For these Swiss architects - better known for their rebuilding of London's former Bankside power station as Tate Modern - the material is incidental. It helps them play the old architectural game of space, light and mass. Thanks in no small part to their collaboration with the artist Michael Craig-Martin, the Laban Centre glows gently with rich colours - lime, turquoise, magenta. It succeeds where their previous plastic collaboration, the clumsy light-box on top of the chimney of Tate Modern, lamentably fails. The internal hues of the wedge-shaped corridors in the building are taken up in colour tints in the polycarbonate, so turning the whole place into a gentle kind of beacon. Which is highly relevant, because the Laban Centre is nothing if not a beacon, culturally and urbanistically. It has been built in a wasteland.

Let's be brutally frank about Deptford. It's in south-east London and it's a hole. True, it has some fine things in or near it including (some might disagree) Craig-Martin's Goldsmith's College, alma mater of contemporary Britart. It was once a famous royal dockyard, and some traces remain. But the area has been more than a little louche ever since playwright Christopher Marlow - who may or may not have worked for the Elizabethan intelligence service - was murdered there in a tavern brawl in 1593. Deptford today is an area of wharves, scrapyards, warehouses, odds and sods of post-industrial industry, council estates, snaking railway lines and sidings, bleak roads clogged with traffic trying to get somewhere else. Deptford suffers from being next door to Greenwich which, though good only in parts, appears a paradise in comparison. That's the scale of the Deptford problem. But it's cheap. And there's lots of redundant land. Wherever artists go, developers are never far behind. Deptford is slated as the new Hoxton. So it has been targeted for regeneration. And the Laban Centre is instrumental in getting that regeneration under way.