Down at the Building Centre, on Store St near the British Museum, I managed to catch the new display dedicated to East Village, the new residential area for Stratford that is currently acting as the Athletes’ Village for the London 2012 Olympic Games.
The Building Centre is dedicated to the built environment and was established in 1931. It’s at the the heart of London’s architectural scene, and they run public exhibitions, educational tours and host popular lectures. The most well-known feature of the public space within the building is the model of London which goes out to about Zone 3 and fills a large part of the main floor. This model showcases large building projects, both current and proposed – planned developments around Canary Wharf and the City of London can be spotted on the map, as well as the completed Shard.
The map now goes out further east to include the Olympic Park and the riverside developments near London City Airport and the Greenwich Peninsula, and there’s also a satellite model which shows East Village at a larger scale . Here you can see the finely detailed models of Chobham Academy, the residential blocks and medical centre, as well as rough representations of further construction planned for the area in future – fortunately they’ve included the arrow-straight channel that carries the Eurostar trains so that you can work out the orientation of the model.
Around the corner there are several displays which provide details of the design and construction of East Village – what materials were used, how the public spaces were planned and so on. There’s even a little patch of the wild grasses that they are using on the roofs of several of the buildings…
The information displays will be changing in the next week or so but I imagine that the models will be remaining in place. I rather enjoy looking around at the Building Centre whenever I’m in the area – it’s quite refreshing to look at shiny modern buildings when you’ve had your fill of antiquities at the museum around the corner…
April 2, 2012 at 10:41 am
Loving the clarity of those buildings Pete!
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April 2, 2012 at 12:25 pm
You should see the ones I threw away! I rather like the models – they remind me of the buildings that you see in those old Gerry Anderson TV series, particularly the Academy’s rotunda…