MORPHIELD
Studio Patrik Schumacher
Tutors Pierandrea Angius
Team Yan Chen, Yushan Chen, Meysam Ehsanian Mofrad, Yanran Lu
The flood risk has been a major factor for the planning of the city of London for decades, while the probability of flooding is increasing with extreme climate change. Without the current river walls many areas of London alongside the Thames would be inundated through the normal tidal cycle. While the River walls have been built up to give increasing levels of flood protection, climate change that has a major impact on the tidal flooding threat and rising sea level will steadily reduce the level of protection.
As the given site in Wapping area is located in a high-risk flood zone, the flood is one of the key elements to be considered for any future urban development. The flood as a natural disaster acts as an active agent that impacts on the land by deforming the urban fabric and transforming it into a new landscape morphology. Therefore, any strategy for a hyper-density urban field should embrace this catastrophic event as a potential that can provide adaptability.
Our aim to adapt is inspired by this natural disaster. We propose a generative and morphologic design that enables links between the Thames River, Wapping and our design of a hyper-density hyper-rise development. These connections generate an organisational urban space and a master form proposal for a landscape based on the traces of the flood. This interaction between the urban grid, the landscape, and the river and the opposing forces of the flood – the motion of water on the land and the resistance of earth to the former – have been the two elements informing a continual generative process that brings fluidity, erosion and porosity. A levelling and layering strategy has been implemented by proposing the interaction of three layers: the layer of river, the layer of the existing city that can be affected by the flooding event and the layer of the new structure dominated by high-rise towers that provide safety during the flooding event.