Advantures in Megastructures – The Park Hill experience

I am an architect, they call me a butcher
I am a pioneer, they call me primitive

(Manic Street Preachers, Faster)

Ideas, especially in architecture, are a bit like urban legends: no one really knows who first came up with them, and there are some variations of them popping out through out history. One of these ideas, that seem to constantly appear, is what to do with high rise buildings or as a young british architect named Jack Lynn described them in 1962: "bungalows stacked one above the other . . . [like] tidy solutions of a storage problem".

Jack Lynn, which too few people have ever heard about, was just another voice carrying the cry of Team 10 (don't be shy to look it up in wikipedia) that something has to be done with the all issue of density in urban centers.

Humans, they argued, should be an important consideration when designing buildings, especially big ones, and social structures there for are at least as important as physical ones.

The solution for the problem according to team 10 was to create the building as indistinguishable part of urban plan (New urbanism wasn't invented yet, so they still talked about urban plans). That's idea is easy enough to think about, the problem is how to turn this idea into a building.

The English branch of team 10, AKA Peter & Alison Smithson, had a simple solution: take the streets and insert them into the buildings, to create what they called "streets in the air". Well, they always say the british are more pragmatic than theoretical.

Golden Lane Housing Project, London

The "streets in the air" idea was first introduced by the Smithsons in 1952, as the concept for a housing project in London, called Golden Lane. Although their proposition didn't win (or for that matter wasn't even close for winning), the Smithsons PR machine started to pump the idea into the architectural circles in Britain, and in 1957 the building of the first "Streets in the air" building has started in Sheffield.

The project which was called Park Hill, and was Sheffield's version of the great british social and architectural experiment also known as the post war reconstruction. Designed and constructed by Sheffield's very own city architectural department, Park Hill was a massive public housing building, containing 995 apartments, not including pubs laundry rooms and other functions.

Park Hill Estate, Sheffield

In the spirit of Mega-Structures (though it was quite an early example), the building was designed mainly with the thought of the system, less with a thought of a building. Architects Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith who designed the building used the "streets in the air" concept in order to design a living environment which was both dens and provided high quality of life, making it the dominant (and almost the only) architectural feature of the building.

As Jack Lynn had explained it:

"In our zeal to erase the evils arising out of lack of proper water supply, sanitation and ventilation, we had torn down streets of houses which despite their sanitary shortcoming harboured a social structure of friendliness and mutual aid. We had thrown the baby out with the bath water."

This social experiment called Park Hill was surprisingly quite successful, housing a working class community based on the steel industry of Sheffield, but in the 80s it has become kind of a slams, and the main questions are why? And what it has to do with the architectural design?

The first cause for the demise of Park Hill was the change of population, instead of the homogeneous working class population it has become a sink area housing all sort of welfare supported residents, which teaches us that basically Park hill did a good job maintaining community structure where a community already existed, but when it came adding new components into such a community it was a unsuccessful.

The second cause was the end of the british public housing policy under the Thatcher regime. As a big building it required much maintenance, and when it become a lower priority it quickly become neglect and as a result house for a flourishing criminal scene.

These two causes help surfacing the problems of both Park Hill and the mega-structures idea in general: they still treated all architectural creations as building, they had a main purpose and things were added into it. Park Hill had no streets; it had long corridors 2.7m high where you entered your apartment from. It could never have been part of the city's structure because it was still just a big housing project, and not much more.

The main lesson from Park Hill seems to be that in order to maintain large structures of urban qualities they must not be conceived as a single structural body, when maintenance becomes the thing which keeps such structures alive they are destined to die.

Although Park Hill is not a real mega-structure it is successful in showing the main weakness of the idea – the concept of one structure which embodies all functions. When a large system can't adapt to a changing circumstances it can never survive by its own, and urban structures can not be artificially kept alive.

In order to create large urban structures we must make them able to be divided into sub sections, enabling changes and adaptations in time.

 

MultiStructures – Imagining a system based design

I'm already out of foolproof ideas
So don't ask me how to get started
It's all uncharted

(Sara Bareilles, Uncharted)

One of the most prominent aspects of modernity is the habits of cataloging everything around us; the western society is compulsively busy with defining things and trying to find patterns in everything.

Architects in particular are very keen on that. In every architectural project first comes the scheme that organizes everything, than we define the areas and the parts the project consists of, and after that the design process of the building begins (unless of course you are Frank Gehry).

This process is the cause for the annoying habit of architects to create complete structures, as if after they were first defined, things can't ever change, evolve or grow. There is a minimal degree of freedom in architectural design and for a good reason – buildings are very expensive, so you better make sure they won't collapse, or worst, have unused spaces. So although dynamic evolving buildings might capture our imagination we probably won't be seeing such buildings in the near future.

This leaves us with the problem of adapting structures, and how to create architectural structures which will be able evolve and fit the changes in uses and demands.

When we deal with single buildings is not a problem, we can break some walls, add supporting columns, and than we can add about everything to our building, but this type of operating method is very scale dependent, you can't expand skyscrapers, clusters of buildings or larger urban structure, it's simply not very much cost effective both financial and social.

Since not every one can have the luck that the late Baron Haussmann had and get an employer like Napoleon who had allowed him to demolish and rebuild Paris, we need to find a little less intrusive way of changing the urban structure.

One of the first solutions for the problem of evolving urban systems was the idea of mega-structures, which was quite popular in the 60s and 70 (surprisingly, mainly in Japan and Britain).

The idea of the mega-structures, besides creating gigantic buildings, was to create a framework for a system than can change over time, or as Kenzo Tange has described it: "a mass-human scale form which includes a Mega-form, and discrete, rapidly changing functional units which fit within the larger frame work".

Reyner Benaham had better described it, as part of his four-part definition of mega-structures, as a structural framework into which smaller structural units (for example, rooms, houses or small buildings of other sorts) can be built – or even 'plugged in' or 'clipped on' after having been prefabricated elsewhere.

The reason that this notion had failed was its main feature, which is common to both definitions, and that is the existence of a framework: a basic structure where inside it everything happens. This idea which fitted quite well to the than popular idea of industrialized building had failed to recognize the fact that mega-structures are very space consuming entities, and in order to create this so called flexible environment you need to virtually create a space for all options, and this is both expensive and not well defined which is a bit problematic when you try to design an urban system. The existence of a large frame work is not enough to define a system, the components need to have a connection which more than physical.

So in order to create flexible urban structures we need to take the opposite approach compared to mega-structures, we need to define a system that is simple, undemanding and that can be easily changed and adapted to its environment.

We look for a system that can evolve in several possible scenarios and not only in one predetermined path and will as much as possible be able to join existing urban patterns and urban tissues.

In order to do that we need to think outside the box, or as urban structures are concerned, think outside the square.

We tend to think of urban structures as well defined and closed systems, when in fact they are well defined in only part of our reference field - only in two dimensions, when we add the third dimension things get a little less coherent, and more development options becomes available.

In that new field of opportunities we can try and implement the ideas behind the mega-structures theory, but in reverse. We can create a system without any defined physical attributes that will evolve in time to create a large urban structure.

The ability to use the third dimension enables us to create new connections between masses and define a new urban system without drastically changing the built environment.

We are not dealing with a mega structure but with a multitude of small structures that like a swarm are joined together to create a larger system. The idea is to create few points – as much as necessary and applicable, connect them together to a coherent system and in time adding more components to the system, while maintaining its urban and physical qualities. When our urban system is defined by the connections between its elements we can simply change the structure by connecting new elements to it, whether new or existing ones.

This multi-structure is a dynamic system, as it grows both in size and in intensity and density. It is not defined by a final closed shape but by guidelines that enables it to act as a system. The framework of the multi-structure is not a physical one but conceptual one, and its components are bound by certain evolutionary rules instead of by physical development limitations.

Suburbs in the sky – On urban density and what it really means

Even when the evenings aren’t so shitty
I can’t see any stars because I’m too close to the city

(The Lucksmiths, I Prefer The Twentieth Century)

Density is an urban fact, city centers all over the world are becoming more and more dens by the day, an while the reasons for that process are unimportant, what is important is that this trend is not going to end in the foreseeable future or even to slow down.

Density is not only the byproduct of the need to squeeze many people into a limited space but rather of the need to efficiently provide services to an ever increasing number of people. The equation is quite simple – less people per area means more money is spent on infrastructure, big cultural or commercial centers have smaller potential users base and in general any urban tissue become less intense and less varied.

Urban tissues are creatures which live of people – the more they get the more they thrive. People are like the red blood cells of the city, the more there are and the bigger their flow, the more vigorous the city is. In general we can assume that the more people and function we can get into a certain space (up to a point of course) the better it will perform, or in other words – the higher the density the better.

The problem with density starts when the need to express it in a physical form arises, or in other words, the need to squeeze al these people into buildings. The traditional method is to simply stack them one on top of the other as high as we can, which at the current status of technological advancement is getting pretty high.

This situation leads to what Rem Koolhaas calls the theory of bigness, which points out that at a certain point the urban fabric simply starts crumbling into buildings, when every building becomes an independent entity without any context or connection to it's surrounding, when the city becomes a collection of artifacts instead if a coherent unit and the main mean of transportation is the elevator.

This theory is based on the fact that as the technology is advancing and the buildings grow taller and larger they become more important than the city. This fact although documents a fast materializing situation is far from being ideal or desired.

Instead of calling for the formation of the theory of bigness Koolhaas should have called for an inquiry for the causes of bigness, for the reasons that makes us buy the air above neighboring buildings just to ensure view from our building or at least a minimal space, an inquiry of how density ha turned into crowding, of how buildings have become small scale suburbs detached from the city.

When a building is 30 floors tall and in the best case scenario the first two floors are designated for commercial uses you can hardly claim that everyone who lives in such a building is living in the city, they are merely living inside the city but they are hardly a part of it.

It's no accident that Rem Koolhaas doesn't mention density. It's because bigness is not a result of density, bigness is a result of technology and of outdated conceptions, when we get a certain area of land and to live our mark upon the earth.

Remember, urban density is not about filling as much space as we can with built mass, urban density is about services and connections, about infrastructures and life quality.

When you stack apartments or offices one upon of another you're simply pushing them away from the city, disconnecting them from the urban fabric in every possible way. This zoning technique simply creates vertical suburbs with no gardens but with porches and the people who live there drive the elevator to work every day.

In order to avoid the problem of bigness we should stop thinking of building as byproducts of the street and instead treat them as equal variables in the city.

This is the place where urban density comes into play. The best way to connect many functions together is in a three dimensional way, when we arrange objects in space we can make many objects much closer to each other than when we arrange them in two dimensions.

If we can define the network of functions in the urban tissue, and optimize their spatial arrangement than we can apply this network in the three dimensional space and use building to host it. The result of that is not a building which host clear and defined functions but rather a collection of units which may or may not be a part of one mass.

When we remember that buildings are simply a tool used to arrange the city we can abandon the misconception that buildings have any real meaning and stop treating them as the end point of every architectural design.

Our urban building block doesn't necessarily have to grow out of the ground, they can as well grow out of other buildings, or if needed even in the air, Their origin and location is secondary to their connections.

The transformation of the connections network from the two dimensional grid of the streets to the three dimensional grid of the buildings gives us the chance to create diverse and stimulating urban density without having to encounter the problem of bigness, to expend the urban fabric to another dimension without losing any of it's basic attributes.

When we will stop planning suburbs in the sky we will be able to start designing high density urban structures.

The city is not a tree - it's a graph

Where I grew up there weren't many trees
Where there was we'd tear them down
And use them on our enemies
They say that what you mock
Will surely overtake you

And you become a monster
So the monster will not break you

(U2, Peace on Earth)

The way we organize the world around us is a major concern when designing architectural products, whether it might be a house or an apartment, a building, a street or even larger urban components.

Easy to use architectural products are ones that fit with the way we perceive the world, ones that can be seamlessly added to our mental system of connections. The problem is that this pattern of connections is quite hard to define. It's rarely linear and it has a hierarchy, but there aren't any clear rules other than that. So how do we construct our environment? How do we connect the different parts into a comprehensible system?
When we design small scale architectural products we tend to do it intuitively, the connections are few and all the details are comprehensible, but how do we design lager architectural products? how do we design an urban tissue? a city?

Christopher Alexander had used, in his 1965 article "the city is not a tree", the mathematical structure of a tree to demonstrate the problems with the zoning based modernist concepts of a city as structure that originates from a certain point and expands in a clear direction.

Instead Christopher Alexander had chosen the mathematical structure of a semi lattice to describe the city, a fact that seems to indicate that he hadn't read enough in his discrete math book, which seems right enough as he was busy fighting modernism.

Although Alexander was quite right to point out that what defines cities is the overlapping of zones, the mixture of systems, where the natural conjunction and density creates a multi centered city, he seemed to have missed the fact that the city is not composed of zones, as modern architecture wants us to believe.

The city is composed of urban functions which are combined together to create an interesting environment, rich with multi sensory stimulations. The city is not a reserved old man; it's more like a hyperactive child – an ever surprising and creative creature that can never fit into any traditional system.

A city can't and shouldn't be tamed into strict patterns but rather follow predetermined guidelines. In order to do that we need a much more flexible structure which we can build our cities around, the skeleton of the city to which urban tissues will be attached.

Such a structure needs to have two main attributes: the ability to express hierarchy and the ability to define connections in a non linear fashion. These two attributes are the basis for the creation of intricate systems that are seemingly complex and yet can be separated into clear sub-systems.

The ability to define for each component it's hierarchy level and to which elements it is connected enables us to create a system that can grow to be complex and yet clearly defined and easy to understand.

The structure which provides us with both complexity and hierarchy is the mathematical graph. I'll skip the technical detail (what is wikipedia for?) and just do with the basic definition that graph is a data structure which is composed of two types of components: nodes and edges, when each two nodes are connected by an edge.

Each node can be assigned a value, which can be used to place node along the hierarchy scale, and when we connect all the nodes together we can get a spatial skeleton of our system.

Further more, when considered in an urban context the system gets more meanings. For example, a node with many edges connected to it has relatively more intensity. Some features of the system are byproducts of other attributes and it is almost impossible to control them as the system grows, much like in real life cities.

The question is what exactly the nodes represent? it's clear that each one is an urban function but that hardly a value, and barely constructs any kind of hierarchy.

In order to find out the units of the values, we must first define the scale of the hierarchy, what is at the top of the scale and what is in the bottom? Does a shopping center is ranked higher than a public park and where it stands in relation to housing or offices?

I suggest a definition of what can be called an urban mass, a term which represents the relative effect an area has on the urban fabric. The unit would consist of a combination between density (and how the measure that is another topic) and land area, or more correctly volume. Such a scale that recognizes the fact the large low density areas has an effect on a city as much as high density areas. Take for example the Central Park in Manhattan and Time Square, both of New York's landmarks with completely different nature.

When the urban mass of a function and its intensity (the number of edges) are combined we are able to define urban centers and the relations between them, and combine them into a complex yet coherent system, which is the basis of designing urban tissues.

Abstract – How we deal with density and how we can do it better

One of the earliest human behavioral patterns is the way we design and build our cities. The clear template of two dimensional streets which wraps urban functions is with us since the dawn of history. Even though that in the course of history the building blocks which the city is composed of have become much more diverse and the way we design and build them have changed significantly, the way we organize them in space remained almost unchanged.

The main paradigm which dictated the way we think about urban design was two dimensionality – the drawing of streets which encapsulate colored stains that represent different land uses, like nothing had changed since the days of the Roman Empire.

In fact thinking in two dimensions is so rooted in urban design (and in architectural design in general)' that even if a design is not a straight forward two dimensional, it is almost always a superposition of several two dimensional designs which keeps on existing individually. The technological advancement only affects the height for which we can extrude those colored stains drawn on urban plans, but the way these stains are organized was accepted as an axiom which defines that the biggest architectural component is the building – which stands as a clear antithesis to the street.

The reality of increasing density in the centers of the cities has virtually transformed any urban design plan to a variation of the modernist zoning concept, when the created building are like islands in the urban space. The land uses plan, no matter how sensitive and complex it might be still focuses on it literal meaning of how to use the land level and its immediate periphery, employing minimal reference to the vertical dimension.

There for even if in street level we get a mixed use design above it we get the same paradigm that the new urbanism is trying to contradict, when the street is experienced mainly by the random user rather than by the people which regularly work and live in it. As the building gets taller it gets more detached from what is happening on the street level and the urban design is losing its meaning.

The solution for this problem might be a fundamental three dimensional design. By defining the street as the largest building block opposed to the single building, while "pulling" the street upwards and organizing the built mass around a street all the way up, and designing it on a volume based method transforming the traditional concept of land uses to a more three dimensional concept of Space Uses.

The three dimensional reference to space uses allows us to create a more interesting environment containing much more uses, such an environment which allows the creation of many connections between the urban function enveloping the "street", enabling us to receive large amount of information without overloading our senses.

A system which emphasis the connections between different parts might be the basis to an organic like structure which is able to expand and evolve by connecting to specific functions. Just as grass shoots (or strawberries if you prefer) expand by sending extensions so does a system can expand by creating new masses and connecting them to existing ones.

Such an expansion method enables the creation of a reach environment which has minimal footprint, touching the ground level on select points and growing in space. In fact due to the nature of such system it is possible to use it as extension to existing urban tissues that can no longer follow their original design by creating new intensive urban focal points while maintaining high quality of life to their users.

The ability to pinpoint the exact location of the system's entry points/connections can produce a surgical treatment to urban tissues planting the seeds of a three dimensional structure and allowing it to grow in order to match its needs.