London.Stations.

Paddington Basin vs St Pancras Square and Victoria Nova buiding

In this first exercise, the student focused their research on three London based case studies: Paddington Basin, St Pancras Square and the Nova buildin. These projects are recent developments located next to main stations: Paddington Station, Kings Cross St Pancreas and Victoria Station. Stations that are key infrastructural assets for the city. The Greater London Authority supports a vision called “The Opportunity Areas” that, among others, has strategically focused projects to upgrade the main stations and their surrounding environments. Students looked at these new developments and explored how they relate and complement to the stations and its surrounding urbanity.  

The students have drawn these areas, including buildings and public realm, through their physical and material qualities as well as their intangible and performative qualities. The aim was to discover how the buildings and urban designs react to similar challenges, of instance of circulation, scale and materiality, and examine how they relate differently to their specific urban settings.

To do this, the studio divided itself into three groups so that each member of the team can explore one specific topic. The elements to be explored dealt with tangible and intangible attributes in order to reveal the unseen essence. The topics explored were the following:

1- Circulation and Flow

2- Infrastructure and Network

3- Activity and Time

4- Scale

5- Edge and Boundary

6- Pattern and Rhythm

7- Horizontality and Verticality

8- Heavy and Light

The challenge is to abstract the real building to show only the qualities of the topic the student has chosen to investigate.