Lighter Than Brick
Peckham, London. WHAT_Architecture, 2020
On the corner of Costa Street, in Peckham, there is a building that leans. The upper half is a mansard set at seventy-two degrees, tipped out towards the trees in the nature garden next door. The house beside it has a mansard too, an ordinary one. This is the same idea, answered back.
It leans because slate is light. Brick weighs about a hundred and fifty kilograms a square metre; the slate on the top half comes in under forty. That difference is the whole building. The slate was laid to the same coursing as the brickwork below it, so the change of material reads as a decision rather than an accident.
There are four flats behind it — a one-bed, two twos, a three — built around a cross-laminated timber frame. The lean is the part that gets photographed and the part nobody living there can see. They get the trees instead.
