My design thesis project, Laboratory of Productive Ecologies, is sited on Pomona Island, a strip of brownfield land bounded by the Manchester Ship Canal and Bridgewater Canal in Manchester.
The roles of humanity and nature on this site have fluctuated greatly over the last two centuries. Between 1845 and 1887, nature and humanity coexisted to mutual benefit, with the Pomona Palace and Pleasure Gardens drawing great crowds. After this, the docks transformed the site from being a leafy oasis of leisure to a grimy place of hard labour. Since the closure of the docks in 1982, both ecology and humanity have gradually been informally reclaiming the site.
The core rationale shaping the project’s development has been the desire to firmly establish the site for the explicit benefit of human community and natural ecology once again, as in the golden age of the Pleasure Gardens, and thus secure its future against the threat of profit-driven developer greed. From this, a programme based primarily around food has developed.
Food crops will be grown on the site through permaculture and agroforestry principles, an idea influenced by Vincent Walsh’s article in Fruitful Futures: Imagining Pomona, and then be sold and used in new markets and restaurants on the site. Through this programme, the project will bolster the sustainable food security of the local area and also become a community hub where people will gather, brought together by the cultivating and sharing of food. Alongside this, pockets of nature within and around the peripheries of the site will remain untouched, positively impacting the biodiversity on and around the site.
The site will be developed incrementally, in phases, as a gradual remediation process of the site. These phases are not inflexibly determined ahead of time, but will instead be a direct response to the site conditions and programme requirements of the surrounding community at that given time; a conscious rejection of top-down masterplanning. This channel’s Stan Allen’s aforementioned Infrastructural Urbanism principles, so that it is “flexible and anticipatory...not progress[ing] toward a predetermined state...but...always evolving within a loose-envelope of constraints.”
Fig.12 – Diagrammatic site plan
This shows the prototyping area used in years 2-4 in teal, the first main construction phase in year 5 in dark teal, and indicative future phases in light blue. Each node/vertex of the polygonal cells is the location of a hollow column, which arch across to one another as shown in the model photograph below.
These main guiding ‘constraints’, embedded from the outset, are the consistent ecological philosophy linked to permaculture, and a new construction system and methodology. This construction system is the casting of cement-free concrete onto calico fabric formwork, supported by a falsework of living bamboo, which has been cut and braced into compressive vault forms. Once this is cured, the bamboo is cut away from beneath it, leached and dried for constructing temporary structures on-site such as pop-up markets, and the fabric is peeled off.
Fig.14 – construction process section series
Planting bamboo; growing and maturing; drone-cutting into vault forms; bracing; applying fabric formwork; spray-applying cement-free concrete, leaving to cure; striking formwork and falsework.
The cast forms retain a permanent memory of the construction process in both the fabric texture of its surface and the indentations into the vaults formed by the tops of the bamboo.
Fig.13 – 1:10 physical model of vaulted space formed from two columns
This model demonstrates the architectural language and form of the project, retaining a memory of the fabric and bamboo through its surface texture and the indentations in its surface.
The vaulted structures spreading over the site, in 4-yearly cycles derived from the bamboos growth and maturation period, provide underneath spaces for food markets and restaurants to occupy. Secondary, non-food-related programme, such as small shop units for local independent businesses and community centre spaces, occupy these spaces too, with the size of the vaulted bays varying as per programme requirements. During the construction process, certain bays are omitted to create courtyards to bring light into the spaces and in which people can walk, sit and eat food.
Prior to the first castings, the food crops are only grown on the ground, but later, a second ecological membrane of the site begins to exist, as food is grown on top of the cast forms as well. Crucially, this means that over time, more and more food trading and community spaces become available, but at no loss of the area available for growing crops.
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