Smout Allen

London's Hydro Infrastructure

London's Hydro Infrastructure, buffering scarcity & abundance

These designs are the first iteration of a proposed architectural oasis sited in a near future suburban or peri-urban location in an imagined extended metropolitan area running along the Thames through the marshes to Rainham and beyond to Tilbury. 

The proposal is an architectural, infrastructural and technological landscape that manages, distributes and displays water, river flood, sea surges and rain fall. It deals with the commodity of water and concentrates and localizes the infrastructure as an alternative to the extensive and embedded systems global cites rely on. It adapts a selection of technological systems and integrates them into an architectural infrastructure as inhabitable spaces. The ephemeral, intangible and mythical nature of water is deployed and materialized in the form of rainbows, glories, halos and clouds in and around the sites.

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