A new architecture centre in Bankside, a home for the Architecture Foundation and the first new cultural building in London for 30 years.

The Architecture Foundation was established in 1981 as Britain's first architecture centre. It's first site was the Economist Building by Alison and Peter Smithson, where it hosted exhibitions and debate about the future of London. In 2004 the AF held an international design competition for a new architecture centre on Southwark Street in Bankside, behind the 'new' Tate Modern.

We proposed a public house for architecture, an easy icon.

A gold screen printed polycarbonate wrap ensures that the 900sqm public building has a presence to match the imposing mass of its commercial neighbours. David amidst the Goliaths. A little gem.

The ground floor is a solid plinth with several front doors, generous windows and inviting niches encouraging you in and up.

A double stair, sometimes touching, meanders through and round the building, connecting the street to the interior to the roof above.

Extruded from the site, the building's chiselled form provides a home for the local ecology. The roof garden's stripes of different soil provide opportunities for diverse flora and fauna. The north facing facade, 8m from its 12 storey office neighbour, provides a lapped black rubber chasm for rainwater to drain down and polypods to grow up.

The warehouse like rooms are raw and specifically flexible. The concrete structure provides intense caverns, divided and lined with timber to allow easy adaptation and reinterpretation.

A spatially layered, materially rich palace like route connects the rooms, providing the intimacy essential for a public building to nurture serendipity.

The generous proportions and specific characters of the building are defined by its site, its neighbours and structure. Over the years it's interiors will be lined and relined, its ecologies will flourish and its facade replaced. In 'the future' we hope it will provide as useful for the contemporary public as it is for the Architecture Foundation today.