Reinvesting the everyday: This proposal for low-cost housing in London draws on contemporary urban models to create a striking set of buildings that embody passive solar design, flexibility and generous communal spaces.

Since the British state's retreat from the provision of public sector dwellings, the task of building and managing social housing has latterly fallen to independent associations such as the Peabody Trust. Established during the nineteenth century by George Peabody, an American financier and philanthropist, the eponymous trust is a non profit-making body originally charged with building decent housing for working men in inner London. Its stolid residential blocks are a familiar feature of the capital's townscape, but more recently, the Trust has emerged as a notable patron of inventively designed housing by a younger generation of architects, including Allford Hall Monaghan Morris in Dalston (AR November 1999) and Bill Dunster in Sutton (AR June 2001). Such schemes are all the more remarkable for being achieved in the teeth of invariably parsimonious budgets.

At the end of last year, the Trust initiated a competition to seek ideas for economical family housing aimed at people aspiring to home ownership. The brief asked for proposals for three different but neighbouring sites in north Woolwich, between the Royal Docks and River Thames. As part of its policy of working with less well-known practices, Peabody restricted entry to firms with fewer than seven members. Sarah Wigglesworth was one of the shortlisted architects. Her scheme proposes a family of buildings based on an economical, repeated apartment plan deployed to create different forms. The three sites are united as a sequence of spaces that move from urban block through terrace to suburban villa in its own grounds. Despite their apparent simplicity, the dwellings form a recognizable series of insertions in the existing streetscape.

Wigglesworth draws on contemporary urban models to create formally striking architecture that becomes a visual marker for the general neighbourhood. Passive solar design is also fundamental to the organization and appearance of the blocks. Each elevation is a considered response to its solar orientation, with winter gardens and shutters on south-facing walls contrasting with heavily insulated north facades made of straw bales clad in vividly coloured corrugated sheeting generating an arresting kaleidoscopic chequerboard. The use of straw bales follows on from Wigglesworth's own house (AR January 2002) which acted as

a prototype for many of the ideas developed here.

Internally, the flats are distinguished by qualities more usually associated with private sector dwellings, such as open planning, flexibility and the potential for informal living, so that different families can occupy the same spaces in different ways. Communal areas such as gardens, entrances, staircases and landings are all generously proportioned. Decent, engaging and with a touch of wit, Wigglesworth's proposal, like most of the shortlisted schemes, dignifies a currently marginalized area of architectural activity. It is easy enough to build object houses for rich clients; what is really needed are more sane, humane and inventive solutions to the problems of the everyday.