Learning

SUZANNE DUNCOMBE

DEPTFORD REFUGE

MA LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH

STUDIO B

The project aims to re-imagine Convoys Wharf as an arrival and intergration point for refugees. The landscape is designed around the arrival of refugee families and their resettlement in both the community of Deptford and across the UK.

The project will go beyond the current Government Re-settlement Scheme and instead put the focus on the people themselves. The landscape is designed to become host to both the refugees and the activities that will help them to setlle and thrive in the community.

Integration occurs at various scales, beginning with the process of pairing arrival families with host families, providing a more personal and welcoming arrival environment.

Partnership is formed through the shared agreement of mutual support and also the shared space of the courtyard linking the homes of the families. This courtyard allows direct integration at a one-to-one level between two families, that can then extend to the immediate and wider community.

TUTOR - SUZANNE O'CONNELL

Convoys Wharf is a complex site. Empty for 14 years with a development programme of up to 10 years, temporary and interim use will play a key role in beginning to understand the variety of possible relationships the development could have with the community and context.

This studio focused on participatory and temporary projects as a valuable strategy for the long term planning and design of the landscape. A key phrase in the process was to develop engagement and research strategies to understand the existing assets of the community. In response to this research, students researched how the Convoys Wharf site could bring to stage these hidden assets and local culture by proposing a programme of use that required participation from local actors. Outputs were not only design solutions, but interventions that supported continual engagement with the community, including business proposals, non-profit community initiatives, artistic endeavours and cultural strategies.

ANUSHKA ATHIQUE WINTERBOTTOM

SLEEP ESTATES

MA LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH

STUDIO B

Sleep Estates blurs the boundary between the public and private realms, allowing the extreme-private or micro-private dream state to seep into the waking, public world.

In real-time a dream may exist for a few seconds or for 20-30 minutes. Within this time experiences are sped up, slowed down, compressed and layered - multiple actions take place at varying speeds. Between this hyperreal dream state of hypnopompia, where sleep inertia causes confusion and waking moments are accompanied by vivid imagery from the dream interior.

By stretching and interpreting the hypnopompic state into the landscape of Deptford, the project transforms the quotidian aspects of the site into a strange and wonderful sleep domain. Public spaces dispersed across the site into a strange and wonderful sleep domain. Public spaces dispersed across the site allow for embodied sleep-to-waking routes to take place. Sleepers can be seen slowly awakening or jolting suddenly, as they rejoin the waking world.

MAX BARNES

DRAWING THE LINE

MA LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH

STUDIO E

The project is a demonstrative intervention in the neighbourhood of Deptford, SE London. The project facilitates an entanglement of site narratives, from the dispossession of a local artifact – the displacement of long-term residents and long histories of trade, social ecologies, migration and slavery.

The first stage addresses the removal of the Deptford Anchor from a location on the Hight Street to inside the Olympia building in Convoys Wharf. The first move of the project is to facilitate the relocation of the giant anchor by metaphorically dragging it back to the high street – and in doing so ripping a trench and watercourse along its trajectory, disrupting existing infrastructures but creating an ecologically rich new urban landscape. This disturbance engages directly with issues of concern in Deptford and begins new narratives of resistance and participation. It creates a communicative thread; a line of flux that facilitates the pushing and pulling of movement and ideas.

The second stage of the project is the cloud chamber: a giant black shipping container becomes a place of storytelling. It is a site of reflection, speculation and imagination as individuals, groups and masses come together to share stories of this contentious site and more importantly to generate their own stories in relationship to it. The location of the Cloud Chamber on Convoy's Wharf is another disturbance to the more generic masterplanning which extends a redevelopment of London for commercial purposes. It 'calls out' by becoming a point, for the outside, inside. Having pushed its way into the site it conceptually mirrors the Anchor at the other end of the line.

The Cloud Chamber becomes a public place for continued contestation, story-telling and debate – exploring what Doreen Massey would describe as the 'story-so-far' of this very particular space.

TUTORS - ED WALL & HARRY BIX

Thresholds are places in-between; moments along journeys; sites of arrival and departure; spaces of transition. Thresholds are sites that mark moment of interchange. As people and materials flow through environments, they take and reconfigure materials, politics, ecologies and spaces.

Studio E focuses on the idea of thresholds in Deptford. Projects explore flows of people, materials, goods and ideas to design transformative thresholds as new landscapes and urban environments. Projects accommodate and embrace journeys; the slow down and speed up; they resist, stop and interrupt. Some projects begin through the exploration of doorways while others stretch borough boundaries; some make claims to be heavily permanent, but most admit to a fleeting ephemerality. All projects however address critical concerns of public spaces and the city through extraordinary design.