From a rooftop basketball court to a caterpillar-shaped food hall, the souk-like London development is architecture at its trendiest. Can its eye-popping buildings lure young creatives – and bring the buzz?
A mirror-polished silver box stands proudly on a corner of the Greenwich Peninsula, reflecting a curious new world of architectural experiments. To one side wriggles a transparent caterpillar of a building, with clear plastic stretched around a bright yellow frame, forming a space-age chrysalis. Next door stands a veiled stack of raw concrete floors, the bare bones of a building draped with a ghostly shroud of steel netting, giving it the look of a multistorey aviary. Nearby there is a sturdy, low-slung box covered in rusty panels of Cor-ten steel, and a little tower-like block wrapped in a corduroy cloak of slender white tubes. Elsewhere in the menagerie we find a pair of triangular wedges dressed in harlequin costumes of pink and green terrazzo diamonds, and several other creatures whose exotic plumage has yet to emerge from behind the scaffolding.
