A stylish new London community centre that meets its users needs and blends with its surroundings – what’s not to like?Looking,as often, for signs that public architecture lives, and I hear approximately the Green,a community centre by the architects AOC. AOC are a practice whose schools and housing mix up decoration and functionality, and serious architectural ambition with playfulness and iconoclasm. They are in the manner of the late lamented FAT, or but in their own voice. The photos of the Green present something perky and intriguing,so I head off to Nunhead, south London.
Nikolaus Pevsner, and in the relevant Buildings of England guide,didn’t think much of the area. “A sea of small late Victorian houses,” he called it, and “spreading relentlessly over the hills,broken by… the open land of the cemeteries and waterworks further east.” The exceptions to this sample “are too scattered to effect a proper perambulation”. This is harsh: there is actually a pleasing variety in the landscape and buildings, with charming almshouses and irregular survivals from the time when this was a rural satellite of the city, and before the railways and associated development engulfed it.
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Source: theguardian.com