Architect Gordon Shrigley stumbled throughout London City Island within the Leamouth Peninsula throughout lockdown, and has given this newspaper his view of the “kooky” improvement.
A Covid-19 lockdown cycle tour of Canning Town discovered me on the Leamouth Peninsula, which has not too long ago been redesigned from the bottom up by Glenn Howells Architects.
To rejoice the reinvention of the peninsula, developer EcoWorld Ballymore has renamed it London City Island – which given it isn’t truly an island and is six miles from the City of London, is an effective instance of up-marketing.
One can definitely perceive, although, how the renaming of the peninsula as an island definitely helps promote the brand new residences.
As we’re additionally knowledgeable on the gross sales web site, the island represents a recent begin for potential consumers, who it suggests may embrace younger filmmakers, animators, photographers and even ceramics arists.
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These inventive sorts should all be very profitable to have the ability to afford a modestly-sized £600,000 and upwards one-bedroom house.
Using creatives so as to add gloss to a brand new city improvement is nothing new in fact, and is an element and parcel of the varied advertising methods used to persuade us that chaining your self to a big mortgage isn’t any unhealthy factor.
What is absolutely attention-grabbing and distinctive about London City Island is the only authorship of the island’s architectural language.
I wrestle to consider one other instance the place a single architect has been commissioned to design a complete island. Okay, this island solely comprises residences, studios, some cafés and one cultural establishment, so it’s definitely not a metropolis in microcosm, however nonetheless, that’s definitely some fee.
You may think that such a grand architectural fee would elicit an try at stylistic selection.
What is absolutely singular in regards to the architectural language used on this undertaking is that the buildings on London City Island, that vary from towers to low-slab like house blocks, seem to have all been impressed by the aesthetic world of Lego.
London City Island on the Leamouth Peninsula.
– Credit: Gordon Shrigley
All the buildings have been constructed from the identical pre-fabricated System-Built constructing blocks which, other than minor variations, are nearly an identical. This creates a really highly effective impression of 1 monolithic architectural language used over all facades.
The System-Built constructing has been fashionable amongst mass builders for a while, because it allows giant buildings to be constructed in a short time at low price. The London City Island buildings had been all constructed from prefabricated insulated brick tile confronted panels that had been craned into place, full with window frames and glazing too.
One results of System-Built buildings, although, is a marked tendency to the monolithic, because of the system limitations of what’s possible to prefabricate at a lowered price.
To keep away from the visible banality of this, the architects have chosen to offer every constructing a strikingly daring color, which when seen from afar, has the impact of constructing the island appear to be an over-scaled toytown.
Nevertheless, even contemplating the aesthetic limitations of prefabricated panel building, the architectural language of the island, the repeated industrial-sized home windows and easy geometric shapes, jogs my memory of Edward Hopper’s work of low-rent industrial buildings in 1930’s New York.
It’s as if the island is a grand homage, an ode even to the minor in structure, which is absolutely fairly one thing, if you consider it.
There is nothing I can uncover from the architect’s web site that might point out this. Nevertheless, consciously or not, this has resulted in a powerful work, a critique even, in constructed type of architectural splendour.
London City Island is then an aesthetic experiment of some depth.
As I explored the island additional, I additionally had the impression of strolling round a kooky futuristic metropolis, and that alienation was maybe the one genuine response I ought to be having.
However, these modernist instances are previous, and so I simply lamented the shortage of a takeaway espresso store, feeling that it was about time for an natural artisan flat white.
