Designing Buildings - User contributions [en]

Public space

2012-12-02T20:07:32Z

Neal.whitaker: Created page with " Exhaustive coverage of the main strands of the debate on public space would be impossible in such a short essay, so I have focused fairly narrowly on the contention that succes..."

Exhaustive coverage of the main strands of the debate on public space would be impossible in such a short essay, so I have focused fairly narrowly on the contention that successful spaces are generally part of a broader urban fabric that is rendered intelligible and coherent by the way its ‘nodes’ are linked to one another. Florence, Rome and Glasgow will be my main case studies.

Before commencing the analysis, it will be worthwhile to establish a working definition of public space, which, following Cousseran’s definition[[#_ftn1|[1]]] can be considered a component of urban space along with inscribed space and service space. He says that ‘public space is a particular kind of social space created specifically for the bringing together of people, and where locals and strangers, the familiar and the unusual, can mingle freely.’ How, then, do such spaces come about? Florence, a city noted for its particularly outstanding public spaces, and one with two millennia of historical layering, shows us how they are often the product of both historical accretions and powerful bursts of civic planning.

‘Generally speaking’, Bosch says, ‘the medieval city [of Florence] was functionally inadequate, aesthetically ill-considered, and lacking in unifying qualities’. At the beginning of the Renaissance, the city had no established political order, with ecclesiastic authorities, local feudal lords, invading feudal powers and the Holy Roman Empire, as well as craft guilds and an increasingly powerful banking sector all aspiring to power. These rivals had funded the construction of significant buildings, which were swallowed up by the dense medieval grain of the city. Powerful families inhabited compounds, built with no regard for the public realm, with towers like those of San Gimignano competing for visual dominance. The church, the state, and families like the Medici, however, transformed the city over the next 200 years, ‘slowly producing the greatness of its various spaces out of medieval mediocrity’. The interesting thing about this process is that although it resulted in what are perceived as great public spaces, the interests of the public were not part of the thinking of the patrons, whose aim was to establish spaces around the major points of interest, the nodes of church and palace, from which to view them, and streets to connect them.

In Florence, as in other Italian Renaissance examples, often ‘the single most important driving force… was the power and ideals of one man who was able to push for order in his particular city. Such men did this as a means of assuring a physical structure that would bring the city even greater influence and growth, to their benefit, and as and expression of what they personally owed the city for their power.’[[#_ftn2|[2]]] The Uffizi for example, which today feels like an inherent component of the composition of the Piazza Signorina, was commissioned by the Medici, whilst the town hall, was an expression of the rival interests of the ‘republican commune’.

The lesson of Florence is, perhaps, that competing interests recognized that their own glory could be best asserted by accommodating the imprint of others’ desire for the same end, rather than by attempting to eliminate it. This allows an accretion of contextual responses to accumulate over time. Significant participants in the shaping of the city have directed their resources towards the making of space rather than object buildings, seemingly embracing the fact that their investments thereby became the ‘property’ of the public at large. This attitude differs almost completely from the predominant contemporary paradigm, in which investment in ‘object’ buildings leaves incoherent overall urban fabric, and begins to suggest the importance of investing in space rather than just buildings.

We can perhaps better understand why the spaces resulting from the processes described above feel so satisfying to be in, if we move from considering the reasons for their evolution to an assessment of their characteristics. Rowe and Koettler, in Collage City, offer a useful starting point, characterizing ‘the debate which is here postulated between solid and void [as] a debate between two models and, succinctly, these may be typified as acropolis and forum.’ They are attempting to distill the essence of the difference between what they call the ‘traditional’ city and the ‘modern’ city, and their analysis is crucial in understanding the spatial characteristics of what is often thought of as ‘good’ public space. What they call the ‘acropolis’ model of urban fabric denotes a modernist emphasis on individual buildings surrounded by open space which, according to Cousseran has ‘unfortunately become synonymous with empty space. The ‘forum’ is not a void with objects placed in it, but a solid with spaces carved into it. Florence follows this pattern, with its dense grain opened out around significant buildings, following the compression of its streets with the release of well- defined spaces – the result of orderly rationalization of dense earlier development.

A similar process took place in Rome somewhat later, as Pope Sixtus V set about applying an urban design strategy in 1585 that would impose order on what was at the time a chaotic medieval city, albeit one containing remains of imperial grandeur. Watson and Bentley, in the concluding passages of ‘Identity by Design’, say that '''‘'''a leitmotif of all our case studies has been the manifold advantages, in place-identity terms, of forming public space into highly connected networks, rather than designing a system of relatively isolated enclave spaces.’ This passage could have been written to describe Sixtus’ plans for Rome, which involved the carving of routes through fabric to connect significant points and, often, to create points for pause – public spaces – around them. He built very few buildings in his lifetime, but the order he established has acted as a template and inspiration ever since – evidence that designing spaces rather than forms is the proper basis for creating harmonious urban environments.

The dramatic tension in the city is set up by the relationships between significant nodes, each of which has a different character. Bacon[[#_ftn3|[3]]] describes the development of the Piazza del Popolo as ‘[demonstrating] more clearly than any other single work in Rome the power of an idea as an organizing force over time.’ Prior to the redesign of Popolo and its connecting axes to the rest of the city, the area was ‘squalid and confused’, with an arbitrarily shaped open space sitting beneath a mud banking on its eastern edge, which sloped up to open fields on the hill above. Although the piazza terminated three important axial streets leading into the heart of the city, and was itself a space of civic proportion at a gateway to the city, it failed to capitalize on these inherited attributes, having never, effectively, been designed, but simply allowed to exist.

Two great interventions, 130 years apart, turned this mess into one of the great anchor points of the Rome we see today. Rainaldi, between 1660 and 1679 built two churches, ‘whose entire justification is the role they play in the larger structure of the design. The buildings are neither totally of the square nor totally of the street, yet they link both and are related to both as well as to the obelisk of Sixtus V.’[[#_ftn4|[4]]] Valadier, in 1813, then regularized the design of the piazza with exedras on either side of the churches, ‘repeating the basic form of Santa Maria del Popolo on the opposite side of the Porta Del Popolo.’ To the east, Valadier ‘designed a great stairway, ramp, and cascade descending from the Pincio Gardens, which had the effect of binding this open space into the structure of the piazza.’ ‘The harmony and unity of the total work’, Bacon concludes ‘are the more remarkable in that its parts were created in such widely spaced periods of time, each having its own mode of architectural expression.’

I can only concur with Bacon’s appraisal of the space as it is today. It is majestic, with a grace whose apparent effortlessness belies its gestation of centuries. It succeeds in making features around it which actually developed independently feel like part of a great composition: the gardens which were laid out atop what was once the mud banking feel like an essential complement to the piazza, without which it would lack completeness. The piazza itself terminates and contains the marvels of the city – aided by the river on the west and the hillside to the east, in a demonstration of another of the principles of public space making: using topography as a strategic ally in delivering harmonious – even beautiful - urban plans. It is worth noting that the Piazza del Popolo, although it is clearly a public space, was not developed into its present form primarily ‘for the bringing together of people, where locals and strangers, the familiar and the unusual, can mingle freely’ – although it certainly facilitates these things. It was intended to capitalize on the vision of Sixtus V, and elevate the level of the city as a complete composition.

These examples, of Florence and Rome, demonstrate the benefits to the quality of public space in a city of considering it in the context of the whole. In neither case was the establishment of what are today considered exemplary public spaces motivated by the desire to ‘bring together people’ and ‘let them mingle freely’ – although in both cases, these effects have resulted. It will be instructive now to examine both of these masterful compositions in relation to Glasgow, for doing so raises some interesting points.

Like the two Italian case studies, Glasgow once had a medieval core. Whilst never comparable in commercial wealth to medieval Florence or possessed of the classical heritage of Rome, Glasgow was an important ecclesiastical centre, and as such its cathedral was at the apex of axial development down towards the river Clyde. When mercantile activity brought wealth to the city in the 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries, mansions were built in what is now the merchant city, and the city’s built fabric became increasingly established, with the grid as we know it today set out in the Victorian period at the height of Glasgow’s commercial prosperity. This grid remains as the figure ground diagram of the city centre. Its crude dislocation from the outer city – by the M8 on the north and west, the way it drifts haphazardly towards the East End beyond High Street and its lack of engagement with the river on the south are not the focus of my attention – I am keen to look at the public spaces inside the grid, and understand how they compare to those of Florence and Rome.

The first point to make is that there is very little historical layering. For the most part, medieval and early mercantile architecture was built over by the Victorians, with a few isolated structures – the Royal Exchange, the Tron – surviving. Buchanan Street feels like the primary axis of the city plan, but terminates at its northern end in a shopping centre and at its south by a ‘public space’, St Enoch’s square, which is simply a left over space from the demolition of the former railway station, and lies outside of the grid. None of the other primary axes feel as though they lead anywhere - Ingram Street for example, is anchored successfully at its western end by Royal Exchange square, but whereas in the examples I have discussed, such a street would terminate in an appropriately civic space at its opposite end, in this case it peters out into nondescript student housing and a car park, again just beyond the edge of the grid.

If we use the idea that public spaces, are defined as much by their relationships with each other as their own spatial characteristics, we can see that they are not successful in this regard. Blythswood Square seems to be little more than a missing block, which has no special relationship with any surrounding streets; George Square is located almost at the eastern extent of the grid’s coherence, and as a piece of urbanism succeeds only in terms of offering the space to view the façade of the City Hall. In short, there is no sense that an overarching vision has ever been in place to apply a hierarchy of spaces to the grid. It has the feel of a city plan which was laid out in a rush to accommodate the quick building demanded by the rapid influx of capital rather than a response to either existing built context or topography, the denial of which is pronounced. In this sense, of an architecture born of a thoroughgoing capitalism, there is some comparison with Florence – but whereas the urban fabric of the latter was the subject of careful surgery and improvement over time, that of Glasgow was laid out on a drawing board, a Victorian equivalent of the modernists ideal tabula rasa – and whilst it accommodates some spectacular architecture, it fails to provide beautiful – or even good – public space.

It is tempting to conclude that this failure is the result of the inherent limitations of a grid plan – its lack of capacity to respond to topography, or particularly significant spaces or buildings. Grahame Shane, in his ‘Field Analysis of Central London’, examines how the Georgian great estates were originally laid out in between tributaries of the Thames, ‘with the grandest houses fronting the square at the heart of the estate[s] to attract the wealthy early buyers and to set the market for the secondary street streets of more modest terraces behind’. Subsequent development has responded to this skeletal masterplanning, which was itself derived from a direct response to existing context. In this, it is fundamentally different from the Glasgow grid’s denial of context, and its refusal to accommodate or acknowledge significant nodes with an interlinked system of public spaces.

I am seeking here to demonstrate the importance of integrated networks of public spaces, rather than the impossibility of laying out successful tabula rasa cityscapes. Brasilia is a good example of urban design as a composition, which accommodates hierarchy and dramatic tension in a completely different paradigm to that described in the Roman and Florentine case studies, which responded to existing built context. As Bacon says in his analysis of the city, ‘the gift of Brasilia is not primarily the form of its structures, or the formal symmetry of its composition, but rather the reformulation of the vision of the city as a totality’. This totality contains a ‘harmonic reverberation between buildings [which] does not depend on one carefully posed photograph; it is ever present and intensifies as one moves around the buildings’. This is a kind of layering, of major and minor spaces and buildings, which the powerful but one dimensional grid layout of Glasgow cannot accommodate.

Poor public space is often discussed in terms of the negative effects of the modern idiom, in which coherent urban fabric is replaced by buildings as objects, which fail to define space and result in a reduction in quality in what Jan Gehl calls ‘life between buildings’. Glasgow does not suffer from these issues – at least in its centre, which with its coherent grain defines very definite ‘inscribed space’ – and yet I have argued its public spaces are lacking, particularly in comparison with the exemplars I have discussed. I have shown that coherence at an urban level is not enough – that good public spaces must be connected in a way that lends meaning and significance to the whole city as a composition, and have hinted that major and minor spaces, which function at the human as well as the civic scale, and constitute an overall environment for people to inhabit are essential prerequisites in elevating urban space above the functional and towards the beautiful.

Bibliography:

- Post-Modern Movement: The Inscribed City, in Urban Design Futures, Alain Cousseran ed Moor, Rowland, Routledge, 2006

- Design of Cities: Bacon, Edmund N., Thames and Hudson, 1975

- Cities for People: Gehl, Jan, Island Press, 2010

- Identity by Design: Watson, Bentley, Elsevier, 2007

- Collage City, Rowe, Koetter, MIT Press, 1978

<div><br/>
----
<div id="ftn1">
[[#_ftnref1|[1]]] Post-Modern Movement: The Inscribed City, in Urban Design Futures, Alain Cousseran ed Moor, Rowland, Routledge, 2006

</div><div id="ftn2">
[[#_ftnref2|[2]]] Ingersoll, Richard, The Advent of the Closed City
</div><div id="ftn3">
[[#_ftnref3|[3]]] Bacon, Edmund N: Design of Cities
</div><div id="ftn4">
[[#_ftnref4|[4]]] These churches can be seen on my photographs and are marked on the map.
</div></div>

[[Category:Roles_/_services]]
[[Category:Student_architect_essay_competition]]

British post-war mass housing

2012-12-02T19:41:28Z

Neal.whitaker: Created page with " In this essay, I will focus primarily on housing constructed during the decade or so after the end of the Second World War as part of the progressive, experimental establishmen..."

In this essay, I will focus primarily on housing constructed during the decade or so after the end of the Second World War as part of the progressive, experimental establishment of the Welfare State in Britain. Although housing was constructed speculatively by private developers on a fairly wide scale with varying degrees of success (Span schemes like New Ash Green in Kent, by Eric Lyons being an obvious and commonly cited success story), it is social housing which is linked most fascinatingly to the evolving socio-economic landscape in Britain, as I shall demonstrate.

Housing provision by the end of the war, particularly in urban centres, was considered inadequate, not only in quantity, but in quality as well. War damage had impacted the quantity of housing stock, but additionally, much ‘obsolete’ housing had been earmarked for demolition since before the war. Nicholas Taylor, writing in the AR in 1967, in a discussion of what he called ‘the failure of housing’ in the postwar period, cites the ‘negative [postwar] reaction to the boom towns of the industrial revolution’ as the reason for this. ‘In particular’, he says, [we] ‘have aimed to prevent epidemic diseases cholera, dysentery, rickets, scurvy, typhoid’, all diseases which were ‘propagated by overcrowding, by bad sanitation, by inadequate facilities for the preparation of food and by the pollution of homes from adjoining factories.’

Clearly, a commitment to addressing these public health issues must be commended – what I will be discussing is whether the attempt to do so through the medium of housing, and specifically social housing, can be considered successful.

It is important to understand at the outset the politically progressive nature of housing policy in the period, embedded as it is in the establishment of the Welfare State, which “is based on the principles of, equality of opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for those unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life.”[[#_ftn1|[1]]] Architecturally, the modernist desire expressed by Le Corbusier to “provide an environment that was spiritually fulfilling, creating harmony between people and their surroundings and freeing communities from the misery of poor housing”[[#_ftn2|[2]]] was perfectly in sync with the prevailing political commitment to decisively break away from unsanitary, overcrowded slums.

I propose to discuss a handful of iconic/ notorious case studies of 50’s and 60’s mass housing, as they excite passionately polarized opinion and act as symbols for the wider debate.

The first is Park Hill in Sheffield, built in 1960, which according to the Architectural Review (in 2011) “marked the peak performance of Sheffield’s city architects office as run by J.K. Lewis Womersley, regarded by [Nikolaus] Pevsner as an outfit of national importance.”[[#_ftn3|[3]]]

This building “proved popular with its residents, who loved their flats and soon formed an effective association. It was also much lauded in architectural circles… Its size and hillside location made it the prime example of ‘streets in the air’ nationally, and for a decade or so it thronged with international visitors.”[[#_ftn4|[4]]]

However, decline set in “as the ideal of equality was eroded [and] social housing became the ghetto of a suppressed underclass, and the more active, capable and employed were encouraged to buy themselves out, leaving the disadvantaged in possession.” This is the key trend not only in this case, but across the country, and my desire is to understand whether this was a reflection on poor architecture, changes in society, or both.

In the case of Park Hill, a recent initiative, privately funded by the developer Urban Splash, to redevelop the building, has provoked fresh debate over its merits. A blog on the Guardian website[[#_ftn5|[5]]] on the subject exemplifies this. One poster expressed typical views (my italics):

“As a "foreigner" from Leeds who has lived in Sheffield for 30 years I can support those who report that the people of Sheffield did not want Park Hill kept, and were '''''mystified by the listing''''' and bemused by the amounts of money, some of it public money, being spent on this '''''eyesore'''''. '''''The bright coloured panels are not an improvement'''''. Anyone in Sheffield with the money to buy one of the penthouses would be '''''much better advised to spend it in one of Sheffield's leafy and affluent suburbs''''', of which we have many, which also often enjoy superb views, as Sheffield is very hilly.”

This poster neatly expresses a popular verdict on dense, large scale urban social housing projects of the period, in which as long ago as 1967, “It [was] easier to count the few unbroken panes of armoured glass on the staircases than the multitude which are cracked and splintered”, and where “economy on materials and inadequacy of detailing can be assessed as objective weaknesses, but what is perhaps more important… is the subjective hatred of the tenants for the '''''rough shuttered concrete''''' that is thrust upon them.”[[#_ftn6|[6]]]

Descriptions of inhumane proportions, ‘undefined wastes’, and, above all, “women return[ing] from the shops to be blown about amid the appalling dinginess of '''''rough shuttered concrete'''''”[[#_ftn7|[7]]] (my italics) crop up again and again in discussing schemes like Park Hill, Robin Hood Gardens, Red Road etc. The poster’s views on the preferability of “leafy and affluent suburbs” to dense urban apartment typology for “those who can afford it” also reflect a lingering psychological scar in the popular psyche left by the memory of the descent of estates like Park Hill “from source[s] of intense municipal socialist pride to dilapidated sink estate[s]”[[#_ftn8|[8]]], as though by their very nature they preclude the presence of a functional, prosperous community. Is this the case? If it is, how could “surveys at Park Hill show that through the 1970’s residents remained consistently loyal and generally happy.”[[#_ftn9|[9]]] What caused the slide of schemes like Park Hill into dysfunctionality?

The homebuilding drive, founded on the vision of spiritually uplifting accommodation for all, continued – but “…the vision was damaged by lack of reform in the 1960s. Rather than opening up [the] low cost-balanced rented sector to supply the needs of a more wealthy and mobile population, it narrowed to serve the restricted needs of welfare housing.”[[#_ftn10|[10]]] This was a key error, and precipitated a vicious circle of decline.

The 60’s was a period of economic optimism, in which comparative affluence was accessible to many more families than previously. An aspirational desire among those in social housing developed to graduate to home ownership. “Very large council estates, tower blocks in the cities and restrictive letting policies contrasted with the variety of choices available for home ownership. From the 1960’s, the welfare characteristic (residualisation) of council housing began to develop as a stigma from which home ownership was the natural escape.”[[#_ftn11|[11]]]

The original dream of social housing as “a living tapestry of a mixed community”[[#_ftn12|[12]]] was replaced instead by welfare housing, which established a low cost rented stock but created deep social problems and lost the affections of the electorate. A different political vision could have avoided this. Pre-war restrictions, limiting public housing to the working classes had been repealed in the 1949 Housing Act, opening up a universally accessible rented council house sector. If public housing had remained just that, rather than seguing into welfare housing, the vicious circle of decline would have lacked the conditions to come into being. The ‘living tapestry of a mixed community’ could have remained.

With Park Hill and its cousins populated as a matter of new policy increasingly by those on welfare, however, “‘financial structures of dependency’ [were] deliberately imposed on social housing”[[#_ftn13|[13]]]. An alienated quality grew as residents of the schemes became increasingly cast adrift from mainstream society.

A further strand to this narrative was playing out in the form of a shift in the structure of the economy in Britain. “Sheffield grew up producing steel, in the 18<sup>th</sup> century knives and tools, in the 19<sup>th</sup> century heavy industry, with a high population of low paid but skilled manual workers.” As the 1970’s drew to an end and Thatcher came to power, the shift in policy away from provision of affordable social housing accelerated against a backdrop of an increasingly deindustrialized economy. The original inhabitants of the Park Hill and schemes like it, who had once been a proud working class, increasingly found themselves unemployed and without prospects of employment. It is certainly arguable that problems in residualized estates in decline, like Park Hill would have been exacerbated by the scale of social problems developing independently of housing policy.

In the public imagination, then, the built fabric of the postwar years has not only become synonymous with social failure and breakdown, it is perceived as a cause of it. ‘Failed’ buildings are pulled down, and it is easy to speculate that they are being made scapegoats for wider problems. Can an architectural defense be mounted for schemes like Park Hill, or Robin Hood Gardens?

The latter is similar to the former - a serpentine, high density block, this time inserted into an area of bomb damaged terraces (the standard grain of working class England) in London. “What the Smithsons [architects] wanted to achieve was intended to maintain community dynamics [of the bombed out terraces] rather than to replace them with something entirely different. However, what they had not expected, as Kenneth Frampton pointed out in his book Modern Architecture, a Critical History, was that three principal features of the by-law street would be absent in their proposed blocks: first, the dynamics associated with dwellings on both sides of a street, secondly, the community life associated with the street at ground level, and thirdly, the backyard, which played a crucial role in by-law housing and the life of its communities.” [[#_ftn14|[14]]]

Robin Hood Gardens, then, contained inherently flawed logic. But the flaws were shared by Park Hill, which prospered during a period when it wasn’t handicapped by other factors. “[Park Hill] is commonly described as the ‘largest listed building in Europe’ and the largest listed [http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog/2008/jun/26/dontknockbrutalism brutalist] or 60’s building. In fact”, says Owen Hatherley, “it's none of those things, with all those titles being taken by London's [http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Barbican+estate&hl=en&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=kg6DTpWVFqKk0QW4qZ3aAQ&ved=0CFkQsAQ&biw=1476&bih=1001 Barbican estate]: a place that, like Park Hill, is full of bare concrete, open space, urban density, walkways, social and the separation of pedestrian and car. One is a problem that apparently had to be solved; the other one of London's most prestigious addresses. Why? The obvious reason is that one is council housing and the other, from the very start, was built as private housing. Accordingly, the Barbican has always been cleaned and cared for; Park Hill has been left to rot.”[[#_ftn15|[15]]]

Physically, the Barbican is a close relative of a Park Hill, or a Robin Hood Gardens. Socially, though it bears more resemblance to Park Lane. This constitutes evidence against the argument that the decline into dysfunction of large, dense postwar urban social housing developments was an inevitable consequence of poor design.

Further support from this position comes from a comparison between Park Hill and many of today’s ‘luxury’ apartment developments. Park Hill was accused of being disconnected from the surrounding fabric, isolating its inhabitants from the life of the city at large – but what of the urban regeneration of the last few years in the light of the financial crisis? What do the speculative redevelopments of inner cities look like now? “They have become the new ruins of Great Britain. These places have ruination in abundance: partly because of the way they were invariably surrounded by the derelict and un-regenerated, whether rotting industrial remnants or the giant retail and entertainment sheds of the 80s and 90s; partly because they were often so badly built, with pieces of render and wood frequently flaking off within less than a year of completion; but partly because they were so often empty, in every sense. Empty of architectural inspiration, empty of social hope or idealism, and often empty of people, Clarence Dock and Glasgow Harbour had a hard time filling their minimalist microflats with either buyers or buy-to-let investors.”[[#_ftn16|[16]]]

We can begin to see that although marketed and branded differently, contemporary developer led, aspirational urban regeneration, may in fact suffer from similar or worse problems relating to its context as the maligned social schemes of the postwar period. Think of Glasgow Harbour, stranded by the Clyde and cut off from the city by the Clydeside Expressway. Worse, analysis of the flats themselves reveals a shocking inferiority in terms of space standards in contemporary developments compared to the 60’s schemes.

“The logic was straightforward” says the Architectural Review in its analysis of Park Hill’s original planning principles: “a slab block up to 13 stories high and about 10m wide would permit a habitable room each side and centrally serviced bathrooms, while gallery access was preferred to a double loaded corridor. By making maisonettes with internal staircases it was possible for one gallery to serve 3 floors. Greatest design ingenuity went into planning interlocking flats of different sizes, making best use of the limited space…. [space standards] now seem generous, in relation to the products of mass house builders”[[#_ftn17|[17]]]. This, they note, is “still valid logic” if you accept the inevitability of flats for high densities in urban situations, as exist in cities worldwide.

Even much admired contemporary schemes, like the Panter Hudspith development at Bear Lane in London, feature double loaded internal deck access, permitting only single aspect flats, with cramped accommodation – yet their skin is considered attractive, and they are praised, despite inferior circulation and planning principles.

Before concluding, I wish to note that whilst I have tried to demonstrate that it is impossible to blame the general failure of British postwar social housing on its architecture, there is still a world of difference in quality between the Red Road scheme, for example, and a Lasdun or Lubetkin scheme. Lasdun, even within tight budgetary constraints and a density target set by the local council of 200 people per square acre, managed to apply intelligence and subtlety to his designs for Keeling House, Bethnal Green in 1958 for example: “the scale of the 14 floors was purposely designed to reflect the two storey brick terraces around it, essentially like a row of houses tipped up on its end.”[[#_ftn18|[18]]] This is architecture as we are taught it – thoughtful, embedded in context. We should remember as well that Park Hill is no simple monolith inserted carelessly into Sheffield. Its very form is a response to specific topography, with its well - known horizontal roof datum capping a 13 storey structure at the bottom of the hill and nuzzling into a street of Victorian villas at four storeys at the top.

In conclusion, there is never an excuse for bad design – although the fact that mass social housing in Britain ultimately failed is, in the end, not due to design at all, but to policy.
<div><br/>
----
<div id="ftn1">
[[#_ftnref1|[1]]] Britannica Online Encyclopedia
</div><div id="ftn2">
[[#_ftnref2|[2]]] Architectural Review p114
</div><div id="ftn3">
[[#_ftnref3|[3]]] Architectural Review, October 2011, referencing Pevsner, Nikolaus, Yorkshire West Riding (buildings of England), Penguin, Lonfon, 1967 pp446-449
</div><div id="ftn4">
[[#_ftnref4|[4]]] AR pp94
</div><div id="ftn5">
[[#_ftnref5|[5]]] [http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/aug/21/park-hill-sheffield-renovation http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/aug/21/park-hill-sheffield-renovation]
</div><div id="ftn6">
[[#_ftnref6|[6]]] Taylor, Nicholas, writing in the Architectural Review, October 1967
</div><div id="ftn7">
[[#_ftnref7|[7]]] AR Nov 1967: review of Hutchesontown-Gorbals, Sir Basil Spence, Glover and Ferguson, 1961-1965
</div><div id="ftn8">
[[#_ftnref8|[8]]] Hatherley, Owen: A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain
</div><div id="ftn9">
[[#_ftnref9|[9]]] Steve Parnell, Building Design, September 9<sup>th</sup>, 2011
</div><div id="ftn10">
[[#_ftnref10|[10]]] [http://thereadyfamily.com/housing/Visions_2.htm http://thereadyfamily.com/housing/Visions_2.htm]
</div><div id="ftn11">
[[#_ftnref11|[11]]] http://thereadyfamily.com/housing/Archive/PostWar.htm
</div><div id="ftn12">
[[#_ftnref12|[12]]] Aneuren Bevan, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, 1959-60
</div><div id="ftn13">
[[#_ftnref13|[13]]] http://thereadyfamily.com/housing/Archive/PostWar.htm
</div><div id="ftn14">
[[#_ftnref14|[14]]] Clement, Alexander: Postwar British Architecture: Brutalism. Ch6 Social and Private Housing
</div><div id="ftn15">
[[#_ftnref15|[15]]]Hatherley, Owen: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/28/sheffield-park-hill-class-cleansing http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/28/sheffield-park-hill-class-cleansing]

</div><div id="ftn16">
[[#_ftnref16|[16]]] Owen Hatherley, The New Ruins of Great Britain
</div><div id="ftn17">
[[#_ftnref17|[17]]] Architectural Review, 2011, pp86
</div><div id="ftn18">
[[#_ftnref18|[18]]] Clement, Alexander: Postwar British Architecture: Brutalism. Ch6 Social and Private Housing
</div></div>

[[Category:Project_types]]
[[Category:Public_procedures]]
[[Category:Property_development]]
[[Category:Cost_/_business_planning]]
[[Category:Student_architect_essay_competition]]