Go to the Gherkin or to the Royal Festival Hall and one experiences a cultural dimension to the architecture that is easily taken for granted. Go to Peckham Library and that aspect becomes pertinent and unavoidable. Similarly, at the Dalston Culture House, architecture gets mixed with an ethnic vibrancy that is very London and not at all the City or the South Bank. You can go and mix architecture and jazz any evening, but also try a Saturday afternoon to see how the DCH swims within a sea of local entrepreneurial culture — except that some of this is about to be swept away in a tidy-up to the car park in order to create a new Gillett Square (part of Mayor Livingstone’s 100 squares programme for London).
The principal architectural event — where the Vortex is — is simple enough, but strives to impact upon the whole square in the way its facade lights up at night. And then, all along its adjacent facade is a series of rented sales booths selling everything imaginable. The whole thing tests and perhaps defines the fluid cultural boundaries of what architecture is and does, what it strives for and is forced to do. Whether, for example, the entirely worthy make-over of the car park into a sanitised realm of design decency (the image shows us the white middle – classes sipping cappuccino outdoors and sitting by fountains) is at once relevant and irrelevant to the community, how it is served and how it signals identity and self-esteem to itself. Compare it with Trafalgar Square’s make-over by Foster, Stanton Williams’ scheme at the Tower and (when it is completed) the latter’s efforts at Sloane Square. (Other public spaces in this scheme include Kensington High Street, Exhibition Road, the Victoria Embankment, Highbury Corner, Barking Town Centre, etc. — most of which are in the process of being realised.)