James Ip - Illumine Forestation

Project is based at Ealing Broadway Centre (highlighted) within the Town Centre Conservation Area

The Ealing borough serves as an area that offers a wide range of retail opportunities, particularly consumer goods, complemented by strong employability, service, and leisure functions. Ealing council seeks to revitalise the town centre, they intend to focus on offering new homes, office spaces, and other public facilities to meet the need of the community. However, they prioritise developing the retail sector of Ealing, which will impact Ealing’s character, particularly the High Street and the Broadway Centre.

As the high street becomes desolate, there is a need for a site that can offer a civic, yet playful environment that visitors can explore, just like a typical shopper lost in a Broadway Centre. This particular site needs to provide an elusive, yet entertaining experience, for visitors to explore and interact.

Strengths:

– Proximity to a large and diverse population.

– Large number of retail and office spaces, good for attracting local communities and businesses.

– Good quality and a large area of land development available; a good opportunity for revitalising green spaces.

Weaknesses:

– Range and quality of its retail that Ealing can offer are limited and lacking cultural and community facilities.

– Issues with congestion; both traffic and pedestrian.

– Increase usage of digital technology and advertisements has reduced the number of people visiting retail spaces such as the Ealing Broadway Shopping Centre.

Proposal:

– As part of a design competition issued by the Ealing Council in Autumn 2020, the Broadway Centre will be demolished to make way for a surreal, civic, event space for all visitors. This has been submitted and approved by the borough.

– To illustrate this civic, playful aspect of Ealing, an artificial urban forest, mixed with interactive follies scattered inside it.

– There is a wide variety of follies ranging high up from observation decks, to revolving sitting pods for socialising. The artificial tree canopies also cast overlays around the site, with the addition of a light network illuminating the site during the evening, for visitors to immerse themselves in illusive yet exotic sceneries in Ealing.

Grid layout for the landscape

As part of the project, the entire Ealing Broadway Centre is demolished, leaving only a brownfield site. To reflect the high street and wind direction, the layout of this urban 'forest' is slightly unorthodox. The entire grid is laid parallel and curved, at least two metres apart.

The surface area of this brownfield site is approximately 26,000 square metres, so there is plenty of space for visitors to explore and interact with the installations around the site.

Design of Tree Canopy

Using Houdini and the rules of L-Systems, this branch template was set up to explore various arrangement of patterns. This was done by collaging the afterimages as shown below.

Conceptual Collages

The Illumine Forestation offers the explorative, yet elusive experience to visitors, whilst interacting with various follies scattered around the landscape. At night, the embedded grid and the tree canopies help illuminate the site for evening exploration, and also shows that this landscape is alive, though it's fluctuating colours.