The Blue Fence Project

studiosuperniche — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:04:41 +0000

The site for the London 2012 Olympic Games has been ringed by 11 miles of blue plywood security fence since construction began in 2006. Since then, the fence has been interpreted as a political symbol of forced regeneration, an endless billboard trumpeting the arrival of gentrification to the area. Local communities feel excluded from the process of planning what will happen to the site after the fleeting sporting funfair has gone, barred from participating by the impenetrable wall of blue.

The plywood hoarding is currently being taken down and replaced with a high security wire mesh fence. StudioSuperniche sees this as an opportunity. We are developing an Olympic Legacy Toolkit, the beginning of a catalogue of temporary structures to be fabricated out of the blue plywood, designed to facilitate local occupation of the site post-Games, activate the vacant plots and allow communities to reclaim the vast empty landscape as their own.

Focusing on the niche user-groups of London’s Lower Lea Valley – from bird-watchers to market stall-holders, allotment keepers to model boaters – this collection of urban furniture will populate the site in the wake of the Games, offering a provisional set of tools to stimulate an evolutionary model of local participatory development.

The project will be launched at the Parallel Cases exhibition of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam from Saturday 26 September – Sunday 13 December 2009, at the RDM Campus, Rotterdam-Heijplaat.

For the exhibition we have constructed a two-storey bird hide and wall of nesting boxes, responding to the enthusiastic culture of birdwatching in the Lea Valley, where over 200 species of bird have been recorded. We have also been boating down the Lea River in boats made out of the blue fence.

Many thanks to Emu Masuyama of Mesa Studio and Guan Lee at the Grymsdyke Farm Workshop for their generous help. See more photos of construction here.