Konstantinos Retsinas

In a ‘mega’ scale framework that the project set up, declining infrastructures, abandoned buildings and underutilised spaces became subject to speculation. Their collapse was to be conceived as the spatial manifestation of radical socio-economic transformations with a clear impact on architecture and the built environment pointing to how space is actually used and exploited. Beyond exaggerating a condition of collapse, the project’s scope was to envision a future of growth that lies within their decline. Throughout this research, Sky City – an existing mixed-use development with megaformic characteristics that sits in the Metropolitan Center of Wood Green, London – was used as a field for experimentation through the deployment of a multi-level investigation. By looking at the generalisable characteristics of this case study, the project attempted to generate a speculative method with which buildings of this scale can be treated by expanding the common architectural vision.

Within a scenario of collapse for these buildings’ – wherever their catastrophe may derive from and head towards – the polemics of this research stood strongly against the overexploitation of their form by a monocultural framework dictated by the needs that retail, office, or any such sector might dictate. The resiliency and adaptability that these built forms could possibly demonstrate are still to emerge. Their formal and functional latent capacities are powerful enough for one to postulate and create a life anew for these buildings.

For example, the typology of the car park and patterns of automobiles that these buildings are connected with are becoming obsolete in the same way that shopping has become almost obsolete. However, they are still very much present. At the same time, these environments undergo some kind of recycling of commodities and service industries - promoted within the capitalist framework - that ultimately blocks any possibility for a land settlement that could function as a thrust towards the production of a coherent civic space, an aspect that this project aimed towards the critical reassessment of. Amongst the many objectives, which this project highlights, the tendencies, and capacities of these mega buildings are strong enough to signify a life beyond their primary configured occupation.

Under Covid-19 some airports served as hospitals and most houses served as offices, schools and playgrounds. So, everyday activities became contained within the scale of the block. In our project, we aimed to intervene sectionally in the urban fabric by contaminating buildings in the scale of mega, super, high, big with hybridism to bring housing, work, leisure together - similarly to what Covid-19 imposed - along with infrastructures, health care, and wellbeing facilities towards the state of mixing where many different uses of space that normally don’t coexist, came together.

We established new complexities and programmatic mixity by fighting against homogeneity, segregation as seen in monocultural, architectural programmes such as shopping cities that no longer provide a meaningful relationship; we thought of the city as an archipelago in which the island becomes its defining form and life is contained within it. Under the extreme circumstances at that time we tested ecologies where new relationships were to emerge allowing social, professional and domestic conflicts in the scale of the building block.