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.