Site Specific: Bow Church Yard

Saqqra - City of London, 2023

A collaborative project for temporary public seating which investigates material reuse and historical presence in the public realm, completed by the UK based practice Saqqra. The name ‘Saqqra’ means ‘bedrock’ or ‘origin’ in Arabic and reflects the studio’s understanding that local histories, ecologies and cultures of making, strongly influence their design process.

This project’s use of Cocciopesto, an ancient technique of embedding stone aggregate waste within a lime-based medium, allows for tolerance; the cast volumes reconciling the difference between the specific sizes of reused elements and the dimensional requirements of the brief. In this way the project is essentially a mediation between an historical inheritance and a proposal for future use; with the intervention giving meaning to an historical legacy.

Saqqra co-founder Marwa el Mubark writes about the project below.

MeM In Robert Smithson’s 1968 sculptural installation ‘Non-Site: Line of Wreckage’, metal bands encase stone aggregate debris in a steel case which the artist claimed afforded an experience of the ‘physical abyss of raw matter’¹. It is an abyss because the rocks have been displaced from their point of origin or natural geography to the artificial display of the gallery space.

Naturally, displacement of any kind creates tensions. In Smithson’s case, there is a tension between the natural point of origin and the artificial space of the gallery. With architecture, we can extend such tensions to include those between old and new, between history and continuity, between tradition and modernity. The contemporary public realm as a site of operation is no exemption.

The City of London, as the historic origin and centre of the city, still bears its history explicit in its medieval grain. However, despite this depth of history, contemporary public realm design continues to engage only with a limited range of expression. Centred largely around novelty or ‘newness’, it is more often characterised by a desire for a seemingly perpetual youth and renewal; favouring shiny, clean and steel studded surfaces that seem to defy weathering and entropy. This desire for the ‘ever new’ is ironically often short-lived, to say less of being wasteful.

Yet sentimentality and memory rarely take the form of the new. When thinking of the material objects we hold dear, they are more often shabby and worn. They become meaningful in the way they accrue patina and come to bear signs of the passage of time. In fact, Smithson’s view is that all tensions are non-existent because they are all held in the continuum of time. In other words, with time, new becomes old.

The process of making architecture is one that necessitates the displacement of materials. The energy with which this displacement occurs has become the key pre-occupation of our time. Working in the context of the contemporary public realm, is it possible to conduct a meaningful displacement of materials which at once feels both familiar and situated in its context? In other words, can we extend Smithson’s metaphor of new becoming old to suggest that ‘old’ becomes ‘new ‘again as old materials find their way into the contemporary ecological discourse?

Process of Reconstruction

This project was completed for the LFA festival ‘Common Ground’ in the summer of 2023. The brief was for temporary seating in Bow Churchyard, an installation that would commemorate the tercentenary of Sir Christopher Wren’s death in 1723 and the role he played in the reconstruction of the adjacent St. Mary-le-Bow church. The site is a small square, enclosed on one side by the historic façade of St. Mary-le-Bow church and on the other side by more contemporary development. Routes permeate its edges, at their confluence a mature London plane.

Building on the history of the church, which was re-constructed by Wren following the Fire of London and which was also bombed out in 1941, the need to create a mode of construction which embodied an aspect of site history and cultural significance became evident. More specifically, there was a desire to make this latent aspect of history more visible and, inspired by images of building rubble and damaged buildings the first impetus was for an aggregate or cumulative form of construction.

Given our proximity to the ruins of London’s historic Roman wall, we became interested in the traditional Roman construction technique of Cocciopesto – a process by which aggregates are held together in a cast bed. The Romans, for whom re-use was an embedded part of their construction lexicon, often put stone construction waste – termed ‘Spolia’ – to good use in the construction of carriageways, roads and paths; an archaic sort of terrazzo flooring where aggregates of stone, brick and clay were combined and set in a concrete base. Originally a technique devised to pragmatically re-use materials discarded from construction sites, it was found to be a robust method of construction in itself as well as a way in which the material of earlier buildings found its way into the public realm of everyday life.

Material Gesture

Although the Romans used concrete, this was not the cement-based product of today, but a lime, ash and water mixture. Working with the ambition of re-use, we sourced aggregates from nearby construction sites and chose to extend experimentation in this area by casting our aggregates in a lime bed. Although not a prevalent material in the UK’s contemporary building culture, owing to a wet climate and long drying times, lime is a historic material that offers a number of advantages. The slow drying time, often perceived as a programmatic hindrance, offers additional capacity for shaping and positioning on site, leaving room for errors to be managed during construction. Due its mouldability, it also retains the trace of a handmade gesture in comparison to the sharp precision of concrete.

Poetics of Necessity

Beyond the point of historic reference, necessity breeds its own poetics. The dimension of the seating is partly determined by the desire to re-use uncut, found materials as they are. The use of lime as a base to cast these elements offered dimensional tolerance, allowing space in between elements to be varied as needed. The additional added fluidity and flexibility frees the process from the dimensional constraints of working with each material unit as found - an otherwise onerous obligation. It also allowed the project to achieve a consolidated wholeness that bridges material differences.

Altogether the ensemble is enclosed and lifted slightly off the ground in a rendered frame. This separation gives the illusion of weight and mass, helping to minimise material volumes while and allowing us to navigate existing site falls while maintaining the lightness required for a temporary installation. As part of the afterlife of the project, the two inclined elements of the proposal (which were designed to shed water) together form an accessible ramp, to be donated after the festival to the church, allowing for level access to the aisles for an annual candlelit procession.

The result is a site-specific sculptural interpretation. Site specific because it is constructed using locally found materials, assembled with a process rooted in local history. Sculptural because it has a material presence that invites touch, and encourages engagement - a gesture of intimacy largely absent in the anonymity contemporary public realm.

The ability of construction and tectonics to hold meaning and cultural significance is a central interest of our practice. Through an investigation of the site specific, new material and cultural narratives can be unlocked that are a direct product of place. The work becomes a record of local, tacit knowledge; ultimately reinforcing identity.

NOTES

¹ K W Forster quoted in the essay ‘Non Sites and Remote Times’ in Herzog and de Meuron: A Natural History, Lars Müller, 2005.

Many thanks to Marwa el Mubark for help in posting this project. For more on Saqqra visit their website here.

Completion photography © James Retief.

Posted 28th February 2025.