Without question the city must endure.
Without question the city as [sic] a significant environment because it is total theatre and total experience.
Without question we must engage with the city with enthusiasm and resource.
Our project seeks to augment the events and the structures, the atmospheres and the manifestations, the incidents and the monuments.
This engagement must be made in a sense of architecture as being the ultimate choreography. The movements and the scenes and the mime by which the values of a society are played by strange concoctions of stone and concrete and screeching tyres and misty mornings.
We present such a view by way of a single cartoon. Geographically it represents a cut through London from north to south. Evocatively it represents a progress from the established suburbs into the old, but still vital centre and out again. It is a sequence of scenarios. They each have their origin in different moments of history but they are alive now.
Our project seeks to augment.
Such an augmentation must be made with wit at the same time as sympathy. It must be made with audacity at the same time as empathy.
Where there is the hint of a new architecture it is shown in certain infiltrationary elements.
Reading from left to right we see the suburb as a gentle, liberal place [labelled 2] not to be destroyed and inevitably creating complementary zones of event and spirit.
The English park and psychology of "the weekend" - what if this could be perpetuated? [labelled 3] and the structures, sometimes a hard thing and sometimes ethereal or vegetable.
Inwards from this, the twilight zones, the rotting but endearing terraces where ingenuity of a very simple kind could make it a place not just surviving but of a second period of magic. Behind the terraces [labelled 5] a new structuring and useful rooms and storage rooms.
The even of the common place is the city, do we need to be self-conscious about the significance of the event? The necessary ritual of buying a loaf of bread [labelled 6] is in microcosm the ritual. Only one of the millions of rituals which go together to make the city unique as a life-style.
Piccadilly [labelled 7] is the giant street corner, the corner which is merely a forestage of enactments that confound each other as yet another and another bewildered visitor comes by. The city has power in this bewilderment. Even noise must be seen as a creative part of the proceedings.
At the South Bank [labelled 8] there is an autobiographical pause for Ron Herron as he now crenellates the hard ground formed by the arts buildings and life and event erupts around the whole surface and through new artifacts.
At Stockwell [labelled 9] the gardens have been given over to the whole community. Again it is a matter of time and possibility and surface offering much more to city life if they are re-invested.
And finally for Clapham Common [labelled 10] another magic place tuned and humming.
