Project description
The Sublime and the Prosaic imagines a future for Hackney’s former power station, located along the River Lee Navigation. The project advocates for a phenomenological approach and explores ideas of waste and ruin. Identified sublime and prosaic qualities of the site form the essence of a ‘dialectic’ idea between existing and new, valuable and discarded, and past, present, and future.
The proposal maintains the existing commercial waste sorting facility, with the programme expanding to encompass spaces for domestic refuse drop-off, material salvage, testing, and reuse. The focus is on education: the site is opened up to the public to reveal usually hidden processes. The architecture creates a resilient physical infrastructure that can house varied uses over time, building up layers of history and memory.
The site is at an intersection of residential, past and present industrial, and natural landscapes
The structure of the new machine hall echoes the existing
Old and new forms frame a new central public space
Logistics happen towards the north and can be viewed from the first-floor walkway
Activities spill out into the landscape
Contact
oliviabailward@gmail.com