LONDON
Image: Doug Joyce
10 January 2015
Over the holidays we took a trip to London England.
It is a place where successive generations layer their city building atop what their predecessors built. Old buildings and infrastructure are honored and preserved, but are kept alive by new adaptations within the preserved structures.The character and history of the place are realized everywhere you look. Yet the hand of the current generation of designers is also everywhere. The past is honored and preserved, and yet the excitement of the new is also clearly at hand.
An example of this would be the new underground station at Westminster Abby. Above, there is the traditional setting, with a discrete entrance. Below grade, a state of the art transportation hub is revealed, accommodating and beautiful to look at. Another example is the top floor restaurant at the Tate modern museum, a sleek and classy venue that overlooks the traditional view over the Thames across to St. Paul's. And there is Norman Foster's inner core addition to the British Museum, and appropriate and unifying modern addition to the venerable institution.
I find these wonderful interventions to support the principals of the Crafted City. They support the public life of the city- they tend to work within the existing city fabric and provide great transition spaces and encourage the processional qualities along city streets. They keep a city alive and vital, and keep it from being a museum piece. These interventions are done with love and respect for what took place before, with the eye of a craftsman.