Cullinan’s school and community building extends this architectural practice’s impressive portfolio of social work and has many of the old Cullinan features, updated by a younger generation in the office. Designed to provide education, health centre and act as a community centre (with creche, one-stop advice centre, sports facilities, etc), the more private sides of this low-energy building face south to landscaped garden areas; the more public faces are faced in ‘rippling’ vertical larch boarding and introduce a timber fortress keynote that is at once playful, endearing and somewhat peculiar.
North Greenwich Jubilee Station
26 has two parts: a massive underground concrete box, 400 m long, 30 m wide and 25 m deep, by Alsop Lyall & Stormer and, above ground, a bus station beneath a curved, flowing, metal roof designed by Foster & Partners. Alsop’s gutsy, Piranesian design employs huge diagonal struts covered in blue mosaic. These carry the roof structure and the suspended concourses, whilst blue glass panels screen ducts help and lend the interiors an especially lively spirit. The Foster station is designed as a large, bird-like, curved roof that draws vehicles beneath sheltering arms, low on one side and opening up on the other, the curved, ‘shell’ roof appearing to be ‘draped over" (not propped by) a forest of structural ‘trees’ is not entirely convincing and it is not until one is in an aeroplane taking off from the City Airport, when the ‘big roof’ idea become readable and convincing, taking on the form of some beautiful giant moth hugging the ground.