If a city enshrines the dreams and fears of its’ citizens, then what does London say about us? That it was two cities and numerous villages and towns, drawn together by trade, religion, and changes in taste during the 17th century, bombed then ruined by road engineering? One thing is clear, that London is full of public buildings but lacking in communicative space. There are no grand squares or piazzas; instead marooned buildings stand trapped on traffic islands.
The area to the east of Waterloo Bridge, west of Middle and Inner Temple, south of Lincolns Inn Fields is rich in civic institutions and public buildings. Deprived of their relationship to the Thames and strangled by road engineering, these isolated fragments fail to fulfil any sort of civic purpose or cultural meaning.
The task at hand is to renew these existing fragments by tying them into a coherent hierarchical spatial sequence connected by public spaces. Other programs, when relevant and appropriate, will be incorporated as a part of the strategy. The proposal will allow for a return the forgotten and latent meanings of human situations such as death, birth, friendship, and public encounters. The likelihood is that the forum or agora or several similar spaces, return as the centre of civic life. Traditionally these spaces and their buildings have given meaning to the personal, social, political, commercial, and cultural life of the city. At the heart of the strategy is the desire to establish a dialogue between the present form of culture and those possibilities forgotten or dormant in the depths of tradition, alive in memories and residual beyond the fragments that exist. In order to avoid the meaninglessness of the modern city, it is not necessary to search for some ideal order of the past and paste this into the present. Instead we can start with the given reality of the existing city and unearth a residuum of tradition and myth sufficient to support a reinterpretation of the status quo.
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