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RECONCILING INFRASTRUCTURAL ARTEFACTS
Is it possible that redundant operative form is able to define future infrastructure?
The testing grounds are the mutually exclusive operational fields of Smithfield Meat Market (1868) and Farringdon Crossrail Station (2017). The latter is projected to pass 27 meters below the market building. As the operations of the meat-packing shrink because of demand, its obsolete infrastructural elements are revealed through a process of dismantling, cutting and underpinning. The strategy is to puncture the horizontality of the Market with the verticality of the Crossrail, and to negotiate material and operational aspects into new form by reutilizing what is able to gather and transmit. The reconciliation in question is part Meat Market, part Crossrail, and it immediately calls into question known conventions of both operative forms.
