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Urban Metabolism

Part 2 Project 2005
Frederick Phillipson
Jack Harding
 University of Cambridge | UK
Two separate projects, linked by the Grand Union Canal, develop interventions at the periphery of London, from beyond the M25 to its nineteenth-century edge at Kensal Green. In the more detailed exploration of this second site, an urban strategy proposes the extraordinary island between Kensal Green cemetery and the railway as a garden, constituting a spectrum of conditions in which a brief structured around health is co-ordinated with this engineered nature. Speculations on this order- effectively that of life (metabolism)- through epidemiology are situated in the garden's horizons, thereby embedded in the concrete urbanity on which these depend.


Phillipson is one of the most remarkable students to have passed through the Cambridge Diploma (ironically its last year). The second semester scheme takes place between the representation of culture as disease (epidemiology) and concrete urban life. He avoids recourse to "space" and the usual comprehensive synthesis in bourgeois well-being. Instead he builds the order from the bottom up, out of the conflicts in the given conditions and the ambiguities of praxis. The resulting topography provides a framework for understanding through use, in history. The deep metabolism underlying civic life is exposed in the project's extraordinary intellectual richness, wit and openness to phenomena normally suppressed (how much disease is necessary for health?).
Tutor(s)
2005
At the entrance to the New Town of Hemel Hempstead, a landscape of further education develops from the generality of the floodplain.
Courtyards and gardens periodically separated from each other engage with this changing landscape, questioning the town's supposed autonomy.
Moving in from the M25, the nineteenth-century edge of London at Kensal Green juxtaposes the contrasting times of gas holders and graves.
The spectrum of engineered nature developing between these conditions is developed as a garden.
The primary thematic horizons of the garden are keyed to existing infrastructure, landscape and health (metabolism).
A new crossing to the cemetery is part of a threshold landscape structured around epidemiology.
At the junction between this landscape and the rest of the garden, a square opens onto the rhythms of the gas holders.
Off the square the horizons of cemetery, canal and gas holders frame the main institute, set between rhythmic water (lido) and clearing (library).
The extension of earth mounds and canal water into this rhythm is an anticipation of the cemetery.
Ground level plan
In the main institute the concreteness of live debate in rooms engaged with the movements of the earth forms a counterpoint to conceptual speculation on the social structure of health.
This concrete life echoes through the solidity of offices and laboratories facing East, latent in the disposition of the institute's library.
Contrary to this, the West side of the building is suppressed into generality, an opaque glass rainscreen forming the backdrop to the lido.
The institute's public room, revealing London as a tableau of towers, speaker and audience, is reached from the lobby by a glass stair which extends this window into the building.
A clearing through the lower levels of the institute, the debating chamber is set within the landscape as a setting for examining public life itself.
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