Patel Taylor

The Canary Wharf Group invited Patel Taylor, Allain Provost and Alain Cousseran to explore how to create a landscape scheme around the bulbous glass domes of Foster’s Canary Wharf Station.

The proposal sought logic in this engineered piece of city. We achieved this by symbolically uniting land and water with a wave-shaped lawn, from which the station entrances appear to emerge as breaking crests, and a series of water courses whose flow emphasises the changing levels.

The troughs between the waves become six distinct gardens, tying into the flanking buildings and providing entrances to the shopping mall below. This design conjures moments of magic out of the austere engineering and commercial logic which created the wharf in the first place.