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.