Will Tooze & Daniel Wood — Plan for Chalk Bridge

Graduation year — 2022

Email — will.tooze@the-LSA.org; daniel.wood@the-LSA.org

Phone number — 07739067996

Tutors — Jesper Henriksson & Akari Takebayashi

Location — Chalk Bridge, Edmonton, London Borough of Enfield

Size — 200,000sqm

Objective —

To re-evaluate the potential of urban planning, using the Lea Valley as both an impetus and possible site of experimentation. As a case study in the relationship between control and blindness, the Lea Valley furnishes London with a parable of the tensions of modern development.

Motivation —

Ambiguity is becoming a rarity in the Lea Valley – planning flattens paradoxes. To counteract this, planning theory needs to be turned against itself. Useless space will be developed out of the functional.

This uselessness is not a gratuitous abandonment or the entry of chance, but rather opposes these things as a kind of rhetorical blockage.

Strategy —

Taking inspiration from the maze as an example of a useless plan, our proposal is for a wilful amalgam of functional elements into a pointless whole at a key junction in the Lea Valley. This strategy operates both logically as an urban form, cinematic device and environmental adaptation and illogically as an ambiguous image.