Trace: Translating Bankside Air Raid Shelter through Material and Spatial Tracings

Abstract

This project explores spaces of tolerance by using the University of Westminster as a place for casting concrete architectural models and setting them in a dialogue with faculty members. The project’s site of study was the underground air raid shelter built during World War II in the garden of the Hopton Street Almshouses in London’s Bankside district. Bankside is in the Borough of Southwark, located on the southern bank of the River Thames. It runs just west of Blackfriar’s Bridge to St Mary Overie Dock in the east. In recent decades, Bankside has been subject to regeneration, most notably the conversion of the former power station into the Tate Modern art gallery, which has turned Bankside into a global tourist destination. In the accelerated process of development, the underground presence of the air raid shelter has been tolerated, but has become somewhat lost.

Keywords:

• Bankside air raid shelter
• Archive for Rural Contemporary Architecture (ARCA)
• design proposal

Notes

Notes

1 Available online: fabricationlab.london/.

2 Available online: www.arca-projects.com/.

3 Provocateur and correspondent were selected from the Department of Architecture; they asked to remain anonymous.

4 The project can already claim to have “impact value” because the casts were shown in a commercial gallery during the 2017 London Festival of Architecture. To suit the gallery context, they had to be presented in terms acceptable to the gallery owner, which meant a great deal of the project’s critical content was not shown. Through Spaces of Tolerance, ARCA has had the opportunity to revisit the project and to present it in full, bringing casting, provocation, response and proposal together into a single text.

5 James Lawrence, “A Substitute for History: The Origins and Exhibition of Rachel Whiteread’s ‘Untitled (Room 101), 2003,’” Burlington Magazine 152 (November 2010): 736–743.

6 Moretti’s models were published in the magazine Spazio, edited by himself. See especially Spazio. Rassegna delle arti e dell’architettura no. 7 (December 1952/April 1953): 9–20.

7 Anthony Vidler, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 145.

8 Ibid.

9 In this respect, it is interesting that Herzog and de Meuron’s winning image in their Tate Modern competition entry showed the Turbine Hall with curated art pieces situated in the space, one of which was by Whiteread; Tate Gallery archives, TG 12/4/7/7/2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Corinna Dean

Corinna Dean is a Lecturer in the Architecture Department, University of Westminster. She completed her Ph.D. at LSE Cities Programme in collaboration with Tate Modern. She established the Archive for Rural Contemporary Architecture (ARCA) and is interested in exploring dialogues of urban transformation around culture and the arts. She published Slacklands (2014) to accompany the open source archive and continues to build projects to accompany ARCA.

Victoria Watson

Victoria Watson is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Westminster, a partner in Doctor Watson Architects (DWA), and a visiting tutor to the MA Architecture degree at the Royal College of Art. She has contributed articles about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to the Journal of Architecture and to the Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society. She has written about color theory for a variety of journals and magazines. In 2010, she won a Rome scholarship and, in 2012, published her book Utopian Adventure: The Corviale Void was published. Her architectonic models, derived from the study of color in Miesian architecture, have been exhibited at the Royal Academy, London. She is currently writing a book about the cultural economics of architecture.

Duarte Santo

Duarte Santo is Visiting Lecturer at the University of Westminster in Architecture and Tourism and Events. Duarte privileges transdisciplinary approaches and operates in the cross between art and architecture, landscape and tourism. His interests in island spaces are applied in research and practice, in roles as coordinator of INSULA.Beyond Nature/Artifice, or as editor of TRANSLOCAL – a research project, publication, and partnership between the Centre for Research in Regional and Local Studies of the University of Madeira (UMa-CIERL) and the Municipality of Funchal (CMF), promoting the dialogue between local and global urban cultures.