City Markers we were told and the awaited return of the hierarchy of spaces that they bring. City in which navigation is easy and places are unique. Markers generate spaces we heard, but can they really? Their directional role is not difficult to attain yet can they be meeting points, people gathering places; objects public will start thinking of as their own?
1st example: Olympic Park Orbit (Daniel Bosia, Arup, Kathryn Findlay, Ushida Findlay Architects) is an awkward engineered rather than designed shape. This metal triangulated tube wraps around itself, opens at bottom, meets 9 times and rises to create a viewing platform. Its designers claim it will bring city into area, connect and interact with urban fabric, yet it feels unnecessary in the Olympic Park. This unique structure stands among other equally unique large objects and between them there are kilometres of sidewalk and car parks. The viewing platform asks for some other than those car parks and emptiness. The only real purpose for the Orbit to come to existence is to be as stage of the Olympic Games 2012 opening nights’ fireworks exhibition. In a way it is a successful marker due to its uniqueness and size yet I believe it is in the completely wrong place to be significant for the city. It does not make a place since the place is already carefully designed. It is an add-on and quite an expensive one.
Euston Arch (Alan Baxter, Alan Baxter & Associates) represents the idea of restoration, the romantic idea to bring back arch which has been crudely demolished in 1962 and dumped into cabal. A nice thought, sympathetic with the history of Euston Road. Arch was and if restored will be a gate in and out for the city. Great! I wonder however how visually noteworthy it is among tall glazed elevations of Euston road. Maybe it’s relatively small scale is insignificant since this will, when restored, be the rare old among the masses of new.
Return to the Olympic park theme: London Gate in Aldgate (Fernando Donis) wants to be both: a marker and a gate. There was a long classical introduction of the concept of the gate and the project resolved in 2 dots on the footprint of the Aldgate traffic junction. Those 2 doors in elevation grow to become a long thin rectangle which is to be a gate: the beginning (or end) of High Street 2012. It is definitely not a gate, no one crosses under it. It is in a middle of a roundabout not allowing itself to be used or to be close to neither. It’s definitely not a marker not making any impact onto the space. A thin nothing with no purpose to be there.
Finally The Ebsfleet Horse (Curator) represented something different altogether. A horse in a field. Simple. It is not trying to do anything else than to be this enormous horse and be seen and recognized for what it is. Huge refreshment after all the previous conceptualized talks trying to make a case for the existence of its subjects.
All objects presented this morning are very particular. Will they however be the recognizable markers of the city? Maybe yes or maybe they will get lost among other architectural building attempts of uniqueness. What makes a marker and a place is an object itself as well as its placing and its surrounding. Some of this lectures examples have it all and potentially they will be successful as space indicators, recognizable points of the city. Will people like them is a whole different story.
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