Strata is an interactive architectural intervention, at the former Barking Power Station in East London, that peels back layers of the building, exposing its history and people’s relationship to the area.
Strata
Barking Riverside, East London
Working with urban development Barking Riverside, we transformed the former Barking Power Station Control Room Building in East London into an expansive interactive experience that brought the disused urban structure to life.
Strata is an interactive architectural intervention that peels back layers of the building, exposing its history and the evolving relationship between people and the site. By weaving together immersive technology, architecture, and multiple community perspectives, the work creates an ‘incision’ into the unoccupied infrastructure, inviting visitors to experience the site and its surrounding area at a wide range of scales across space and time: from macro to micro; personal to collective; past to present; material to systemic.
A core part of the experience is an extensive evolving spatialised soundscape installed throughout the 5000m² building. Developed in collaboration with current and former residents, Strata helps reveal hidden stories and memories associated with the building and surrounding neighbourhood, layering immersive experience with a deep sense of place and history. As visitors move through the spaces, the soundscape shifts and transforms, enveloping them with fragments of oral histories, ambient textures of the site’s industrial past, and memories of the landscape beyond its walls.
A massive section of the floor peels upwards, a physical incision into the architecture, to present systemic scales of impact
The immersive environment responds in real-time to visitors and their movements, transforming the collective experience
We used interactive projection mapping, computer vision and real-time data to bring the Control Room Building itself to life, through a massive section of the floor that appears to peel upwards, like a physical incision into the architecture, to present systemic scales of impact — from the local to the planetary. This immersive environment, projected across a floating structure as well as floors, walls and ceiling, responds to visitors and their movements, making connections to local community experiences, occasionally revealing the ‘surveillance’ systems driving the interaction, at other times zooming out to show people’s current location on site, or on Planet Earth.
By blending physical and digital experience to transform a massive urban structure, Strata is an experiment in treating architecture as a dynamic, responsive and interactive medium in which environments evolve with their occupants, leaving a lasting impact on how people perceive, engage with and understand the built environment.
Strata is an experiment in treating architecture as a dynamic, responsive and interactive medium
