Client: Peabody Estates
Architect: Niall McLaughlin Architects
HOUSING FOR THE PEABODY TRUST, SILVERTOWN, LONDON
In December 2002, Niall McLaughlin Architects won a design competition organised by the Peabody Trust called Fresh Ideas for Low Cost Housing. The site was in Silvertown, East London, between Royal Victoria Dock and the River Thames. We developed the design with the Peabody Trust and with the builders, Sandwood Construction Ltd.
Each living unit has two bedrooms and a shared bathroom. The kitchen, dining and living functions are accommodated within a single, large space on the south side of the building. This allows each apartment to make the most of the sun and the view. There is a little south-facing terrace outside each flat, and the ground floor units each have a back garden. Special corner windows on the upper floor flats allow the view to open out along the street towards the Millennium Dome and Canary Wharf in the distance.
This practice looks carefully at the history and topography of a site. Each place has something comparable to DNA, a coded trace pointing towards the future. Everything from local myths to geology can become a starting point for architecture. Looked at in the context of historical time, this site experienced an extraordinary flowering of industry from the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851 to the collapse of British manufacturing in the late 1970s. In 1830 the place was marshland, by 1990 it had returned to almost total dereliction. The industrial flowering, or chemical-flare, lasted for a very brief period of time. Now the area is being repopulated by a rag-bag of yuppie-houses, airports, an IBIS Hotel and a vast conference centre. It is both somewhere and nowhere. This kind of place has been called a post-industrial landscape. We prefer to think of it in the context of emerging and dissolving landscapes. The uncertainty of its identity is the essence of the place. Its properties are fugitive.
Even the name Silvertown plays a trick on you. The glister in the name comes from Stephen Winkworth Silver who built a rubber plant on the site in 1852, manufacturing wet-weather clothing. It_s the kind of stuff Queen Victoria might have inspected at the opening of the Great Exhibition the year before. Raw materials from the Empire transformed directly into the cheap consumer goods on the shore where it landed. Looking at the map change during the next fifty years, there was a blooming of remarkably consistent range of factories making sugar, coloured dyes, jam, golden syrup, gutta percha, soda, TNT, soap and matches. The Victorians, through chemistry and trade, learnt to make luxury cheap. These factories manufactured chemical sweetness, colour and light. Low-cost housing often uses modular timber frame construction involving considerable prefabrication. This industrialised building process is usually wrapped in a conventional material like brick or tiles to give a traditional appearance. In fact, the wrapping could be anything. It is a primarily decorative layer. Working with the artist Martin Richman, a beautiful envelope for the apartments was developed.
The French physicist Augustin Fresnel explained the colourful iridescence of dragonflies, peacocks and films of oil. It is caused by light reflecting off different layers within a material resulting in interference patterns. Martin found a strange dichroic_ film made by 3M - famous for everything from dentistry to post-it notes. We designed a layered construction in which the film selectively reflects and transmits light to generate shifting colourful patterns. This has become our wrapping. It is held in glass frames. Light hitting the faade is reflected back from different layers of the construction, producing a shifting pattern. Cast glass is used to capture the light as it escaped. A stand of silver birch trees adds an extra layer to the faade. They cast shadows onto the surface and catch coloured light on the way back out. At times the effect is robustly geometric, at others it is evanescent and fugitive. We want the building to have a slightly dream-like quality as though its image will not fix completely in your mind. We hope that this connects to the shifting, uncertain properties of the place.