My site is mostly occupied by the Woolwich polytechnic complex. Once a pivotal centre for engineering, due to its supporting role to the nearby Royal Arsenal, it now houses an independent school supporting kids from 11 to 15 years old and a care facility for under 65 adults with disabilities and mental illnesses. It belongs to the civic heart of the town, neighbouring the old bathhouse and town hall, as well as the new Woolwich centre library. Next to the latter, a humongous grocery store shifts the scale of the site. Hence, the varied material palette of the context.
The project’s narrative is to establish a London branch of the Lincoln University, a leading institution for agricultural technology – which shall acquire the whole site in a decade. The transition shall allow the present activities to be relocated.
The response to the brief was born out of the school’s foundational positivist vision for a a rational industrialised society, moved by pragmatic scientific progress. The aim is reinstate the polytechnic as a cultural pole, albeit in a different area of study. Namely, food research.
Opposing the standardised luxury of the newly gentrified areas of the site, the corner brutalist extension to the Victorian polytechnic will house public space and greenhouse facilities. The building’s concrete skeleton is thus exposed, its brick infill substituted with full-height glazed, insulated panels. These shall only allow surreptitious looks at the working scientists, through the veil covering the building. Also, the new envelope is stepped back, thus creating different outdoor spaces, while at ground level, the polytechnic’s internal parking becomes a paved square.
Just like Woolwich scholars would dilute music into technique and acoustic investigation, the polytechnic shall now give a new aesthetic impulse to the local culture. Blowing research into the sensuous realm of eating and discovering.
Everything is transcendent, event the most infinitely modest event. Let’s say a hen breaks out of its house. Well, is there an adventure of more delicate humanity?
From A menina sem estrela, Nelson Rodrigues’ memoir.