Dancing down to Deptford

A run-down area of south London is not where you would expect to find an exciting new dance centre, especially one that even finds room for pop art. Jay Merrick reports

Sometimes, architecture enters the Twilight Zone, complete with an appropriate tracking-shot opening and Rod Serling's deadpan voiceover to set the scene. The walk from Greenwich Docklands Light Railway station to the just-opened Laban dance centre turns out to be an amble into this unexpected territory.

It goes like this: right into Creek Road, Deptford, past the Up the Creek Comedy Club, the Lord Hood pub, and then over the Deptford Creek bridge. To the right, over a new low-rise office development, towards the buildings of Canary Wharf, two miles away, and the mish-mash of apartment blocks with their clashing palettes of brickwork, fiddly fenestration details and escape stairs concealed so elaborately that they become a major, rather than a disguised, feature of the building.

On the other side, Deptford creek itself. It's low tide and the silt lies like slabs of charred blubber. There are manky houseboats and a small commercial craft rooted in the mud. Then, left into Copperas Street, to be confronted by the derelict hulk of Universal Tyres. And then the Twilight Zone moment. What happens next could surprise anybody. Standing in Copperas Street, by the back of Universal Tyres – a low, crudely banded modernist building that may once have cut a decently functional dash – we are confronted by something truly other; a building that doesn't seem real. And that's because, in one sense, the newly opened dance centre, known simply as Laban, seems to have been something beamed down from another place.

Here is a building, whose façades are sheathed with subtly coloured polycarbonate sections, that threatens to defy description. It is transparent, but in a semi-opaque way; its outline is crisply defined, but to what purpose? For a millisecond, you might take it for a super-cool IT headquarters, or a recording studio. But the most obvious – and condescending – question of all is: what's this building doing here?

The short answer is that Laban, designed by Herzog and de Meuron – interior decorators, by appointment to Sir Nicholas Serota, of Tate Modern – is there because Deptford is the perfect place for it, and because the Arts Council Lottery Fund coughed up £14m of its £22m cost.

Here is a tranche of greater Greenwich that is beginning to outgrow its sometimes threadbare past. The mire of Deptford's inner city is gradually giving way to redevelopment. The new mixed-use development on the north side of Creek Road may be architecturally lobotomised, but it's there; so, too, are the starter homes at the junction of Copperas Street and Creekside; and, opposite the rather forlorn looking Sue Godfrey Nature Park, there are equally new apartments in Berthon Street with a pretentious title, Ravensbourne Mansions.

Laban stands apart from all this, architecturally, but is fused to the good, the bad and the ugly around it, in spirit. It brings a new flavour to the locale, something subtle and yet decisive. It stands like a beautifully chiselled slab of multi-coloured sorbet, apparently self-effacing, yet radiating certainty. Forget Tate Modern: this is Herzog and de Meuron's first properly expressive piece of architecture in Britain, a building whose ruthless simplicity of overall form and internal layout has delivered a series of spaces whose proportions and feel faultless.

The architects have been clever by not being obviously clever, and by dealing with the demands of internal circulation and various functional requirements in a very direct manner. There is certainly artifice and aesthetic nuance involved, but it comes second to purpose. And Laban's purpose is considerable. The original Laban Centre for Movement and Dance was founded by Rudolph Laban in 1972 in extremely ropey premises at New Cross. It rapidly became the world's pre-eminent degree school for modern dance. Today, Laban's students – about 350 at any one time – are there to study as well as stand, gracefully on pointe, at the barre.

This is a building with a gentle and playful soul. The concave sweep of the entrance façade may be a brilliant exercise in razor-cut modernist luminosity, but the entrance hall is where the architects have really excelled. Beyond rough-cast circular concrete stairs that jab down alongside the reception desk like a gigantic black drill-bit, a slope of polished concrete rises gradually towards a large glazed wall about 30-metres ahead.

Halfway up, a floor slab – painted bright pink on its underside and glazed at its angles – juts down into the space like a partially collapsed ceiling. To the right, a glazed, double-height wall of glass, reflecting in smears and jags, the Pop Art mural painted on vinyl by Michael Craig-Martin. And along the walls, wavering handrails in steamed beech. This is a great, and greatly ambiguous, space: a chill-zone that somehow also manages to be loaded, provocative.

Craig-Martin's input was to do with colour. Riot-girl pink, acid green and turquoise are used to mark out the three sections of Laban and, within those sections, these colours are mixed to enliven a building whose key contents – the dance spaces and theatre – have been beautifully realised. The dance spaces are fabulous: light passes through the sheathing, picking up washes of subtle colour, and each room has a floor-to-ceiling window at one end to let the real world in. These are spaces whose vibe – a sense of gathering and release – have been tuned to perfection.

The theatre is equally remarkable. The architects have used rough-sawn timber cladding on the walls, amber auditorium lighting and dark seats to deliver a space – and an unusually deep stage – where the expressions of dance become the focal point. They have designed something that cannot fail to provoke fertile imaginations.

But it's a fertile area. Take time to amble around a bit, and you would discover St Paul's Church, Thomas Archer's baroque masterpiece, which sits four-square, 300 metres away from Laban's entrance façade.

Retrace your steps and turn right into Greenwich Church Street, and you find Hawksmoor's St Alfege's Church, hugger-mugger with the Café Sol, Pizza Express, Café Rouge and, in Nelson Road, Noodle Time. Spookily, the two churches, and Laban, are on the same axis. Cue Rod Serling voiceover.