Emergence 

Studio Patrik Schumacher

Tutor Jose Pareja Gomez

Team An Bao, Jiajia Deng, Ziyi Jin, Ziqian Ni

Located on the riverfront of Wapping, between the City of London and Canary Wharf, this project proposes a new three-dimensional urban district in response to London’s growing urban backlog. As demand for housing, mixed-use programmes, and public space continues to exceed the capacity of incremental development, the project explores the potential of bigness as an urban strategy rather than a formal ambition. The proposal takes the form of a 500 × 500 × 400 metre megastructure, conceived not as a single building but as a vertical city capable of accommodating complex and intensive urban life. By concentrating living, working, and public programmes within one coherent architectural system, the project seeks to counter the spatial fragmentation and rigidity often associated with large-scale developments. At this scale, architectural transparency becomes a critical condition for spatial usability rather than a visual effect. The project redefines transparency through three operational principles: intersecting circulation, vertical continuity, and habitable boundaries. Together, these rules allow volume and void to remain legible, connected, and open to reinterpretation over time. Through a generative system based on Voronoi logic, circulation networks, and spatial gaps, the megastructure is organised as a sequence of overlapping urban experiences. The project ultimately asks whether a city-scale architecture can remain readable, adaptable, and continuously re-occupied, positioning megastructure as a viable framework for future urban density.