Ravensbourne Art College has sought to relocate itself from the suburbs into central London – well, into the Greenwich Penninsula. In the process it has turned itself into a media college and has dumped its workshops. Whatever one thinks of all that (and I yet have to find out more about this brief), the building designed by Foreign Office is strangely schizophrenic, i.e., enjoying (or suffering) a toal divorce between inside and outside.

The outside is treated as a discrete problem is a decorative wrap punctuated by round windows and patterned in a clever, neo-Islamic motif. The inside seeks to define itself as the art college as a garage, laying claim to a radical interior layout that provides two atria (one public; one private) with off-set floors to either side.

Te overall mass of this decorated shedbends in homage toward its dominant neighbour: Rogers' 02 dome, from 2000. Behind it sits a dreadful office building by Terry Farrell. Opposite it is the Foster bus garage that tops the North Greenwich Underground station designed by Will Alsop. In between is a desert of urban promise.

Whatever the merits and demerits of the quite separate interior, the externals are depressingly without any mediary features that facilitate interaction with the interior life. Why, one wonders, has the building any windows at all?

Photos courtesy of Ravensbourne, by Morely von Strenberg