floating suture zone

‘All that is solid is made to be broken tomorrow, pulverized or dissolved, so it can be replaced next week, and the whole process can go on again and again, hopefully forever, in ever more profitable forms’ (Berman, 1987). Creative destruction characterises many processes by which capitalist development grows out of the destruction of some prior order. Within the colliding and fractured urban landscape of Hackney Wick and the Olympic site, what new city type can be re-imagined? An in-between zone is proposed, acting as a political suture – the process of destruction-creation is reversed to “an uninterrupted process of creation and re-creation” (Constant, 1974). The ‘floating city’ is grounded in the urban fracture and escapes the contextual air space pressure by minimizing its footprint and exploiting the structure of existing buildings. It is fed and grows using waste materials from construction and destruction sites, and hosts a fragile network of artistic communal spaces.