London's Canary Wharf business district is in many ways an undeveloped development. As an address and physical location for grand-scale office developments it is an effective and well constructed machine. As a human environment however, it is uninviting and seems insensitive to the modifying touch of its many daily users.
I am interested particularly in Montgomery Square; a bleak, largely grey space to the east of Jubilee Gardens, between the Clifford Chance and BP/McGraw Hill buildings.
Currently the square is windswept and forgotten, used only as a circulation route.
As such it epitomises the less lovable traits of the development; people pass through on their way to somewhere else, never ever lingering to enjoy the space itself.
Around Canary Wharf there are half a dozen sculptures. Though they vary in style, all are abstractions of the human form, as if the environment is only habitable to beings of metal and stone. Inside the skyscrapers and office blocks meanwhile, real people operate in carefully controlled comfort; their climates controllable at the touch of a mouse or keyboard.
This contradiction is fascinating. Why must a modern, technologically exacting development be so faceless? This question can be answered to a degree through considerations of efficiency, but not wholly. After all, there are areas such as Montgomery Square with no apparent reason for remaining undeveloped.
This square would benefit enormously were the Ambient Intelligent technologies coursing through the areas' buildings and airwaves utilised to create a public space appropriate and beneficial to the environment surrounding it; A demonstration that AmI's are essentially human technologies created by and for humans, not something debilitating to the human spirit.
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