2019_Thesis Book: Maria Diavolova

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leveled. Her break was over. She paced her day around the tide times, updated hourly via her Apple Watch’s tidal forecast; the watch overlays data from the Environment Agency to notify its users of imminent barrier closures. The great river had become the metronome to Skye’s anxiety. She now scheduled daily breaks to coincide with the water’s volatility, ensuring that she had taken up post at the balcony in observance of the barrier’s liftoff. Hypnotized by the water’s score against the embankment, Skye watched the building’s reflection in the water as the rain battered its body. Her focus broke as dusk hit London. The nautical ship lights came alight, illuminating the iron footbridges that stretch between Butler’s Wharf and Cardamom Building, a spice warehouse turned luxury housing. A recent addition to the “maritime industrial” theme of Bermondsey, the lights signaled the sun’s fall beneath the ghostly horizon. Skye collected a handful of soaked cigarette buds, a daily measure of her anxiety, and headed for the sixth-floor footbridge to Cardamom. 003 BUTLER’S WHARF, an eleven-acre site, thrones the southeast edge of the Thames. Skye manages the cleaning services of a number of waterfront properties in St. Saviour’s Estate as a way to maintain watchful eye of the river. She spends the day traversing the borough, shifting perspectives from the footbridge of at St. Saviour’s Dock to the balcony of a half-a-million-pound property overlooking the Thames. The river’s periodic withdrawal fills Skye with dread, a cue for the not too distant memory of her childhood on Canvey Island—a town that suffered the loss of more than fifty in the 1953 North Sea Storm. Skye’s grandfather told the story year after year as a cautionary tale. Other children learned to play along the twenty-two kilometer stretch of concrete built in defense of the island. Skye took on the role of coast guard and hasn’t left it since. st. saviour’s dock <strong>2019</strong>, personal photograph st. saviour’s dock <strong>2019</strong>, personal photograph 2150 erosion resurgence retreat 021 022
erosive potentialities “I am not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.” 001 atlas of erosive potentialities 2150 RAVEN lands at the intersection of Jacob Street and Georges Row, just off of Bermondsey Wall. 39 The street is lined with dense clumps of moss, enfolding every harsh edge. Compacted plastic protrusions are disguised beneath the soft, lush flowerless plant. Raven dips to the ground, running her hands along the tips of the urban carpet. Barefoot, she walks along Jacob Street with arms extended to the touch of soft bulbs along buildings’ façades. 40 The weep holes ooze with moisture. Turning left onto Mill Street, Raven hears a burble, the murmur of a nearby stream; it’s otherwise deadly quiet. Looking up at Vogans Mill Wharf, she pauses beneath its green-veined silhouette. The stucco’s ridges have been reabsorbed, filled with seedlings, in an equitable exchange of value. 41 Raven turns right onto Jamaica Road. The road’s sidewalks have been transformed into suspended pathways, whose undersides scrape the surface of River Neckinger, a tributary of River Thames long buried as a sewer line. The river has been undergoing daylighting for a hundred years, its ecosystem now nearly restored. Bioswales line the tributary bed, cleansing the water from urban runoff. Children dangle their feet over the water, while others frolic in the water’s shallow ends. Raven walks along the pathway, hopping onto the bouldered “sidewalk” when passersby are one too many. The shard continues to glisten in the distance, still the only glass skyscraper on the southern shoreline; an orienteer among the lagoons that render former axes inaccessible. Raven leans over the railing at St. Saviour’s Dock where the flow is still sluggish, but grasses have overgrown the clay and weathered rubble. The woodpiles are all but rotten, compost for the clay strata that lies beneath. The Dock is now a green artery, which terminates at the river. Raven is eager to follow it, so she turns right onto Shad Thames. The alleyway is paved in the green carpet, only thicker. Her feet disappear among patches of spongy moss. On the right, the former garage doors have been stripped away by corrosion, creating an aperture onto the green artery. A light breeze circulates through and onto the alley. The alleyway is quiet, only home to a couple dozen. Raven turns left onto the stretch of Shad Thames that runs parallel to River Thames. The footbridges are swarming with residents, enjoying the coolness of the stream that runs just below. Raven meets the edge of the stream, so turns to enter Butler’s Wharf through the ghosted apertures of its ground story. 002 THE GROUND is moist; silt meanders spill from the pier into the interior through an aperture where a floor-to-ceiling storefront window once hung. Twisting and turning, the silt deposits demarcate a one-to-one circulation plan of the ground floor; like tactile paving, they gather where the ground meets the edges of stairwells and apertures. Raven walks along the ridges until she meets the split-level stairwell. Looking down, the water fills the basement; it reaches halfway through the industrial staircase before the steps are overgrown by Nostoc commune. 42 Raven walks up instead, leaving the habitat undisturbed. The steps are dense with ivy, the walls are textured. Plantings have latched onto the crevices at different times, turning the walls into temporal strata. On the second story, live music filters through the corridor, whose end is open to the elements, letting – Ursula K. Le Guin 38 (38) Le Guin quoted in Tsing, 2016 (39) 51°30’03.0”N 0°04’07.9”W (40) David Gissen says, “Nothing is inherently subnatural in architecture; rather, these forms arise from a particular set of social and architectural practices” (Gissen, 2009, 22). London is already host to an abundance of subnatures—the conditions that architecture tries to eradicate: dust, dankness, mud, debris. Gissen continues on to point out that the restoration of nature in the shape of green building is a means to “re-establish a specific class-based idea of the city” where the comforting forms of nature—controlled, manicured, maintained by anyone but the user of a space—go onto reinforce existing social power dynamics (Gissen, 24). I argue that the acceptance of subnatures in contemporary lived experience can be a means to undermine the power dynamics along the shores of Bermondsey. Further, by relinquishing a degree of control over the environment, we can begin to see the externalities of our way of life in visible, concrete terms through the kinds of subnatural growths and conditions that human activity produces. (41) “…a kind of “collaborative survival” (Tsing 2015) (42) Nostoc commune is a cyanobacteria. “A special thick-walled cell has the ability to withstand desiccation for long periods of time…[it] germinates into a filament when moistened.” (Encyclopedia Britannica). 023 024
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Page 5 and 6: 15% London 40% UK carbon emissions
Page 7 and 8: preface “Creative agents advance
Page 9 and 10: capital of capital blackfriers rail
Page 11: liquidity 80,000 75,000 70,000 65,0
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2019_Thesis Book: Maria Diavolova

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