Stories
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Palimpsest

Urban Archaeology — London, UK
About the Project

A city is never built once. It is written, erased, and written again.

This project reads London's urban fabric as a palimpsest — a manuscript scraped clean and rewritten, where the earlier text still bleeds through. The architecture is not designed from scratch. It is excavated from the composite memory of the site: streetscapes, facades, rooflines, and thresholds layered, fragmented, and reassembled into a new spatial condition.

Location London, UK
Typology Speculative / Research
Method Composite Drawing, CNC, Robotic Fabrication
Year 2024
Composite urban drawing

Composite drawing — fragments of London layered, erased, rewritten

The Process

From Drawing to Terrain

The composite drawing acts as the generative source. Urban photographs, plans, and elevations are digitally collaged — overlaid until the individual sources become unrecognisable, producing a new terrain that belongs to no single building but remembers all of them.

This terrain is then translated into physical form through CNC milling and robotic fabrication — a topography that is at once abstract and deeply site-specific.

Robotic fabrication plan

Fabrication — robotic arm milling the composite terrain