Matthew Lloyd Roberts: Congratulations Buster on being awarded Diploma Honours! How did your project grow out of your work with Diploma 11?

Buster Rönngren: The brief was titled ‘into the interior’, so already there is a direction set, it is implied that there is an interior, anticipating an exchange of sorts. To me, that says ‘passage’, that passage becomes part of my project title. I was thinking about a transfer, to match the concept of an interior, a concept that was defined over the course of the entire year. I don’t mean it in a didactic sense of writing a set of instructions, but to see the project itself as a way of communicating what the interior actually is. I carry with me an interest in land, water and property. These are domains that I explored in my 4th year project on the East Sussex coast, which I then applied to the edges of the City of London in my 5th year.

MLR: How did these interests: interiority, edge-conditions, the City of London, combine in the project?

BR: The Victoria Embankment as the edge of the city already has many interiors, you might have heard of ‘hidden’ or ‘lost’ rivers. I took it very literally that these are existing interiors, and I asked myself ‘how does one get into them’? I realised through my research that although I could physically enter, the interiors were literally detached from the river. In fact, dry land was detached from the river in a sense that, to me, seemed deeply artificial. The river was not a river in a natural sense, but had become a kind of disciplined entity in London. What I see in the research is that when the City of London had to deal with sanitary issues two centuries ago the Thames Embankment became a solution parallel to the sewage system, so making this hard edge became synonymous with sanitariness, but also removed access to the river. What I wanted to access were the things that were hidden or replaced in building the Embankment. On communication, it makes perfect sense to me that its etymology is not simply a way of transmitting but to expose common ground. That common ground is the history of the Thames, the stories of mud larking, of finding mundane objects on the riverbank that constitute our common ground.

MLR: What does the project propose as an intervention into that space?

BR: I am very fond of the typology of the boathouse. You can find some boathouses up the river, by the rowing clubs. I am specifically talking about boathouses where there is almost a seamless transition between water and land. You come by boat, you approach the shore, and you reach an interior without leaving the boat. This became an effective image of how to deal with the hard edge of the Victoria Embankment. There are different forms of ownership on the ‘edge’, one thing which is significant is that the riverbed mud is Crown Estate, so by digging through the asphalt and the hard materials of the Embankment I was speculating that you could restore the soft ground, the river mud. By exposing these surfaces of mud, you could restore the public grounds guaranteed by the Crown. The proposal is an extension of the public sphere achieved by moving material, dislocating material. The proposal is nothing more than a structure to hold open a gap in the embankment, create access to the water and the mud of the Thames, rather than covering up these surfaces, which would deny the public rights to the space. I was also interested in moving this material across the river to a community garden. In this case I was speculating that the riverbed mud remains part of the Crown Estate, allowing me to duplicate this potential to create public space.

MLR: I’ve always been interested in the Watergates of aristocratic London houses and institutions, Somerset House has one that’s now isolated from the river by the embankment, so the project is about reinstating a connection to the river?

My site lies in front of the Temple Gardens. Before the Embankment there was something called the Temple Stairs, a sort of Watergate which was a connection between the river and the gardens predated the Embankment by 8 centuries. That connection was immediately severed by the building of the Embankment. The Embankment Act specifies that members of the Temple maintain access from their gardens to the river. The problem is that the arrival of the car, the surge of traffic along the Embankment, makes it extremely difficult to get to the river, the right of access has become defunct.

MLR: Does the project take a political stance around these historic rights to the city?

BR: The project isn’t really explicitly political. I was looking for a way to reconcile different interests. Although that could be understood as a stance on some level, I like to see the proposal as a compromise and the assertion of a right. The Act has been historically overlooked, it enshrines this path of access, but nobody seems to care. I see the riverbed mud as an example of something that exists in the city but could be used in different ways because of its status. Sometimes it can be surprisingly easy to subvert the current norms of developing the city, there are existing parts of the city that can be altered slightly to open up new distinctions between the public and the private, or the natural and the artificial.