Competitions → Remnants: Finding Bricktopia
Streetlife and Landezine International Competition: Lost Sites
Team: Aphra Das Gupta, Henry Westphal-Reed, Lenka Rajmont
Brief in short:
Lost sites are all around us. Fortunately, there are designers like you that know how to improve them. In times of social and environmental distress, the world is increasingly more aware of the significance of open space and the issues of urbanisation. Qualities of urban sites are lost due to various social changes, rising parking needs, inappropriate design and neglect.
The competition is looking for multidisciplinary solutions to spatial issues concerning urbanisation. From urban centres to residential housing on the margins, the competition seeks ideas to improve the quality of urban outdoors and challenges modes of urbanisation.
Our Response:
Remnants is set on London’s Greenwich Peninsula, within one of the last remaining industrial sites in the area. By transforming fences and abandoned aggregates into building blocks, Remnants subtly reconfigures society at a small yet impactful scale.
Our process started with a walk around the last industrial area of the Greenwich peninsula. Sandwiched between the 02 complex and the shiny Greenwich high rises lies an area of the Thames path that has up to now avoided the radical march towards / urbanisation. Here the remnants of the past are still limping on with the pubic foot path sitting uncomfortably in the middle. Around the Thames and the Thames Path are reas that have been reclaimed from the river over the last 300 years. These overlapping area are the ones we wanted to focus on due to their history of occupation. Our response was to bridge the gap between the river and uncomfortably looking at it from above, disconnected and address the pollution problem along this stretch of the path.
We propose a recycling centre with biodiversity features, with opportunity to recycle your sh*t (items).
Jury’s Recognition:
“This project offers a raw, materially-grounded vision for reclaiming Greenwich Peninsula’s overlooked industrial shoreline, transforming scattered remnants into a vibrant culture of reuse. By centering design around found objects, gabion construction, and studios for upcycling, the proposal cultivates a community-led practice of making and learning—without erasing the site’s industrial DNA. The interplay between “granules,” “habitation,” and “bioscene” becomes a conceptual and physical framework that acknowledges coexistence, and ecological repair. Rather than sanitizing or overwriting the site, the design accepts its entanglements, inviting participation through hands-on engagement and shared stewardship. Bricktopia is less a finished place than a process—celebrating the strange, gritty in-between of urban transformation.”