2010 Chips, Lampwick Lane, Manchester

Architect: Alsop Architects

Client: Urban Splash

Contractor: Urban Splash Build

Structural engineer: Martin Stockley Associates

Services engineer: Quartzelec

Landscape design: Grant Associates

Contract value: £20m

Date of completion: June 2009

Gross internal area: 171,000 sq ft, 16,200 sq m

The resident: Vicky Williams, 28, is a programme manager at Royal Bank of Scotland and lives in a south-facing one-bedroom apartment on the second floor at Chips. She says: I love Urban Splash's contemporary style and the location is amazing...just a few minutes walk into central Manchester. It's such a striking building and is so completely different from anything else in the city.

The regenerator, New East Manchester: New Islington was first designed as a total concept that was then presented to planners for outline consent for the entire area after it had gone through a community planning process. There was lots of consultation with other key stakeholders, including the city as landowner.

This wasn't a controversial scheme from a planning perspective. We started with a blank sheet and extensively consulted local people. NEM was fully engaged with the design process from the outset and were consulted all the way through the reserve matters process. However, what was designed matched the previously agreed Will Alsop's masterplan.

If you look today at what was built and compare it with images of the whole site when the masterplan was launched, Chips bears an almost uncanny resemblance to that original concept.

The client, Urban Splash: Delivering a challenging project such as Chips requires close collaboration between client and architect. We worked well with Alsops, but inevitably compromises had to be made.

We reduced the lettering on the façade to a few key words because it wasn't practical to replicate the "newspaper print" seen on early drawings. We adopted "traditional" kitchens instead of prefabricated pods because we simply couldn't find a suitable UK supplier at the time.

We also learned a few lessons along the way. The façade proved more complex and costly than expected, so to deliver the design within budget we had to adopt a different approach to procurement, splitting work packages up and coordinating the work ourselves.

Despite the compromises, we worked hard to protect key design features - the sculptural form, the colourful façade and the dramatic entrance - that make Chips so successful. One early value-engineering idea was to prop the cantilever ends of the building with columns, but this was rejected on design grounds. We think the finished result proves that this was the right decision.

The judges: Chips is a flagship for the New Islington. Its sculptural form and its strong graphic treatment create a striking architectural expression. It's what happens when an architect like Will Alsop meets a developer like Urban Splash: it's flamboyant, daring and it's also very big, more like the warehouses that hug the canals than some of the lesser attempts to house people in large numbers in these parts. It is the first part of Alsop's own masterplan to be delivered: a plan for a series of fingers of accommodation and leisure alongside water; and perhaps also an Alsop finger to the housing establishment.

Chips makes a clear decision about the architectural issues at stake in the project and it pursues these issues to an unusual conclusion.