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The Jubilee
Line Tube Extension opened for the millennium and permanently shifted
the fortunes of Southwark. Conventional traffic chokes the city's core
and alternatives are mandatory: "how do you like my walking?"
asks the back of a UPS deliveryman's uniform. Property values are prohibitive
whilst internet access supersedes some aspects of physical urban space.
The studio will propose active briefs in relation to systems which could
radically reconfigure the London scene. We hope to confound expectations
by claiming to work with sites more deeply than was possible in the past,
thus increasing their singularity and uniqueness. 'Place' is an unrepeatable
concatenation of events. Much of current design practice ignores or neutralizes
its site, which floats on the computer screen as a black void. We will
increase the stakes of site representation by augmenting the existing
with the new. Our site is physically multi-leveled, and it could add even
more levels through the Web, thus inventing new terms for high-density
London. Networked computing introduces means for awareness of site unavailable
when the building industry fragmented and isolated the designer off-site,
in an office in another city. Whilst urban plans have formerly been published
to a select audience of sovereigns, politicians, and clients, our means
to publish is interactive, public or restricted, but eventually, meant
to involve Southwark in an electronic forum.
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