Architect Gordon Shrigley analyses the recently completed Hackney Gardens project
- Credit: Benedict Luxmoore
Architect Gordon Shrigley takes a look at how building materials can showcase an area's varied history and analyses the recently completed Hackney Gardens project.
To design a new part of a city requires the diligent architect to consider whether to enhance what already exists or to demolish and start again.
Cities, on the whole, come to be not by the imposition of a grand masterplan, but mainly through happenstance. All cities are the result of many competing hands, each with a unique view.
The architectural character of Hackney, for instance, is the product of 500 years, give or take, of the competing interests of Georgian nobility, Victorian capitalism, local democracy and more recently, the direct result of a housing shortage that has caused us to increasingly build dwellings as short-term investment vehicles rather than long-term homes.