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The current state of Canary Wharf is marked by a non-engaging, socially disconnected, and artificial corporate urban condition that has historically alienated its surrounding communities of the Docklands and Isle of Dogs. Under a speculative future scenario, rising sea levels and extreme weather conditions will expand the Thames estuary upriver to the point at which this cluster of financial institutions stands in an expansive, intertidal floodplain. The proposal aims to remediate the sociocultural disconnect described and uses these imminent rising tides as a vehicle to do so, thus reappropriating what would otherwise be an ordinary infrastructure project to serve a wider socioeconomic agenda.
Isle of Tides focuses on the phased construction of a flood defence strategy for Canary Wharf on a decentralised, building-by-building basis. By harnessing the naturally occurring biological processes of the intertidal zone, the infrastructural intervention becomes encrusted with a synthetically biomineralised architecture that hosts a hybrid programme of aquacultural production, seafood trade, and a new raised public streetscape.
The proposed inhabitable sea wall absorbs the bases of the existing towers through a new typology informed by the intertidal conditions that can already be observed on the river Thames.
Wet market halls, a public concourse, and aquaculture cultivation basins and laboratories.
Canary Wharf's towers can be described as hermetically sealed, both physically and in a sociocultural sense. Renegotiating this condition became a focus of the project by exploring the selective breaching and puncturing of their facades.
The environmental conditions that the encroaching estuary brings into this urban setting become a core programmatic element. The abstraction of the concept of encrustation through a synthetic approach to biomineralisation was another design focus.