Week 1 - First Contact

Week 1 offered the opportunity to produce a single drawing which encapsulated my experience on first visiting the site, Greenwich Peninsula.

Following encouragement from tutors Mike Aling and Nic Clear, I attempted to experience the site with  fresh senses, disallowing myself from making the typical judgements and following my usual procedures of site analysis.

After spending only a few hours walking along the waterfront of the peninsula I found myself increasingly aware of the numerous contrasts on display. Areas of loud construction and tree-covered areas of quiet. Vast modern structures and extensive voids of land. Old brick walls and extensive poster plastered hoarding.

It is the latter which resonated with me after further research following the visit. The proposed development of the peninsula, GPRL, recently became the sole responsibility of Knight Dragon Group, a Hong Kong based company. Owned by Mark Cheng, also the founder of New World Development, the development of all 10,000 prospective homes falls under the companies control, effectively allowing them control of the future of the entire Peninsula.

This scale of power effects not only the present and future form of the peninsula, but also to some degree dictates the Peninsula's past. With this, I began to read parallels to the Orwellian land and historyscape of 1984 where history is an object which is owned and rewritten. Orwell's omnipotent society falls effortlessly from the pages onto the vast expanses of the peninsula and connected docks. Architecture is power and power is architecture.

With the growth of this architecture comes the people to fill them, a predicted 23,000 in total. With this in mind I began to consider how, if ill-considered, an influx of this magnitude would effect the existing site. Therefore, using the swell in population of 164%, I swelled the existing structures on the peninsula to represent this change along with the further swell of 'The O2' to the 2050 target for london.

My graphic style was a combination of the 1920's/30's british travel posters and that used by Max Dalton to evoke the model-like worlds of Wes Anderson's films. This was in hope to capture the closed off feel of vast urban developments, aiming to form a fully functional city in one sitting, a Model Peninsula.