ST. DUNSTAN IN THE EAST (London)
This academic project was developed during studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture, where Tasos explored progressive preservation, 3D scanning, and surveying of historic buildings. While not a commissioned project, it shaped OM60’s approach to restoration and adaptive reuse, and the skills gained continue to inform ongoing professional work.
What is the role of historic sites in cities today?
How might we re-use them?
What deserves preservation — and what might we allow to fade?
This project investigates such questions through a design intervention at St. Dunstan-in-the-East, a ruined church in the City of London now functioning as a public garden. Rather than preserving the site as a static relic or opposing the new to the old, the project proposes a model of progressive preservation — one that both safeguards and reinterprets the historical environment while enabling future transformation.
The proposal reimagines the site as an archive of its own archiving: a layered space where history is not just kept but re-experienced. The archive is not limited to objects or records, but includes the very act of documenting, tracing, and interpreting the ruin — much like the evolving understanding that emerges from sketch to model to final form in architectural practice.
The intervention introduces a new topography that transforms the site into a “garden of archive,” revealing fragments of the original church while composing new spatial narratives. The design consists of two primary elements:
– A new surface, forming the ground of the proposal, constructed to uncover traces and generate alternative readings of past events and urban change.
– A suspended monolith, inserted into the former nave, hovering above the ground. This object acts as a focal point, a space of concentration and reflection, bridging memory and projection.
Together, these layers form a collage-like composition — an architecture that neither erases nor imitates the past but engages with it critically. The intervention offers not just a way of seeing the ruin, but a way of seeing the city itself: layered, evolving, and open to reinterpretation.
Credits
Design Team: Tasos Theodorakakis
Survey & 3D Scanning: Staff of B-Made Bartlett School of Architecture London & The Survey of London