Unit 2 2005-06
2012 Olympics
The lower Leal Valley has always been a unique and diverse spatial, social and topographical territory, penetrating through East London from the countryside towards the Thames. In 2012, the Olympics will come to visit the Valley, bringing with it a 6 km, 5 meter high wall to surround, erase and replace landscape, making room for the festivities. Once the games are over this new landscape will again be radically reconfigured before the wall is eventually torn down and the outside world presented with the legacy.
The edges of the Olympics, Bow, Hackney Wick, Leyton and Stratford, will feel the full impact of this enterprise. For them the effects will be felt immediately and 10 or more years of constant and rapid change, upheaval and transition are promised. The investigations of the Unit utilised this temporal and spatial frontier as their subject.
The Unit's work emphasised the development of strategic proposals and thought in order to negotiate this rapidly changing situation and to create the conditions that would facilitate the development of an appropriate and responsive physical architectural intervention. The concurrent development of the urban thesis sought to ensure that the proposals participated in a larger field of new and imaginative urban practice. The scale of urbanism was intermediate, ranging anywhere between 1:10 000 and 1:1.
During the year, the Unit sent three urban reconnaissance parties, to Berlin, Sofia and Istanbul in order to create a more diverse dialogue about the nature of change and development in cities and define the spatial and cultural urbanisms arising from these processes. Student projects are a result of this discussion.
The edges of the Olympics, Bow, Hackney Wick, Leyton and Stratford, will feel the full impact of this enterprise. For them the effects will be felt immediately and 10 or more years of constant and rapid change, upheaval and transition are promised. The investigations of the Unit utilised this temporal and spatial frontier as their subject.
The Unit's work emphasised the development of strategic proposals and thought in order to negotiate this rapidly changing situation and to create the conditions that would facilitate the development of an appropriate and responsive physical architectural intervention. The concurrent development of the urban thesis sought to ensure that the proposals participated in a larger field of new and imaginative urban practice. The scale of urbanism was intermediate, ranging anywhere between 1:10 000 and 1:1.
During the year, the Unit sent three urban reconnaissance parties, to Berlin, Sofia and Istanbul in order to create a more diverse dialogue about the nature of change and development in cities and define the spatial and cultural urbanisms arising from these processes. Student projects are a result of this discussion.
House Extension - Yoko Takahshi, 2006
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