Prefabrication experiments - 433 - XL(slabs) - Streets in the Sky

 

Known for their important contribution to Team 10, an architectural collective formed from the Congrès Intérnationaux de l'architecture moderne's (CIAM) dissolution, Alison and Peter Smithson’s theories and projects were a fundamental part of nascent postwar brutalist visions and pedagogy in the UK and abroad. Mat-building previously discussed in blog article 282 envisioned urban form that rejected buildings as singular objects, exploring instead a symbiotic spatial relationship between urban geometry and building topologies. 

 

The couple married in 1949 and founded their own firm in 1950.  Their radical visions for integrating public spaces in collective housing led to imagining access walkways as «streets in the sky» redefining the slab type. The iconic Robin Hood Gardens, a social housing complex in East London, demonstrated the use of exterior access corridors at different levels large enough to support both personal and social spaces. Their design deconstructed the classic slab by placing these common voids within the structure's volume. A proposal, Terrace Housing City, took this one step further by arranging an oblique slab cross-section as a series of vertical volumetric setbacks from floor to floor flooding each floor plate's exterior skywalks with sunlight. The Streets in the sky imagery influenced many social housing proposals aiming to attribute streetscapes' spatial richness refuting the boring interior corridors synonymous with the slab. 

 

The construction of floating social spaces including roof terraces had already been proposed by modern architects, proficiently by Le Corbusier. Aerial passageways leading to flats became a symbolic component of these modernist visions and were applied most notably at Habitat 67 designed by Moshe Safdie.  Contemporary architects also reframed and refreshed the same objective of social interaction in a dense block: French architect, Jean Nouvel, designed a ship like cross-section at Nemausus in Nîmes, France, with large promenade decks. Multiple meters wide, the catwalks leading to access and exit stairwells were planned as a way of rationalizing costs by externalizing costly elements usually built within the slab. Their removal allowed for them to be built with lighter construction systems and materials redirecting these potential economies to offer larger housing units.

Sections though aerial walkways