We visit a new Asif Khan-designed boardwalk in London and discuss kiosks found across Central and Eastern Europe. Plus, we preview Monocle magazine’s new special edition, ‘Monocle: The Entrepreneurs’, out now. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is Monocle on Design, a show where we discuss everything from architecture and craft to furniture and fashion.
I'm Nick Moniz.
On today's program, it's an architecture special.
We visit a new boardwalk in London designed by Asif Khan.
And we talk kiosks, a commonplace, mass produced modular system.
Plus, we preview Monocle magazine's new special edition, the Entrepreneurs, which is on newsstands now.
All that coming up on Monocle on Design.
Ah, the sounds of nature.
Or more specifically, the wetland habitats at Canada Water in the south of London.
Here, a new bright red boardwalk weaves its way across a wetland in a waterside urban landscape.
The structure is the work of Asif Khan, an architect and multidisciplinary designer who also grew up near this particular pocket of the UK capital.
To hear more about the project, here's Asif telling us how the local area inspired this new design.
Canada Dock, where we're standing is a body of water that was part of a larger system called Surrey Docks.
And there's been water on this site connecting to the Thames and being part of the importing and exporting of goods for 400 years.
Now this site and this body of water, if we think about it, is connected not only to the Thames, but to the Atlantic Ocean and beyond that to.
And this particular dock being called Canada Dock, was connected to Canada and the rivers and forests of Canada where timber used to be brought from all the way over here and it traveled across the serpentine Ottawa river, across the ocean waves, up the Thames and landed here.
So it's funny to think that this is not just a piece of London, it's also a piece of the world and it's a piece of several hundred years of continuous history.
So if we were here in the 1780s, we would have seen 20 meter high piles of wood of white and red pine from the Canadian forests.
We would have seen deal porters who were the most, reputedly the most skilled workers of the London dockers, who'd be carrying 10 meter long planks of sawn timber or deal on their shoulders across nine inch gangways across the water, carrying those things from ship to shore and stacking them.
But if you came here three years ago, there was no timber on site at all.