we're facing. Going forwards, looking backwards.. or the reverse... this is dangerous.

We cannot go back. We can revisit, but it's different. It's not the same. So when I revisited Canvey Island for my final project at Greenwich, I found myself redoing the project in its entirety. Predictably, I made many of the same mistakes in execution as I had the first time around. The process was no less rewarding. Repetition is, after all, a form of change. In Leonard Cohen's novella Beautiful Losers the mantra is "I change, I stay the same... I change, I stay the same..." a Leonard koan?

A ship at rest, at last, on the muddy banks of the Thames Estuary.

 Setting process aside and looking at product, two Canvey projects left me with a bundle of loose ends and untethered threads. There is a certain mindset that obtains enormous pleasure from untangling knots. It is not a mindset that I possess: I lack the patience and am insufficiently conscientious. However, I'm proud of some of what was produced and would like to share it with others. There are enough ingredients to put together an interesting meal. But this is not fine dining, and instead of neatly contrived courses it is more likely to resemble a one-pot stew, possibly with some bread to soak up the juice.

As a quick recap, the (second) project was concerned with the reclamation of Canvey Island's Occidental Jetty ("Chainrock") by a group of convicts in order to create a self-sufficient self-governing penal colony. The armature performed the role of conduit, connecting land and sea, and as vector for the landscape processes responding to the prisoners' hierarchy of need (water-shelter-heat-food etc.)

Shipbreaking: not the redemptive power of forced labour, but a necessary subsistence strategy in a new colony.

The concept of the "users' guide" was initially explored as a framing device for the detailing of the project: since the project did not lay out an immutable final design (the site would be continually undone and remade by its users), the "detailing" would consist of helpful suggestions for the site's occupants (i.e. biotopic filtration beds, reclaimed furniture templates, improvised fixings etcetera). Chainrock:  Users' Guide was thus intended to faithfully recreate a document that might exist in the fictional universe of the project.

Time constraints meant this ambition was not realised and ...Users' Guide joins the other confused Canvey concatenations. Of all the unfinished projects it may have the strongest individual case for completion, but in a plebiscite it would win a plurality, not a working majority... I cannot ignore the needs of the other parties and their constituencies, and instead we must enter some kind of coalition.

Hence the one-pot meal approach. By first of all accepting that whilst the initial concept of ...Users' Guide may well have been realised in one version of the Chainrock universe, it exists as a partially finished project in this universe. Likewise, the project exists in multiple forms, in this and other universes. A new realisation of ...Users' Guide might thus serve as a portal into these parallel worlds and also as a psychocartograph of the creative processes that led to the various realisations of the Canvey Project.

In conclusion, the text Chainrock: Users'Guide is currently under production. It may/may not be available online and/or offline any time soon.

DESIGN DEVELOPMENT AREA III

These past few months I have been desperately attempting to complete my landscape architecture diploma, hence the lack of blog activity. The end in sight, I thought it pertinent to share some of the work I will be presenting to the external examiners next week.

The following images were all produced for the third design development area, the occidental colony.

The purpose of the third development area was to produce a cogent planting scheme whilst remaining true to the underlying concepts espoused in the original master plan. Native species were utilised in accordance with the ecological imperative of the master plan, with the plant list drawn from the Natural History Museum's postcode analysis:

As with the other development areas, I produced AUTOCAD models prior to refining the design, the better to understand the spatial relationships engendered by the layout.  With the addition of materials, these rendered reasonably well within Autocad and represent interesting concept models:

With the assessment criteria for this development area focussing principally on technical execution and plant knowledge, it was right that the majority of drawings produced were planting schemes. As I was producing vector drawings in plan, I elected to invert the colours to white on black to make them stand out more. This scheme was replicated in the title sheet (top). 

Unifying the third development area drawings with a white-on-black colour scheme inspired me to carry a similar theme with the other two development areas. In contrast to the black gloss used for this area I used a buff/grey and mauve/blue sugar paper for the hardworks and wetland areas respectively. The rough texture also permitted the use of chalk and charcoal to augment the vector drawings. I will post here Monday or Tuesday.

Masterplanning Canvey

We begin with the site and its context: 7.2 square miles of alluvial island on the South Essex coast:

Most of the island sits below sea level:

Some quick zoning. for some reason this image is horizontally flipped:

The beginnings of a context board with satellite image...

Sketch ideas for landscape features...

The workspace...

A work in progress...

Layer one...

Layer two...

The two drawings combined in Photoshop...

Just a sketch design, lots of work to do... the main issue being that my chosen site is over 100ha in size. The idea is to create 4,000 new homes in South Canvey that are sensitive to the unique environmental and cultural issues facing the island.

Much more to follow. Stay tuned.