effort to compete with the mega-malls in the late 1990s. In East London the open-air precinct scheme at the Stratford Centre (1974), with its high-rise office block across from the regional British Rail hub of Stratford Station, suffered a similar fate, adding the In shops Center interior mall extension in 1998, when the neighbouring bus and railway stations were remodeled. Patrick Abercrombie had identified Lea Valley


as a potential park in his Greater London Plan of 1944 but, until Canary Wharf, the East End remained undeveloped and in limbo as the docks decayed and industry left. The Canary Wharf docks formed a megablock like the 73ha Bedford Estate in Bloomsbury; this giant scale led Skidmore Owings & Merill (SOM) with Koetter Kim & Associates to fragment the development into superblock parcels based on traditional street armatures and subdivision parcels – as Cooper and Eckstut had done in their winning design for Battery Park City, New York (1978). There César Pelli built the World Financial Center (1981) complex of office towers tied together by a lower podium that included a mega-shopping mall on the central parcel for Olympia and York, a pattern followed at Canary Wharf by the same developers. The pre-Olympic plans for Stratford City,


drawn up by a consortium of Arup, Fletcher Priest Architects and West 8, continued this fragmented approach using street grids to tie housing areas to a commercial district. A commanding tower formed part of the larger plans for the Thames Gateway, which involved raising the whole area 6m above the Lea floodplain, laying out the curving armature of the central shopping mall and the north–south line of the eco-park that was later developed for the Olympics (Kendall, 2011). Although Eurostar trains will not stop at


Stratford International during the Olympics, it is not difficult to see Stratford East as a


megastructure in the network terms outlined by Banham in downtown Montreal or his megastructural mecca, Expo 67. In Stratford, the Olympics provided the impetus to connect four railway stations – Stratford International, the Docklands Light Railway, the old British Rail station, and the London Underground station – to form a system of bridges and tunnels that link through Westfield's Stratford City mall to the Olympic Stadium and Aquatics Centre. Like the Japanese Shinkansen station clusters


and Euralille, Stratford City uses its pedestrian networks to connect to small office and hotel towers above, incorporating earlier malls and commercial areas, including street markets. Both Stratford and Montreal include extensive new housing districts, although in very different configurations. In Montreal, Safdie shaped the housing into a classic, concrete, free- standing modular megastructure. In Stratford the megastructure breaks apart, yielding to a variety of designers in a normative mid-rise European perimeter block layout above an underground carpark podium, coordinated by urban designers Fletcher Priest. This residential district, north of Stratford International and the mall, will house the Olympic athletes and then be renamed East Village – a superblock street and square scheme reminiscent of traditional London squares but with 10-storey modern blocks. Banham would no doubt have recognised


Westfield's Stratford City as a massive, enclosed megastructure, despite its fragmentation and the transformation of many elements from earlier American mega-malls. He would surely be surprised at the concept's return and its longevity, but would have to acknowledge that the flexible, multi-scalar, themed megastructure of Stratford City and the Olympics is a vast improvement over its earlier, monolithic incarnation.


107


7


8


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142