Ten new ideas for Poplar

Organised by the British Council, the headline event at this year’s London Festival of Architecture invited 20 architects in the Balfron tower to find solutions for 4 sites subject to development in Poplar.

Nearly 50 years after it was built, Ernö Goldfinger’s Balfron tower still impresses with its uncompromising approach to scale and the expression of structure, combined with an unusual sensitivity in public housing: the bridges between the rugged concrete lift tower and the flats are the vehicle for a magical transition from the public to the private realm.

Plans to refurbish it and to sell the flats on the private market have attracted controversy but, in the meantime, it has another role as a melting pot for new ideas.

International Architecture Showcase, London Festival of Architecture 2014

For two weeks, the Balfron has been home to 10 foreign architects, from four different continents. They were paired with 10 emerging and established UK practices to find solutions for four sites that are subject to development in Poplar, east London, where the Balfron is located. Poplar has a proud history of experimentation in town planning. Its Lansbury housing estate was part of the Festival of Britain in 1951 to celebrate Britain’s recovery after the second world war. Nearby Chrisp Street has the first pedestrianised market square to be built in England.

Now, however, Poplar is in the middle of a personality crisis. Though densely populated, it has a rather ghostly character, not helped by the mass clearances for council housing in the 20th century, the zoning of industry away from residences, the expansion of the A12 to motorway proportions and the cuttings and bridges of the docklands light railway – Canary Wharf’s towers form an unreal backdrop just across the East India Dock Road. Little strategy seems to guide Poplar’s development, apart from to convert warehousing and unused land to private housing, with some social provision if that can be negotiated.

Those factors persuaded the British Council to make Poplar the focus of its International Architecture Showcase, the headline event at this year’s London Festival of Architecture.

The 10 architectural teams presented their ideas on a hectic day of events, including tours and workshops, in and around the Balfron tower. DK:CM and b210 from Estonia posited a new typology for London: a tower that incorporated social spaces on the ground floor, mixed tenancies and a hotel on the upper floors to provide funding. Karakusevic Carson Architects and BCVA from Denmark varied the scale of rings of housing to create natural connections to the area’s underused parks and hard-to-access waterway, the Limehouse Cut.

Other proposals were much more conceptual, though no less thought-provoking for that. Friend & Company and Jonathan Nsubuga from Uganda “swamped and rewilded” the disused gas works on Poplar’s periphery to allow traditional wildlife to return; Adrian Friend commented, “It is refreshing to have a client who is a bat or an owl.” Inspired by Lagos’s spontaneous street life, Studio TILT and MOE + from Nigeria layered a loose framework of 10 metre by 10 metre modules over their site to encourage invention and interaction among residents. Papa Omotayo of MOE + explained, “The question is, who is it for? What are the notions of what a city should be? Communities may not relate to that notion. It is critical to have a system to allow cultural strands to have a voice.”

As an antidote to the dangerous abstractions of the masterplan, Duggan Morris and Hossein Hejrat of ZAV Architects of Iran drew a huge “emotive map”, a drawing recording their experiences of the area, as a starting point for new interventions. The Decorators and ISSS Research&Architecture from Austria were also struck by the myriad realities on the ground, and invented a game to encourage the public to get involved in the processes involved in enhancing Poplar’s appeal.

At the end of the day’s events, on the little-used roof of the Balfron, a panel discussed the contributions of Goldfinger and other émigré architects to the UK. The message was that we discourage foreigners to study architecture and work in the UK at our peril. The showcase has provided further proof of the benefits of such collaborations. Sarah Wigglesworth worked with Kane Yanagawa of Studio Kane Yanagawa in Taiwan to create a forum for exchange among neighbouring industrial, residential and artist communities. As the guest architects bid hasty goodbyes before catching their plane home, she told me that the showcase had allowed UK architects “to resee our world in a new light” and to reconsider the options. “One key conclusion is, what can the global north learn from the global south? The approach is informal in the south. Governments cannot keep control there. We aspire to that. We need to empower people to feel that they can make demands and take control.”

The Balfron is also part of a guardianship scheme, run by the Bow Arts Trust. Instead of the block lying empty before refurbishment, with all the antisocial behaviour that that can attract, it has become the temporary home of artists and architects. Other innovations are in evidence. A walk down the stairs will reveal an art installation using inflatables and copious amounts of washing powder – not the usual smell one associates with tower block stairwells. And the lift landings have been transformed into a theatre bar and performance spaces for a summer run of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” – exactly the sort of rethinking of forgotten or neglected spaces that the British Council has promoted on a wider scale with this year’s showcase.

All the proposals from the showcase will be published shortly, and the hope is that the collaborators will build something on site eventually, so that the fresh thinking and links forged during the two weeks will be able to develop in yet more stimulating and unexpected ways. But the fascinating picture of possibilities that has emerged will only really be tested when there is consultation with stakeholders more widely. That is the next challenge for the programme: landowners and other key decision makers must be convinced of how such radical approaches to the design of the built environment will benefit them, as well as tackle the problems associated with our inner cities – just as Goldfinger managed to convince his clients that his brand of modernism was the right vehicle for their social ideals.

By identifying natural spaces along the Limehouse Cut that could allow for culture and exchange, Delvendahl Martin and Gaiss Architects suggested ways that through temporary interventions and an annual festival this waterway could be animated through activities and events. By designing platforms, stages and seating, people would be encouraged to engage with the water once more and gain more access to it

Working collaboratively to source ideas from around the world, Duggan Morris and ZAV Architects produced a large scale mind map of ideas for the site at Bromley-by-Bow that investigated the history and culture of the idea to propose new possible ideas for future developments

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Working on the site of the decommissioned gas works at Leven Road, Friend & Company and Jonathan Nsubuga explored ways that this area could be ‘rewilded’ building habitats for wildlife to thrive and encouraging traditional wildlife such as eels and otters back into this area of London. The gasworks were suggested as spaces for culture and activation whilst there were notions of swamping parts of the park in order to create these new habitats

Producing a new masterplan, Karakusavic Carson Architects and BCVA investigated the potential that this site had for unlocking under-occupied housing across the borough and looked at how it may better connect with its surroundings. With 8% of housing stock in Tower Hamlets under-occupied and with 23,500 households on the waiting list for social housing, this scheme proposes new ways that housing can be configured and plays with ideas of scale and densification in inner London

Through an analysis of the ‘usable’ areas along the Limehouse Cut, Muf and MoVe suggested ways that these spaces could be used for activation linking both the left and right banks of the canal and bringing informal spectacle to the banks of this waterway. This proposal would act as a new extended civic balcony for the cut and would make space for things that at present there appears to be no room for

By investigating the way transition can be negotiated Natasha Reid and Urbanworks Architecture and Urbanism suggested a new constitution that put the rights of those working on the site at the centre. A series of proposals from craft and making clusters to self-build initiatives were suggested to allow the site to remain industrial yet evolve

Through analysing this industrial cluster, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects and Kane Yanagawa suggested the introduction of a Creative Fabrication Forum to encourage exchange amongst neighboring industrial, residential, and artist communities. By introducing an industrial arts zone that can make use of the existing trades and businesses on the site it was suggested that this area could remain industrial yet transition and evolve to a new way of working

Through on the ground investigation and discussions with members of the public and those running businesses in the area The Decorators and ISSSresearch&architecture looked to discover the hidden narratives of the site, unlocking what was already there and exploring how development on this site is being played out. Through this exploration a game was devised that allows participants to engage with and inform the multiple possible futures of Bromley-by-Bow

Comparing and contrasting the formal and informal natures of London and Lagos, Studio TILT and MOE + took inspiration from the spontaneity found in Lagos overlaying this onto their site in Bromley by Bow and creating a framework for a self-organising model. Allowing for invention, immediacy, interaction, perforation and unique identifiable places that allow London as a mega city to grow

9-21 June 2014
The International Architecture Showcase
Balfron Tower, London

The participating practices
muf architecture and Paula Velasco, MoVe from Chile
Delvendahl Martin and Arnita Melzoba, GAISS from Latvia
DK:CM and Aet Ader, b210 from Estonia
Duggan Morris and Hossein Hejrat, ZAV Architects from Iran
Karakusevic Carson Architects and Rune Veile, BCVA from Denmark
Friend & Company and Jonathan Nsubuga, J.E. Nsubuga & Associates (Uganda)
The Decorators and Stephan Schwarz and Ingrid Sabatier, ISSSresearch&architecture from Austria
Studio TILT and Papa Omatayo, MOE+ art Architecture from Nigeria
Natasha Reid and Thireshen Govender, UrbanWorks from South Africa
Sarah Wigglesworth and Kane Yanagawa, studio_KaneYanagawa from Taiwan

Ten new ideas for Poplar

Organised by the British Council, the headline event at this year’s London Festival of Architecture invited 20 architects in the Balfron tower to find solutions for 4 sites subject to development in Poplar.

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