The scaffolding on the 10-storey block of ecologically friendly flats is gradually being struck to reveal great stretches of render on three sides, painted black, gold and crimson. From the south wall, which faces a new lake and eco-park, balconies pop out in bright hues of green, red, orange and blue.
The building's creator, veteran Anglo-Swedish architect Ralph Erskine, delights in bucking his profession's aspirations towards slick, sophisticated design. Instead, he has forged his own populist modernism, in which forms and colours seem to have been lifted out of a children's picture book.
As well as colours loud enough to make a development control officer spit his tea across the breakfast table, the building is topped by an outbreak of vaulted penthouses, rising and falling on the skyline in four lumpy hillocks.
The detailing is, to put it kindly, on the beefy side, with the penthouses framed by hefty fascias and flat external columns (visible on the picture below) that seem to dangle in thin air. But the design certainly gives a strong, unique identity to the block, which erupts out of an otherwise desolate stretch of the Greenwich Peninsula, and the contrasting colours articulate the individual dwellings within the large structure.
Behind their jaw-dropping exteriors, the 100 flats and maisonettes in the block promise their occupants 50% savings in primary energy. They also nod to the Egan agenda, with off-site prefabrication of cladding panels and bathroom pods intended, in theory, to reduce construction costs, time and defects.
The block is taking 22 months to build. Joint developers are Taylor Woodrow Capital Developments and Countryside Properties, with EPR as executive architect, Waterman Partnership as structural engineers, WSP as services engineer and WT Partnership as quantity surveyor.
