Amelia Street
Location:Southwark,London
Client: Architecture Foundation Competition
Budget: (n/a)
Interlocking Spaces …. 3 spaces, 5 points and a line. The dynamic space that permeates and defines the city – the public realm contains the streets, roads, pavements and open spaces that we use everyday. Urban Projects Bureau aimed to transform the way the public domain of Amelia Street and Pullens Estate – one of London’s last remaining live-work communities – is experienced and used by altering the way it is perceived. Modelling the streets and open spaces around the estate as a volume, helped us define the perimeter of the public domain, its entry points and intersections, and the shared spaces between buildings. We reorganised the existing public services – the bins, bike stores, play spaces, gateways and pedestrian crossings – to be more efficient and to open up new possibilities for social encounter and activity. We introduced new public infrastructure elements, including shared ground surfaces and street markers, pavilions, space frames, new street lighting, public facades and image screens, to create new spatial relationships between disconnected spaces across the site. Pullens Estate is set within an extensive network of civic spaces and institutions, and is surrounded by a number of overlapping development boundaries that are about to transform its future. We reconfigured the relationships between these boundaries and reinforced the network of civic spaces through improved connections and more legible routes. Setting the stage for public life, we proposed a transformation of the public domain around Pullens Estate to allow new uses and activities for local residents, and to overlap with its neighbours. With Carlos Villanueva Brandt, Christina Godiksen and Carl Fraser.





