Reconciling Infrastructural Artifacts. © Robert Boettger.
Project by Roberto Boettger
Is it possible that redundant operative form is able to define future infrastructure?
The testing grounds are the mutually exclusive operational fields of Smithfield Meat Market (1868) and Farringdon Crossrail Station (2017) in London. The latter is projected to pass twenty-seven meters below the market building. As the operations of the meatpacking shrink because of demand, its obsolete infrastructural elements are revealed through a process of dismantling, cutting, and underpinning. The strategy is to puncture the horizontality of the Market with the verticality of the Crossrail, and to negotiate material and operational aspects into new form by reutilizing what is able to gather and transmit. The reconciliation in question is part Meat Market, part Crossrail, and it immediately calls into question known conventions of both operative forms.
Roberto Boettger is an architect trained at the Architectural Association and based in Rio de Janeiro and London. He has worked in The Netherlands with OMA and contributes to The Architectural Review, Domus, and AU.
Tags: 2015, ARCHITECTURE, FARRINGTON CROSSRAIL STATION, HIDDEN, ISSUE 28, LONDON, PROJECT, ROBERT BOETTGER, SMITHFIELD MEAT MARKET, WINTER 15