2

Architecture, attesting to tastes and attitudes of generations, to public events and private
tragedies, to new and old facts, is the fixed stage for human events …
3
One need only to look at the layers of the city that archaeologists show us, they appear
as a primordial and eternal fabric of life, an immutable pattern. This inseparable whole is
at once the natural and the artificial homeland of man.
4
This project starts with the urban-scale porosity as a formal amalgamation of historical
moments and context as a reassessment of the negative avant-garde of Rowe and Le
Tendenza
5
It engages with the immediate context of poplar, tower hamlets
6
An as-found condition of historical mixture in the urban fabric is a system of
spontaneously porosity not as much a result of planning practices as a result of an
indefinitely deterred consciousness of planning
7
Through the shrouding darkness of history one spots the undead ghosts of a dockland
memory of precarity,
8
Of crowdedness and the dispossession from the lack of homes. After roaming the streets
of the capital a day or two, Engels writes in The Great Towns, one realises for the first
time that these Londoners have been forced to sacrifice the best qualities of their human
nature, to bring to pass all the marvels of civilisation which crowd their city today.
9
One also spots the strategic failures of a political economy, a group of architects, and the
indirection of means and ends in state provisions
10
Lansbury estate in poplar was featured in the festival of Britain in 1951
11
as a showcase for flagship projects of council housing in postwar Britain: street market,
sun-trenched yards, maisonettes with ground-level retail.
12
The chrisp street market as the community centre
13
With adequate provisions for open spaces, community infrastructure and public
institutions
14
Children of the garden city idea, as Smithsons had put it, clean, simple, affordable, sun-
giving architecture with carpets inside
14.5 (15)
And vandalism outside, traffic, noise, air pollution, vandalism
16
And one may add to the Smithsons with a knowledge of a hindsight: privatisation,
planned dereliction, destruction, displacement, and neoliberal regeneration.
17
The Keynisian project of state-provision for housing
18
Finally precipitated its eventual demise, the total exhaustion. With the 1979 general
election giving power to a conservative government led by Thatcher, the public housing
programme that had ensured the accommodation of almost 50% of the population in
public-sector homes in the mid 70s, was brought to an end.
19
Followed by the systematic privatisation of public property and land
20
And even the responsibility of providing public-sector housing fall onto registered private
providers. Many of such homes are threatened by regeneration projects
21
Resulting in the displacement of tenants, unfulfilled promises and the net loss of social
homes
22
Such exercise is systematically organised and executed
23
With a clear political agenda of stigmatisation
24
And legislative support for privatisation
25
and regeneration
26
Of which the scope is believed to be London-wide
27
As is also confirmed by several visits
28
to existing council estates
29
With an assessment of the urgency of heralding regeneration projects
30
Currently Chrisp street market features with a typical tenure mix between social, owner-
occupier through right-to-buy, and private rented former-council homes
31

35
This shows a schematic plan and section of the retail-maisonette units
36
This is the covered market overlay in the centre
37
It was erected in the 80s to facilitate the street market culture that has since the 50s
become an iconic character and communal activity in this neighbourhood
With affordable goods throughout the years and has nurtured a strong local connection

40
The northern part of the site are currently ruins of 24 recently demolished social housing
units
41
As a part of Sheppard Robson scheme of regeneration
42
commissioned by Poplar Harca
43
These drawings should be read in combination
44
With this graphic index and with the physical models, that demonstrates the loss of the
loss of spatial accessibility, of locally-rooted economy
45
The loss of social housing units
46
And imminent gentrification
47

This project works to explore the alternatives to the neoliberal urban regeneration

With an exploration of historical dead-ends and the spectres of lost futures and failed
promise. The design , the methodology is introduced as the palimpsest

“A landscape for pure life,” as von Hofmannsthal puts it, the urban landscape of Paris
is the a counterpart in the social order to what Vesuvius is in the geographic order, a
menacing, hazardous massif, an ever-active June of revolution, a palimpsest.

The initial approaches towards a semiotic interpretation of the historical urban

environment

Blast out each layer of features and their interrelations

Such is the structuralist point of historical urban construct, and here it is presented
readings from a elementarist, essentialist point of view where the urban environment
could be operatively reduced to monads and typifiable agencies
It reads the porosity of the city not necessarily as a mix of historical environments but as
a mix of density conditions

expressed and measured with clear, modernist approaches

with strong and verifiable references to positive avant-gardes.

And platonic geometries and symbolic vessels.

And the palimpsest should the synthesis of these avant-gardes and thus, a reflection
upon them.

Wherever the modernist plan calls for a figurative approach, we tackle it through
changes, through differences, we tackle the urban plan chronologically.

Wherever the modernist plan calls for a long-term speculation, a provision, we revoke the
forms and symbolisms from within the dustbin.

Finally we associate the spatial representations with the concept of historical change, the
economic basis, with the superstructural manifestations and revelations

The land with its physical buildup and the idea of lifespans and lifecycles.

All material erections of architecture come into being alongside the traces of the material
relations and social relations of the city; meanwhile, the architecture is also deeply rooted
in and affecting the formation of such relations of material and of society. What is
effectively claimed as the urban artefact in the benefit of the critical preservation of
historical values of the urban environment,

should now be rewritten also as the historical artefact or dialectic artefact that bears with
it the inklings and implications of historical changes and their material relations.

With time, such palimpsestic object agglomerates, and grows upon itself to attain certain
traces and scripts of their conditions of existence and the virtualities of history. Here, A
failed, forever deterred Keynian future

The virtuality to transpire, to transcend, to transgress the deeply intoxicated political

economy of our ages

the possibility and promises of state provision and the city as a collection of public
institutions and private enclaves.

The greatest theoretician is perhaps also the greatest obscurantist. Architecture is the
avant-garde of all avant-gardes that nevertheless cancels itself in this ultimate
abstraction and totalisation. Being strategically wrong is powerful, in that it exposes the
deterred potentialities and the disappearance of the effective virtuality of such futures and
the various layers of the palimpsest rather than the actualities rendered tangible only
through the hopelessly and deeply committed historiography of the knowledge of a
concrete present.