Synthetic Landscapes: New Strategies for Landscape, Infrastructure and Architecture

The decommissioned infrastructure and their temporary new life-spans have been experimented by architects and designers by repurposing old existed structures and buildings. These precedents were mainly to explore their potentials while proposing new but short programmes for sustainable and economic concerns in local communities. In addition to these concerns, our aim was to examine the gradient between naturalised architecture and industrial/synthetic natures around them. Examining apparent opposites, we have been looking at continuities rather than fractures between landscape and the human demands placed upon it. Locating our specific site in London, United Kingdom, we have started to work on New River which is an artificial waterway located in England, opened essentially in 1613 to supply London inhabitants with fresh drinking water. Using this 400-year-old, 32km long item of infrastructure as our vehicle, the studio investigated what forms & roles architecture might adopt along its length in this specific region. By examining the environments that are seemingly natural and finding them man-made, our studies aim to utilize the nature that we find in our city (London). Our pedagogical goal was to develop a project framework to enable synthetic architectural design methodologies with potential to mitigate contextual use with new programmes. To explore this goal, BA architecture students at the London South Bank University, under studio 1, have engaged in a series of design projects that have looked for novel and innovative approaches for integrating decommissioned infrastructure and new programmes that have highly complex but positive conditions. The students used contemporary surveying techniques that included extremely precise landscape and topographical details by using drones. Furthermore, contemporary computational techniques such as coding, spatial prototypes and finally design speculations that derived from the existed natural environments being studied. The synthetic natures, as both practice and pedagogy, sought to extract both physical and social constraints of the natural environments and enable creative exploration of new programmes that might create new type of architectural interventions with infrastructure.