In London dialogues, Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Olbrist, grant London the delicate term of oxymoron.  Under this denomination two worlds unite which at first glance appear contradictory: the north bank - seat of political and economic power -, looks over the south bank, whose exhilarating entertainment is a magnet to the public.

 

During the 19th century, London is the world, and the allegory of capitalism. Production, labourers, prostitutes and other outcasts inhabit the South, while the north bank is residence to banks’ headquarters and diverse private clubs.

 

If London is to be an oxymoron, this cannot be without what makes it a whole: the Thames. Loathed or adored, the river remains the raison de vivre of the roman Londinum, as she is today for the contemporary megalopolis. Themesis, Father Thames or even Isis, it is the commercial artery and vehicle of the libertarian spirit that shapes the city.

 

Formerly a shameful place, the south bank has benefitted from a surge in popularity since the turn of the millennium, thanks to the regeneration momentum fuelled by public authorities. The South Bank becomes a cabinet of curiosities, as icons of the industrial era lodge themselves next to new emblematic pieces. The public is bewitched into wandering among Battersea Powerstation, the London Eye, the National Theater, Tate Modern, the Millenium Dome and other Wharves, all along the original river.

 

But if one sails eastwards along the Thames, the north-south paradigm is reversed as we hit a large meander; the sumptuous Greenwich cultural complex rises up to a peninsula as dismal as it is ill-fated, topped by a shining financial cluster: the Isle of Dogs. In Samuel Pepys words, it was already coined ‘unlucky Isle of Dogs’.

 

This strip of land - formerly bordered by mills and gallows - then burst open by the construction of Docks, lived through both prosperity and blight. Home to the dockers, the Isle of Dogs accommodates a social and architectural diversity since the closure of the Docks and the launch of Canary Wharf in 1982.

 

The two areas respire a palpable tension. From the Wren complex, vertiginous towers appear as symbols of the triumph of capitalism, while the first plan, at 300 metres from the water, lies the discreet Island Gardens, like a Greenwich exclave before an uncertain terrain.

 

Which original design, as a complement of a historical and obsolete tunnel, could link the north and the south bank, while stimulating the more neglected one?

 

This could be a junction that prolongs the grand Greenwich public space and its magnetism towards the peninsula. A poetical, yet efficient, system that invites the crossing as it reveals the element that one is about to pass. The Thames' imagery would itself conceptualise and fuel this project, through its tides and turns, as it nourishes this dissertation.

 

Figures gives the curious reader the freedom to travel through its pages as one explores a bestiary, or as one absorbs a narration; it is the imaginaire of which the collection of figures, persistent or new, tell the story of a city and a site, giving birth to the invention of a design.