London.Markets II.

Oxo Tower vs Seven Dials Market

Students focused their research on two regeneration projects that enhanced the liveability of their neighbourhoods: Oxo tower, located in South Bank’s cultural area with direct access to the Riverwalk; and Seven Dials Market, located in heart of Covent Garden district.

From power station to cold store of Oxo beef stock cubes, Oxo tower is an award winning regeneration project that includes housing, restaurants, shops and exhibition space. The building stands alone within the Riverwalk and Bernie Spain Gardens.

Seven Dials market was transformed from a storage space of vegetables and fruit to an indoor street food market of various floors and in dialogue with surrounding shops and commercial activities. The project was inserted within a existing compact historic urban fabric.

Students explored how these spaces create different urban conditions for the variety of users and activities within them and around them, bringing culture and community together.

The aim is to abstract the complexity that weaves the urban fabric, including buildings and public realm, through their physical and material qualities as well as their intangible and performative qualities of the users and the environment. The urban learnings will reveal how the designs react to similar challenges, for instance of circulation and scale in their specific urban setting. To do this, the studio is divided into two groups so that each member of the team can focus one specific topic in the three different sites. The topics to explore are the following:

1- Circulation and Flow
2- Pattern and Rhythm
3- Edge and Boundary
4- Light & Heavy

The drawing explorations intend to represent the tangible and intangible pair of topics to capture the essence of the place. The challenge is to produce two main drawings. First a mapping of the site that shows the chosen parameters of the topic and its behaviour on site; the second drawing, is a discovery or interest that is observed and extracted from the first drawing exploration. A 3D model follows this study to conclude the mapping narrative into an object that represents the essence of the performance of the topic on site.