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This club and adjacent boat house — described by its architects as a ‘robust intervention’ (whatever that means) — could have been one of the finest buildings in Docklands (sited at the end of an Olympic standard 2000m rowing course within the old dock), but adjacency to an over-bearing DLR line, the windy bleakness of the Royal Docks, and an incongruous fit-out have all fought that possibility. Nevertheless, the architecture has some fine qualities and is worth visiting, especially on a sunny day. On a grey winter day, its pavilion schema is both literally and metaphorically exposed as inadequate to the prevailing conditions (invariably more windy and colder than central London).
The Centre comprises two buildings: a Boathouse and ancillary workshop of approximately 1150 sq. m., and a Clubhouse which includes changing rooms, gym, restaurant and bar facilities (at first floor), short term residential accommodation for athletes, and a unique, powered rowing tank which utilises flowing water to simulate open water rowing.
The single-storey boathouse shed is defined by the free-standing gabion walls and a lightweight stiffened catenary stainless steel roof. The more robust clubhouse building sits back from another, north-side, gabion wall to create an access buffer zone spine running the length of the building frontage. Terraces on the second level project over the gabion providing interesting viewing from the bar and restaurant.
But then there is the damnable presence of the
DLR . . .
This pumping station has to be one of the more challenging 16 and daring of London buildings: one that some people find offensive to their sensibilities and ideas of architectural propriety, but it is a building full of ideas, challenges and enjoyment — a most peculiar mix of fun, seriousness, erudition and skill. What you see on the exterior is the wrapping to a massive engineering pump installation that discharges surface water into the Thames.
But what fun Outram has had. He explains the design almost mythologically: the pediment is like a mountain; the columns are trees on the mountain; water runs from a cave (the fan) and down to the plain where the water mns over the area around the buildings
as different coloured blocks; and the sides of the building are layered as if ground strata. The front gate includes a middle-eastern ‘evil eye’ (we are not sure what it is warding off) and the decorative scheme is pure beaux arts (in the manner of recreated, painted, classical temples) with a slight Chinese influence. There are even references to the work of Alvar Aalto in the way the side pilasters have been clad in half-tiles. Nevertheless, whatever Outram’s rationale, the fan and pediment have the formal playfulness of a 1950’s child’s drawing of a propeller-driven aeroplane and the colouring is like a cross between Classicism and a Chinese pagoda. On top of all that, Outram is sincerely concerned with honest, explicit construction of an entirely Modernist manner. He desires everything to be functional and he wants you to know how it’s all put together. For example, he uses the columns with pre-cast capitals (‘blitzreig’ concrete made from redundant broken bricks) as duct risers, the fan is entirely functional, exhausting any build-up of methane gas, and the outer walls are bomb-blast proof. All in all, it’s a rich architecture, not only erudite in its search for meaning, but significant at the more immediate level of an experience of the thing itself, in all its directness. Few architects — anywhere in Europe — have dared to employ such an agenda and play such a game. To call the work Post-Modernist does Outram a disservice. (Stewart Street, E14; John Outram, 1988; Tube/DLR: Canary Wharf)