Eco Urbanity - architecture and environment

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2002 by Peter Davey

An aim of Team X was to generate community by harnessing and humanizing industrial production. Team X member Ralph Erskine still believes in the ideal, which he has married to a lifelong enthusiasm for sustainability.

Jutting northwards into a loop of the meandering Thames, the Greenwich Peninsula is known mainly for the disastrous Millennium Dome that sits at its tip, like a wen on an outstretched finger. Until the '90s, much of the peninsula was terribly polluted by defunct industry, and one of the reasons for the colossal cost of the dome project was making the peninsula safe for development. Long after the fuss has died down, the Dome sits ghastly, deserted and surrounded by unused acres of car park and empty roads: a miserable picture of desolation. In fact, in the south-east angle of the peninsula, a new ecological park has been created, and buildings are beginning to grow round it. At last, the area is beginning to have signs of life and the possibility of urbanity.

Rogers' original masterplan was an attempt to lay the foundations of a proper piece of city, with a central park linking the leisure area round the dome to employment, retailing and residential areas at the base of the finger. After Victorian pollution had been conquered, the planners hoped that new development would be outstandingly environment-friendly, and that it would be urban, rather than suburban in character. A Millennium Village was to be built as a demonstration of the most up-to-date sustainable ideas in planning, architecture and building. The 1997 competition was won by a team led by Ralph Erskine, the Anglo-Swedish architect, and Greenwich Millennium Village Ltd, a specially founded development consortium.

Erskine produced a detailed masterplan, and laid down strategies for its execution. Flexibility, mixed use, and mixed tenure were key principles. To achieve the latter, there is no differentiation between tenure types, and affordable elements are scattered through the development. Erskine's ideal community form is modelled on an abstraction of the English village, formed round a common, and on the interlocked forms of southern European cities, with their dense tapestries of streets, alleys and squares, and clearly articulated hierarchies of space from private through semi-public local foci to public piazzas. The ecological park is part of the village green, and already seems set to be a success, with well-grown traditional vegetation, fish in the lakes, and birds and animals banished by pollution returning to take up residence in its coverts and islands.

In section, the village complex is tallest to the north-east, where the site touches the Thames and faces icy winds blowing in over the Essex flats across the river. Because the mass rises from the south, sun will be caught by urban spaces. In plan, the urban mass forms a rough U round the green which opens directly to the river. Here, there is a bankside walk from the boat club (an excellent building constructed by Frankl Luty) to the environs of the Dome (which may sooner or later get some sort of life).

The main armature of the complex is the spine, which follows the perimeter of the central park, one block away. Radial routes feed into the urban mass from perimeter roads. At junctions of the spine and these feeder elements are urban squares, where it is hoped that retail, commercial and communal functions will be located to serve each small quarter. In practice, judging by recent British patterns of development, we shall be lucky to get more than the odd corner shop, hairdresser and occasional pub. But opportunities are there, and we shall see. The main urban public space is the Oval, to the north-west of the urban mass. Here will be the social arena of the whole community, with an arcade round the piazza serving shops, offices and cafes. The local bus stop will be here, and paradoxically the Oval will also be the spatial link between the village green and the central park that runs up the middle of the peninsula.

The structure of streets ensures that development is in blocks that contain semiprivate green courts. Many of these courts on the perimeter contain underground car parks hidden under podia, and which are concealed on their street sides by manipulation of the section, allowing streets to be virtually vehicle free (except for emergencies and deliveries). Other concealed parking is in bunds to the south, which also deflect and shield the site from the noise of what one day may be a busy road. Surface parking, which will be limited to bays off perimeter roads, is intended to be limited to visitors, and it will be ameliorated by careful planting.

At the moment, you can only see a very slender sketch of what is hoped for. The development was always intended to be built in phases, and the first two have started. The village green is there. So is the school and community centre in phase two by Edward Cullinan Architects, and so are some bits of low-rise housing made in the same sector by various other designers. Now, the first two blocks by Erskine are finished in phase one. They overlook the lakeside in the northern sector of the site, where they give some notion of the intended enclosure of the green park and of the way in which the whole complex is to rise upwards as it approaches the river.