Lynch Architects Barking Abbey Green Competition Stage 1 «

We’ve been shortlisted for an open international design competition to re-design Abbey Green, a medieval site in Barking, a suburb of London. Below is our competition text, describing our attitude towards the site.

Competition Text
“A grain of Sunday is hidden in each weekday, and how much weekday in this Sunday!” Walter Benjamin

Place names in England bear the traces of the suppression of memory and of the changes in circumstance that typify its history. The Abbey is now also a Green, implying that it could house a new set of activities and the remnants of ancient ones. We propose that this ambiguity between what is old and what is new should be exaggerated to create new-old things and old-new things. For example, a new tower houses a museum that will appear as a fragment of a ruined city wall, but also as a crisp new thing. The tower is also a gateway between Newham and Barking, something that defines and connects places. Earthworks will make the existing landscape seem part of a composition of spaces rather than simply ruins of a forgotten order. Abbey Green will thus become something that activates the imagination. It will appear familiar and strange at once; a place to register the past and to enjoy the daily life of Barking.

Imaginary City Wall
Abbey Green is currently the invisible border between Newham and Barking. MUF’S wall suggests an alternative history of the place…

Common Ground
Abbey Green can be seen as mediating territory, extending the civic realm and natural world, and bringing both together.

Family of Types
Our proposal unites the recent urban fragments in a unified image of a town. Sat in a semiruined walled garden, they will appear as dramatic prompts to action.

Landscape Urbanism
Abbey Green will act as a deep threshold between Barking town centre and Newham (the areas ‘Beyond the Pale’).

Closed & Open Pathways
New and existing routes across the Abbey Green will be made of Hoggin, a type of grit. It is neither rural nor urban, but a natural surface suitable for a large garden.

Sacred Theatre
Abbey Green as a tragic setting: decay and erosion will appear composed and part of a mythic landscape, as if part of an entropic process set in motion centuries ago.