Photos: Dennis Gilbert
Piers Gough applauds a ‘raw funky collage’ amidst the corporate grey of Canary Wharf.
One of the great delights of the 1980s was Frank Gehry’s Norton ‘Residence’ on Venice Beach, California. More of a super shack, it had a separate study box at the front of the house which had flaps over the windows in homage to the life-saving huts on the beach.
Similar delight is now to be had on London’s Isle of the Dogs amidst the corporate blandeur of Canary Wharf and South Quay, where flaps have sprouted from the top of some colourful residential towers by Brady Mallalieu. Here the post-industrial chic aesthetic is nominally solar shading rather than vandal protection but it actually appears more anthropomorphic, like hands shading eyes looking into the distance. They make a great silhouette for tower tops and appear as the sort of low-cost, good design you might get from Ikea. They also have nice resonance with Millennium Harbour at the other end of Mastmaker Road where ten years ago my partner Rex Wilkinson designed cantilevered flats framing the vista of the river, colloquially known as the nodding dog kennels. The developer was the same Ballymore that has built this scheme.
Mastmaker Road is the affordable housing element of the neighbouring upmarket Pan Peninsular building (not one of SOM’s greatest hits). Brady Mallalieu upped the density a bit to include some extra market flats in the mix (with their concomitant affordable percentage) to arrive at more than 1000 habs per hectare. Since the edges of the site had to be lower rise for townscape and light-angle reasons this meant some pretty substantial towers were required to the north of the site.
A lot of nonsense is talked about terraced houses for families when ground, first and second-floor maisonettes with flats above are just as good in urban settings and don’t haemorrhage land. Except for some commercial and communal spaces here the first three floors are combined to maximise the number of family dwellings at 33 four-beds. They are grouped around some lovely internal residents’ gardens, quite a bit wider than the obligatory 18 metres, with their own patio gardens opening into them. There are pedestrian routes along the south boundary providing half of the width of a projected east-west route across the area and through the middle of the scheme with front doors animating them. They are particularly generously landscaped with mature trees and lush planting.
Above the maisonettes are flats, bringing the lower-rise parts up to seven storeys high. Contrary to received wisdom these lower buildings and gardens are in no way oppressed or made less charming by the higher buildings behind, although this is partly due to skilful disposition where the gap between towers coincides with one of the gardens, and the towers being conveniently to the north.
The scheme abuts the locally famous 1960s Barkantine Estate which has an almost dramatically opposite disposition with isolated towers surrounded by long bleak rows of homes. In contrast both to this architecturally blank estate and the glassy eyed inhospitable residential towers of South Quay, Mastmaker Road (now named Phoenix Heights) is cheerfully eclectic and speaks of inhabitation by living breathing people. A fairly catholic palette of materials (none of them expensive) animate the blocks, which are in turn cleverly modelled. One key move has been to combine the top three floors into a triplex of penthouses. With clever fire engineering this obviates the need for the lift to travel up the last two floors, leaving a gap where normally there would be a central lump, so splitting the top of the towers into separate sculptural elements. Otherwise colour is used to differentiate bottom, middle and top and there are more arbitrary splashes here and there.
A particularly successful device is the way in which the white render of the body of the towers is picked up by the white-clad balconies of the reddy brown upper floors so that the white part appears to have its own floating sculptural topping (hesitate to call them cornice fragments), although it has to be said that this effect is at the expense of a sit-down view from the balconies and the rooms behind them. Lower balconies also play a part by having sometimes glass and sometimes white return balustrades varying the apparent silhouette of the edges. The rich palette stretches to architects’ favourite black bricks at the base and the warm embrace of timber boarding, about which I would always have maintenance, weathering and longevity worries but it is confined to fairly small areas. There is a very nice bit of building at the south-west corner where a three-storey maisonette element in bright orange cuts under the exposed columns of the upper floors like a bright child wriggling under the legs of a parent.
Externally the landscape and paving are of a high quality demanded by the planning authorities. Internally the common parts are more utilitarian but OK and decently daylit. The townhouse/maisonettes are generously planned around a central cross staircase. The other apartments are fairly conventional but of course with good views and balconies to view from. The triplexes at the top, effectively one room per floor with a double staircase in between, would certainly keep you fit. The price of fire engineering is a lack of open planning around the stair. However there are stonking views all around the Isle of Dogs and the loop of the Thames down to Greenwich through full-length windows under those top flaps.
A particularly lovely feature of the project is the double-height community space. It is right at the centre of the E-plan and opens up through full-height glazing to the central pedestrian street and the communal garden. A mezzanine is big enough to hold serious sized meetings, and there are music recording and IT/job training facilities. The whole place acts as an informal cafe/lounge, with a delicious combination of perforated wood panelling for sound absorption and bright would-be Irish colours, were it not for Angela Brady’s irrepressible passion for pink.
I went round the project with a large and lively group, including the ebullient Frank McDonald of the Irish Times (who asked all the good questions) as well as the architects, one of the developers, his young daughter who got on sweetly with my young son, some architects from Dublin, the caretaker, Uncle Tom Cobley and all. In retrospect the sheer size of the group may well have made the apartments seem smaller than they are. But it was not so much the bonhomie and sunshine that influenced this positive report as the happy vitality of the architecture. It takes such evident pleasure in providing a lovely looking, well worked out place to live. The residents looked happily at home.
We were initially briefed standing in the coup de théâtre of the project: the rooftop five-a-side football pitch, six stories up on top of the central bar of the E-plan, made of what my son quickly identified as black snow and surrounded by chain-link fencing which kind of brings us back to Frank Gehry. And I guess it’s him we have to thank for spawning the attitude that started this kind of humanist architecture of raw funky collage in the first place.
Brady Mallalieu Architects writes:
4 Mastmaker Road is a mixed-tenure housing project in a high-density location on the Isle of Dogs, just south of Canary Wharf on the west edge of the Millenium Quarter. The £35m project was commissioned by the Ballymore Group and the social and affordable housing is managed by One Housing Group. The masterplan, by EDAW/Tower Hamlets, stipulates a gradual reduction in the height of buildings from Canary Wharf to the north to the residential areas to the south. East-west linkages are identified to help integrate the emerging Millennium Quarter with the existing Barkantine Estate to the west. One such link, across the southern perimeter of the site, will be completed when the site to the south is developed.
The urban design also negotiates a tricky shift in scale between the low-rise Barkantine Estate and the high-rise Millennium Quarter. Three- to seven-storey buildings create positive outside spaces and contribute to the streetscape of Mastmaker Road and Byng Street. Townhouses can be entered directly from the street and have buffer spaces created by planters, entrance canopies and front gardens. Two south-facing courtyards are linked by a community strip that incorporates allotments and a community centre with a double-height entrance space, training facilities, music recording room, meeting rooms and a rooftop sports pitch. A cafe/retail space at the corner of Byng Street and Mastmaker Road contributes to the activity of the area. A basement allows vehicles to be parked away from pedestrians.
The two towers seem to grow out of the low-rise elements, avoiding dead spaces at street level and opening interior spaces to sunlight and views. The distinctive profile of the towers is eroded to create roof terraces and contribute to the wider cityscape.
The elevations are designed to allow the large building form to respond to local conditions along different edges and create an aesthetic that will be enhanced by inhabitation. Zinc cladding reinforces the corner of Mastmaker Road and Byng Street and echoes the muted language of Canary Wharf. Larch timber weatherboarding is used on the low-rise west elevation to private gardens and the playground. Patches of red and orange fibre cement provide a warm contrast to the glazed facades of nearby office buildings. Canopies and projecting balconies exploit distant views at high level. The elevations are based on variation and incident as an antidote to repetition and monotony.
The project contains 199 homes in the 20- and 23-storey towers and five 3-7 storey buildings organised around two south-facing courtyards. Tenures are split with private flats on the upper floors of tower 1, shared ownership flats on the lower floors of tower 1 and upper floors of tower 2, and social rented homes on the lower floors of tower 2 and throughout the low-rise buildings. The 58 different unit types provide a high level of variation: family-sized homes at the base of the building have direct access to rear gardens, a playground and courtyard areas. Smaller homes, located higher in the towers, have private balconies and roof terraces. Overall the project provides 690 habitable rooms over a 0.62 hectare site, giving a density of 1,108 HR/Ha. The building is connected to the Barkantine Estate Combined Heat & Power network and includes green walls, bird and bat boxes, insect bricks and biodiversity roofs which contribute to a ‘very good’ EcoHomes rating.
Project team
Architect, lead consultant: Brady Mallalieu Architects; design team: Anna Bamber, Angela Brady, Andrew Carr (project architect), Richard Garnon, Robin Mallalieu, Francesco Pierazzi; planning consultant: GVA Grimley; landscape: Capita Lovejoy; structural engineer: Walsh Assocs; MEP, fire, lifts: Hoare Lea; highways: WSP Development; acoustics: Hann Tucker; CDM: Perry Scott Nash; ecology: RPS Consultants; client, developer: Ballymore Properties.
Selected suppliers and subcontractors
Concrete: JR Reddingtons; facade installation: MPG Facades; facade drawings: Telling Architectural; Proteus HR zinc rainscreen:
AME Facades; zinc: Rheinzink; render: Sto Verotec (black), StoTherm classic; Natura Plus board: Marley Eternit; Siberian larch: Vincent Timber; Rocksilk rainscreen insulation: Knauf Insulation; Flexi-batt insulation: Rockwool; Matrix XL louvres: Levolux; brick: Ibstock Brick Staffordshire Blue Brindle; windows, doors: Rationel Windows; curtain walling: Solex Manufacturing; roof insulation: Dow Roofmate; Hydrotech waterproofing: Alumasc Exteriors; MT24 sports surface: Tiger Turf; sports mesh:
JB Corrie & Co; balconies, entrance canopies, sun shades, balustrades: OMC Engineering; Richter System wall studwork, RMF/RLS ceilings:?MPG?Interiors; linings: British Gypsum Gyproc; Thermafloor insulation: Rockwool; kitchens: Commodore Kitchens; carpentry, staircases, skirtings, architraves, doors: JA Stott; mechanical, electrical, plumbing, sanitary: Haydon; lifts: Mitsubishi Lifts; fit-out (community): Building Concepts; timber linings: Gustafs Panel System by LSA Projects; Marmoleum Decibel linoleum: Forbo Flooring; floor tiles: Zeus Negro, Pavigrès.
AT207/April 10 p24.
