Erased City: Revealing the lost river Walbrook
Conceptually grounded in a pictorial analysis of Michelangelo's "Manchester Madonna" (1497), the project speculates about a possible scenario creating a void within the dense urban fabric of the palimpsestuous City of London through the technique of erasure. Following this process of destruction and (re-)creation, the void is understood as a space for new possible physical and conceptual arrangements. By revealing the Walbrook sewer, one of the lost rivers of London, it involves architectural ideas of a ground zero, a base layer, a buried history, the trace, the footprint, etc. and develops into a proposal reviving the dying city through the creation of new forms of inhabitation. As an ideological as well as formal exercise, the project forms its polemic and design strategies by borrowing from contemporary urban theories and learning from intuitive site observations.