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Thamesmead is a modernist development that is facing demise and facing regeneration. The project aims to build over existing Thamesmead, and to complete the city as it was, to fulfill its idealized objective.
In every city or construct, there are two aspects, space, the physical confines, and place, its meaning and spirit. William Blake created Golgonooza, which is the spirit and place of physical London.
Regeneration gives the sense of newness, while it replaces space, it destroys all sense of place and memory.
Architecture is about the spirit of the place and the meaning that it lends and the lives of the people who inhabit it.
Thamesmead was designed as an architectural composition, with a rich history that adds to its life further. Seen as a body, Thamesmead has a halo that was formed over the years of its existence, and the objective is to occupy this halo, thereby enhancing its own presence and place.
A structure creates a constructed form that allows the halo to be occupied, it adds density for residents to return to Thamesmead in a new way, yet allow them to stay within the threshold of the place that they had created.
This structure in itself plays upon the notions of modernist principles, the slab, the in-habitation and the demarcation of homes.
With the introduction of the new and the occupation of the halo, the original confines of Thamesmead become negative voids that retain the memories of the homes. This becomes a basis for new occupation that is occupied in a way where such memories are ever present.
These elements as a composition addresses architecture not through form, but through purpose and meaning.
