Eco Urbanity.

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.

They are very clearly Erskine buildings, using a housing vocabulary that he has evolved over many years. It is very changeful, offering opportunities for many variations in dwelling and plan type within the same block. The notion of particularity within the group is celebrated, so is the idea of the possibility of alteration over time. Yet all this is done within a most rigorous contractual system, under which many important decisions and a great deal of fine detailing is passed over to the contractor. In most cases, such management structures lead to disaster, with the architects marginalized and their detailing ignored or crassly changed. But Erskine is made in a different mould. He evolved his gentle, placemaking, humane architecture in the horrendous climate of Swedish construction culture, in which, from the '50s, control of design passed from architects to bureaucrats and to contractors, a process which has had a most disastrous effect on almost all Swedish towns and city centres. Systems like PFI and B OOT' were being tried out in Sweden long before they were embraced by philistine governments and developers all over the developed world.

Through the long night of doubt and sorrow, Erskine's commitment to individuality and humanity caused him to focus on how what are essentially heavy prefabricated systems could be adapted to offer notions of place and identity. He has used many tactics including enclosure, varying the section, colouring external wall panels, varying claddings, applying relieving details like stairs and screens (often in timber), introducing balconies and bays, making much use of planting and modifying the skyline. None of these detracts essentially from the industrialized discipline of the structural and service systems, and all are found at Greenwich.

Overall environmental strategies have been adopted for the village. Grey water will be recycled, purified and used to flush lavatories. Rainwater is collected for use in irrigation. A gas powered heat and power plant has been installed which cycles heat normally wasted from the generating process through district mains to all dwellings, where both power and heat are automatically metered, using the village's sophisticated information infrastructure. Levels of thermal and acoustic insulation are high. Construction waste is reused on site when appropriate and, to try to keep waste to a minimum, as many building components as possible are prefabricated (including service modules like bathrooms). Services and finishes have been specially studied to reduce embodied energy, and wherever possible, recycled materials are used, as are locally sourced products.

Whether all these measures will work remains to be seen. But the development is being monitored in use so that lessons can be learned. It will be interesting to see how the contractor-driven detailing will stand up to the sometimes harsh weather of the lower Thames - some of the junctions look a bit odd to me. But the experiment is under way, and for all the problems encountered, results are eagerly awaited. Erskine is trying to make humanly rewarding places in a desert: the attempt is heroic and, though results seem strange, and are far from complete, the attempt to build a modern community that will live in harmony with nature deserves our closest attention.

I Private Finance Initiative (UK) or Build, Own, Operate and Transfer (US). In both systems, the contractor builds the building leases it to the client, operates it, and after an agreed period transfers ownership to the client. It has yet to be proved that it is cheaper than the usual system, and can produce good buildings.

MASTERPLAN

Architect

Erskine Tovatt Arkitekt

Project team

Ralph Erskine. Johannes Tovatt. Britt Almqvist. Magnus Andersson, Lars Backhans, Geoff Denton, Albert France-Lanord. David Neuschutz, Staffan Read. Bjorn Astrom

Traffic consultant

Rutherfords

Planning consultant

Montagu Evans

Innovation consultant

Richard Hodkinson

Environmental consultant

Taywood Engineering

Photographs

Charlotte wood

RELATED ARTICLE:

1 A series of tactical moves intended to rescue large-scale prefabricated construction from anomie.

2 Park is already well grown, and shows potential of whole development.

3 From east, with block 2 in foreground. Height is needed to shelter Inner urban spaces from wind over Thames.

4 The two blocks with 6 in foreground: an attempt to generate sense of place in the most difficuit circumstances.

5 Idealized living room.