Fall 2016 | Bishopsgate Goodsyard, London | Instructor Jonathan Kline | Group Project with Marina McIntosh & Delaney Lam

BISHOPSGATE GOODSYARD

The Multiplied Grounds studio focused on city making and creating a singular urban design vision through a range of scales working from the internal architectural logic to the larger external urban forces. It looked at O.M. Ungers notion of “Grossform,” where architecture and urbanism blur. We studied the context of the site, designed the insertion of the urban artifact as well as how it would influence the urban transformation of London.

For our group, this project was about preserving the history of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard. In order to do so, we enhanced the anomaly that is the site itself. We took the approach of keeping the monumental arches onsite and deriving a structural logic from them, while designing around the elevated train line that ran through the site. We kept 90% of the existing arches and took an approach that is formally different from the surrounding context. Ultimately, by maintaining the tradition of the site we created something entirely new: a porous, public ground realm and a neighborhood of housing above including apartments, townhouses and artist housing. The logic of our design embraced the diversity of the sites’ elements of societal gathering spaces, office spaces as well as residential spaces in order to create an innately transitional space as a desirable destination itself.