Illuminated River

The river as a breathing, pulsing organism

GROSS. MAX. in collaboration with Amanda Levete were amongst six finalist to create light installations for the bridges on London’s River Thames.

The River Thames is London’s greatest landscape asset. The nature of the river’s tides have defined the city, built its history and its significance. Our project will reveal the river as a breathing, pulsing organism and so illuminate the dynamics of this natural estuary. The design illuminates the river walls as a constant thread of light through the city that gently illuminates the expanses of foreshore exposed at low tide. When the tide is low the underbellies of the bridges are revealed by lighting. At high tide, the lighting shifts to illuminate the elevation of the bridges. We envision the Illuminated River project as integral component of a wider –all encompassing – strategy to reveal, optimize and orchestrate the tidal River Thames as a dynamic natural system, and celebrate its fantastic qualities of flux and flow to be made visible and experiential in daily live. We imagine the entire river Thames -its foreshore, tideway, river walls and embankments as well its ‘lost river’ contributories as an innovative and iconic contemporary linear waterside park. Such ambitious city-wide transformation of the River Thames can be regarded as an innovative and iconic 21st century legacy to the great tradition of London parks and gardens. It will create an interlinked system of blue and green landscape ribbons, which promotes biodiversity and urban wilderness whilst optimizing flood control and storm water management to prepare London for the climate of tomorrow. Such scenario will re-orientate the city back to its river and integrate ecology, urbanism and architecture and will reinstate the river as the vigorous ‘missing link’ of an integrated park system and will reconcile urban London and its unique topographic London Basin setting.

Important is to reintroduce natural process right in the very heart of the city. Our proposal will form integral part of a city wide sustainable urban drainage system and will avoid the current practice of clean rainwater to become contaminated in London’s sewers. Surface water run off will instead become part of an intricate network system composed of green roofs, swales, rain water gardens, retention reservoirs and permeable surfaces. The various riverside marshland gardens will be composed of as mosaic of soil condition representing the original floodplain landscape of the meandering river Thames.

In addition the often barren stretches of concrete and sheet piling flood defence walls river wall will be transformed into intertidal living river walls by attaching structures just above and below high tide line to support native plants (such as Gypswort and Yellow Marsh Creis) and will allow for natural colonization from seed carried in the water. The living walls will boost the ecologic value of the river and support invertebrate life, depending on its location it will adapt to various gradients of freshwater, brackish and saline conditions.

Along part of the riverbank we propose to introduce salt marsh terraces and reed beds as well occasional archipelago’s of floating islands which will act as refuge for wading and nesting birds.

Important part of the vision is to promote increased access to the tidal river foreshore and waterside embankment gardens by means of boardwalks, steps, stairs and landing places. This could become part of a rhythm of distinct architectural interventions combined with fore mentioned waterside gardens.

Equally important is to explore the creative potential of the illuminated River landscape project. We imagine series of artist / botanist / scientist gardens experiments celebrating London’s creative industries.

Imagine nocturnal ‘midsummer night’s dream’ gardens composed of plants, which will flower and spread wildly fragrant blooms after dusk and the eloquent magic effect glowing bio-luminescence water gardens strangely illuminated by fireflies!