The area around the Royal Victoria Docks is witness to some 35 years of Docklands regeneration — an undertaking that has only slowly crept eastward (and will possibly do so more quickly now that we have the Thames Gateway concept and the 2012 Olympics).
It is here — on the south side of the docks and near to the Thames Barrier Park — that we find a group of three housing projects that tell us much about London’s contemporary architecture.
All three projects have the Peabody Housing Trust as their client. That’s where the similarity ends.
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The magically irridescent quality of McLaughlin’s facade shows up even on the most grey day. |
The oldest of the three is, as it were, the real thing: what Peabody normally does (five storey, pitched roof block with lower terraces in between). Except as a contextural background of academic interest, you could ignore this work. In front of this relatively large, multi-storey development is two ‘experimental’ schemes promoted by Peabody. Both have similar briefs, serving small households at the lower end of the social spectrum (typically being aimed at ‘key’ workers). Both are by ‘young’ practices with strong reputations. And both are worthy of your attention. But that is where all similarity ends.
The first of these ‘experimental’ schemes is by Ash Sakular and seeks to continue and terminate a long existing terrace of rather mean dockland worker homes, keeping to their height and (rather bizarrely) continuing the strip of garden in their fronts. It comprises four apartments (see plan overleaf). The aesthetic keynote of this scheme — faced in yellow corrugated plastic — is one of deliberately irreverence and being ‘in your face’ in the sense of directness, lack of conventional fussiness and an implicit denial of formal values. The second experimental project is by Niall McLaughlin. As befits this man’s poised erudition and declared ‘Miesian’ training, his design strives to strike a note of considered detailing and aesthetic cool that is entirely different from the more funky ambitions of Ash Sakular. This is an architect who delights in formal games and he offers us two in particular.
The modern Peabody: the ‘experimental’ housing is in the foreground; the real thing that Peabody normally builds is in the background. The Ash Sakular housing is immediately opposite (out of camera shot, to the right).
The first is one of scale: one looks at the three blocks of 12 apartments and sees four storeys — and then looks more carefully and notes there are, actually, only three levels. This obfuscation is encouraged by the blocks’ most diversionary architectural feature: their glimmering south facades. You might at first think this is solar panelling, but this is England 2005 and such devices are still rare. No, it is entirely an aesthetic conceit — a very successful one, but (disappointingly to most people) without any impact whatsoever on the interior.
Two further things are interesting about these projects. The first is the planning. Whereas McLaughlin provides a well-considered but orthodox plan which never betrays an allegiance to a kind of neo-Miesian order, Ash Sakular dare to aspire toward something more spirited and ambitious: for example, minimising the conventional room sizes and enlarging the circulation so that the hall becomes a living space. The second is that, although the AS housing nudges around the edges of a frontier aesthetic not a million miles from timber packing crates, the Mclaughlin housing strives to provide a narrative overlay akin to those provided by Libeskind, revealing historical traces which might literally inform the aesthetic of the blocks i. e. the wooden packing crates once common in docklands. These — with their irridescent steel straps — are given as the inspirational source of the architecture’s motifs. Like all such architectural conceits — no matter how clever — they serve to flatter clients and planners, but are of questionable pertinance to the lives of a generation who probably have little or no memory of the docks and enjoy no particular sentiment that lingers over its sometimes unsavoury history. On the other hand, it is clever. One hesitates to declare which scheme is more appropriately and considerately addresses the philosophical question of ‘ought’ and everyday issues of dwelling. You literally pay your money and take your choice. (Incidentally, the officer within Peabody who promoted these — and Bedzed in south London — received little thanks for his diversionary experimentation).
This pumping station at the Royal 18 Docks (west end, Tidal Basin Road, E16;
Richard Rogers Partnership, 1987) looks utterly different to Outram’s, but they are both equally expressive as well as sharing the common denominator of brightly coloured paint. Outside, it is all pipework, industrial railings and ducts like ship’s ventilators. Inside, it is basically the same, although the engineer’s plans do look more elegant. The aesthetic is reminiscent of an architect’s idea of either ship or an oil rig (take your pick) and, in that sense, is profoundly romantic as well as functional
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instrumental. From that perspective, the design is not so far away from that of Outram as at first seems.
Royal Docks Bridge: This competition-winning 19 bridge has been offered in two stages. The first provides a purely pedestrian link across the dock and the second will add an enclosed, travelling car slung beneath the bridge. At the moment, it’s a gesture awaiting potential users among those who will live along the Royal Victoria Dock. The southern termination is at a small, semicircular apartment block leading through to the first of the housing developments. It is quite a structure and comparatively large, but shrinks against the massive scale of the Dock.
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The internal planning of the (symmetrically arranged) Ash Sakular apartments is well-considered. The exterior treatment raises eyebrows — this part of Docklands hardly carries the refinements of Knightsbridge, but the ‘stockade fence’ front gate is tonally idosyncratic (timber posts plus corrugated plastic with coloured wire inserts plus Astroturf corner edging) and quite out of tune with the McLaughlin references. |
The Design
The designer’s challenge was to create a park from a heavily polluted wasteland adjacent to the City Airport, linking it into a larger urban design framework of urban renewal and regeneration that includes an extension of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) along the park’s northern boundary. The key elements of the park include a ‘green dock’ (instead of a ‘dry dock’), a permeable eastern edge of housing (originally intended to be a series of pavilions rather than the solid terrace implemented and fenced off by Barratt), a water feature, a street entrance, a plateau of greenery and trees with subtle changes of level, a network of paths that cross the park and leap the dock as steel bridges, and a riverside walk and performance area (now a memorial pavilion).
The ‘dock’ is a topographical slice between the direction of the bridge over the Royal Dock and the Thames Barrier, emphasising a potential linear movement from the Barrier to the DLR and Excel Centre on the northern side of the Royal Victoria Dock. This formally planted device is 6m deep at one end and 4m at the river end, creating a microclimate a few degrees warmer than the surroundings. A 100m rebuilding of the river wall and adjacent walk area (separated from the plateau by a ha-ha), where a dock was once located, includes a tall canopy (The Pavilion of Remembrance) propped by a random set of steel columns simulating a grove of trees (in a distinctly neo-Barcelona style). Another pavilion (more in the tradition of ‘the primitive hut’ as revisited by Mies) serves as toilets and a cafe, and has a concrete service part married to a green oak frame with glazing in between — it’s a fine building.
The park’s axes link to surrounding developments prompted by the 24 acre park, potentially giving a local population of about 30,000 people who could, one day, be using the park.
The area to the north of the Park (which includes the so-called ‘Silo D’ building) is to be called the Sivertown Quays / Pontoon Dock development. This 24 hectare scheme will include an aquarium as well as