70 PROJECT REPORT: TRANSPORT FACILITIES & PUBLIC REALM
This pier is an important part of attracting more users to what is a much more pleasant, as well as effective, means to get around the city
Challenges All Images © James Brittain
triangular sculptural seating on the viewing platform that echoes the shape of the waiting area pontoon. LEDs mounted in the pier’s structure uplight the copper coloured battens, creating a sense of theatre at night time, and mounted under the parapet, illuminate the black resin walking surface. The viewing platform has LEDs running around the glazed perimeter and the timber seating.
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Dempsey says the biggest challenge the designers faced was to ensure the contractors delivered a level of finish to ensure this public space would ‘feel’ high quality. “These are people who spend most of their time making big steel plate and marine structures. It was initially just a change to their mindset to get them to understand we were looking for a precision that was probably in excess of what they were normally used to dealing with.” Bridging the divide between normal marine engineering and the level of tactile architectural quality that the architects insisted on was further challenged by the design and build project being built overseas before being shipped to site and craned into place. “A contractor could very easily have come back and said they wanted to split it into a number of parts or make certain changes,” says Dempsey. “It took a lot of co- ordination and collaboration between the engineers and ourselves to complete the design to quite a significant extent – to make sure the answer is really the only answer anyone’s going to choose.” The final product is a visually arresting, but somehow familiar structure in many ways, that both sits well in its context but breaks with normal pier design to maximise its location for all users. By allowing an architect to take the reins in an unfamiliar typology for them, the client has ensured that achieving a high quality finish has been kept at the forefront. In so doing they’ve delivered a piece of exemplary new transport infrastructure for London that also gives some exciting public space to the community at large. According to Dempsey, the project’s success has been most visibly demonstrated by a visiting US delegation to a major marine conference in late 2019, who alighted at the pontoon. “They were blown away to see that this was the kind of infrastructure that London produces.” This pier is an important part of attracting more users to what is a much more pleasant, as well as effective, means to get around the city.
ADF FEBRUARY 2020
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