landscape tissue, building tissue Part 2 Project 2000 Chi Won Park London Metropolitan University | UK In these projects, I was working with the idea of an archiectural tissue or fabric, but with a wider understanding in terms of the tissue, such as a certain kind of lightness or thinness. Things like light, air or smells can get through them.The "material layers" which had built up over time at the existing site, as well as the landscape history, was carefully investigated and another layer was placed over the site for the landscape tissue project.I also identified the essential physical quality of my particular site. An element of a landscape that I was working with became part of the building infrastructure. In time, the landscape tissue met the building tissue. It is intregrated into the spatial and material structure of the land. The short term use for the structure is machinery storage during the construction of the proposed European high speed rail tunnel under the Thames. It was understood that this new architectural infrastructure could be re-used for a different purpose in the longer term. Chi Won Park has demonstrated a rare sensitivity and feeling for things and materials, and their potential to touch our emotions. Materiality is used as a design generator. His proposal for an agricultural shading structure as a suspended cable-grid work supporting a bed of stones taken from the field immediately under it, could be described as a tissue of stones and light. The site is in an arid desert-like landscape near Almeria in the south east corner of Spain. This new tissue is cut with long slashes reminiscent of Lucio Fontana’s paintings, similar to the existing lines of field stones, used as erosion protection defences.The site of the final project is located on a muddy open landscape along the lower Thames River, with large waste chalk dust mounds and wetland fields of reeds. Chi Won has proposed a large sloping roof covering an existing yard near an old jetty on the river and another large sloping ground plane anchoring the project to the landscape. Imaginative observation and recording of the site and the development of the architectural proposition have been done concurrently. The space is proposed as a machine storage depot in the short term, during the construction of the new high speed European railway tunnel under the Thames. In the longer term, it could be used as a river boat terminal. The architecture builds on the potentials existing in the site, rather than following programmatic requirements.Chi Won’s delicate large drawings convey an understanding of what an architectural tissue could be at the immediate full-size material scale, landscape scale, and building envelope scale. - Florian Beigel and Philip Christou