We are familiar with the park in its manifestations as Renaissance garden, the apparent informalities of the English landscape tradition, and the dense, formal cuteness of the Victorian municipal garden. Within the Renaissance tradition, mannered artifice was everywhere self-evident, mostly as geometry coloured by symbolism and myth. In the English tradition, artifice is at once concealed as an ‘improved’ nature and made explicit as artefactual contrivances such as the resident hermit, grotto, folly, and ornamental cottage — aesthetics devices less concerned with ratiocination and its manifestation as something erudite and clever. Against such a background that we have the Thames barrier Park: a post-modern municipal park returning to the explicit formalities of the Renaissance, now in the guise of public art, Anglo-French style. After a long absence, geometry has returned as the tool of artifice and contrivance. The folly is there as public loo and cafe (an elegant neo-Miesian exercise in timber from Patel & Taylor), with the equivalent of the band-stand, now as floating canopy propped with irregular columns vaguely evocative of a farmed pine forest. The tradition of the walled villa garden is now a huge slot (appropriately reminiscent of a dock) that wilfully slices through the landscape and manifests a taming and repression of the underlying industrial pollution, dominated by playful geometric delights and fragrances that thrive in its microclimate, and oriented toward the Piranesian engineering act that keeps modern central London from drowning: the Thames Barrier. Even the edge of terraced housing (by Goddard Manton) is reminiscent of the grand terraces of Regents Park (now with, of course, nautical overtones). This is the culture of the West End coloured by Francophile influences and introduced into the formerly industrial docklands of the East End as a civilising act of vision and reform serving a programme of urban reinvention within the new Town tradition. However, the place is simultaneously a local park — somewhere to walk the dog and play with the kids — and deeply embedded within a London tradition of open spaces that have always served the needs of a growing, changing city: a successful ornament to London. So what is the problem? Lack of proper maintenance, which the local municipality has only more recently sought to attend to.
The Thames Barrier — one of London’s best loved engineering structures — is the capital’s flood defence: the end of central London and its true river gateway with a very serious defensive role to play. If necessary, water flow can be stopped by six huge steel gates (1500 and 750 tonnes) which rotate up from the river bed. The gear for all this is within the zinc-clad, sculptured housings that straddle the river. It’s an impressive sight, underscored by the massive dangers to life and property if the system doesn’t work when the occasional mix of conditions arises that places central London at risk of flooding.
The engineers were Rendel, Palmer & Tritton (1984). A visitor’s centre is on the south side (Unity Way, off the Woolwich Road), but you’d be better off just seeing the engineering itself, probably from the Thames Barrier Park side.
Ted Cullinan’s University of East London
21 Docklands campus design for 3000 students is strung out along the northern edge of the Royal Albert Dock (DLR to Cyprus). At its core is a building described as a ‘pedestrian hub’ — meaning a stubby east-west ‘street’ that feeds into the various facilities on either side. Along the (windy) dock edge itself, a series of brightly coloured, isolated residential towers lend an identifying theme to the campus. One suspects that a design strategy predicated on the idea of pavilions keenly rationalised in terms of net:gross and available funds
— rather than a network of outdoor spaces and people places — is at odds with the exposed conditions of the Victoria Docks. (Bring back the cloister?)
One of the more pleasant parts of the park is this simple pavilion from Patel and Taylor: Tado Ando meets Mies meets the Abbe Laugier’s dreams of ‘the primitive hut’ — all of it complete with capuccino and public lavatories. The cafe part is a post and beam construction in green oak — immediately grey, cracked and redolent with not inappropriate rustic ovetones. Patel & Taylor, as executive architects, did all the detailing within the park and also designed the memorial pavilion adjacenet to the Barrier (a rather Barcelona – inspired structure emulating a grove of trees, with ‘random’ columns and a flat, sheltering canopy overhead.