The Vauxhall Maze

Dealing with the notion of time within urban environments is something that interests me greatly, particularly
in spaces that no longer exist or have been heavily altered. At the rate at which our built environments change, only a small fraction is documented to keep track of what was lost, either because there was a sense of heritage that had to be kept or by pure luck. In some unfortunate cases, there is a more tragic reason for the lack of records, such as when there is a desire to remove something from the collective memory.
The so-called Vauxhall maze or the Vauxhall walls (unofficial names given by the parkour community) was a famous parkour training site in London that was faced with demolition, as a means to stop the athletes from training on this particular location. The courtyard has since been replaced with a garden that removes any possibility of training or performing free-running. The use of 3D scanning and photogrammetry presents a unique opportunity in these situations, allowing for the reconstruction of three- dimensional data from photograph and video files not originally intended for architectural or historical record purposes.

My main objective for this project was to obtain a 3D reconstruction of the Vauxhall maze site before and after demolition. For the present state of the site, I decided to use Lidar as this was the best and most efficient way to scan the site. As part of a large estate, access to the site was easy and did not require prior request or permission to enter. For the 3D scanning before the demolition, I decided to use videos uploaded to Youtube by parkour athletes where they perform at the site of the Vauxhall maze. This second part of the process was more experimental as I had no certainty that the quality and quantity of footage were sufficient to get a good three-dimensional reconstruction of the space.