“Tappeto Rosso”

Tappeto Rosso is a site-specific installation, which served as the preliminary stage of an architectural design. The installation was the result of an in-depth research process addressing various issues surrounding the site known as Peter’s Hill, between St Paul’s Cathedral and the embankment at Millennium Bridge, London. The method consisted of an interdisciplinary approach including studying maps from manifold periods to help understand the architectural evolution of the location and analysing its cultural history to unearth, detect and understand curiosities such as the phenomenon of “Paul’s-walkers”. Various mapping techniques were also employed to gain information on human traffic in the area in question.

The reason for this undertaking was to raise awareness of a surplus ground , a space in flux, treated with no value of its own other than it’s role as a corridor from one famous tourist spectacle to another. (“Surplus ground” has been used to define an undesired, paralysed space, a borrowed terminology from Pamela Lee, who uses it to describe Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates”. Matta-Clark called these spaces “gutterspace” or “curb property”, being “victims of the architect’s pencil and of the ambitions of the property developers” ). The work also aimed to provide an eye-opener to unmask the control of human traffic which both feeds and enforces this surplus land and to offer a solution and way out of its machinations.