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Silvertown Battery Park

Part 2 Project 2023
Chia-Yi Chou
Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) | UK
The project reimagines Silvertown Quays, a site noted for its history of technological innovation, as a scientific testing ground situated within a public parkscape. In response to its physical, cultural, and political context, Silvertown Battery Park is imagined as an off-grid energy infrastructure that could also provide a vibrant public space for the local communities, within the future culture and enterprise zone envisaged as the next stage of the dockland’s large-scale urban regeneration.

The project sits in response to King George III’s ‘Philosophical Table’, which housed a range of didactic instruments to demonstrate science principles. In this way the proposal is conceived at various scales through a series of bespoke and performative ‘battery’ buildings, connected via a blanket of solar panels and walkways. Each battery also hosts public spaces to demonstrate its practical and performative nature. The spectacle of both bold and trivial science imagination is playful and immersive, yet also reveals the complexity of human and environmental relationships.

At a masterplan scale, the landscape folds into its surrounding context through a series of street-scale interventions. Linear parks and gatehouses emerge from the site’s periphery, and energy clouds at the nodes float up and down throughout the charging process.


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2023
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