Deck-access housing has unfairly turn out to be a logo for city squalor within the UK, however a brand new wave of architects is demonstrating its deserves, writes Rory Olcayto.
As Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius convincingly argue in Tower Block, their 1994 ebook on post-war housing, there “has in all probability by no means been one other function in UK public housing which has been so broadly criticised” as deck entry to blocks of flats. Typically known as “streets within the sky”, decks had been a standard technique of separating pedestrians and vehicles in Nineteen Sixties social housing tasks however quickly got here to be seen as spirit-sapping hotbeds for anti-social behaviour. Some had been even demolished inside years of completion.
This negativity is so ingrained that anybody accustomed to British crime dramas, from Luther to Line of Responsibility, will know that deck-access housing has turn out to be a shorthand for city dystopia. Channel 4 even filmed a brutalist model of its brand floating in a run-down walkway on the Aylesbury Property, with seemingly no regard for the residents nonetheless dwelling within the modernist neighbourhood.
Deck-access housing has turn out to be a shorthand for city dystopia
The British structure occupation, regardless of pioneering the deck-access block greater than every other bar the Dutch, might be simply as cruelly dismissive. Former RIBA president Lancelot Keay, a social housing pioneer in Nineteen Thirties Liverpool, known as it housing “for soiled individuals”. To today, insurers and mortgage lenders regard deck-access properties with warning and planners advise in opposition to them.
But a number of the most interesting modernist housing within the UK, from Park Hill to Dawson Heights, is deck entry, as are many extra workaday schemes housing lots of of 1000’s of people that use elevated walkways to get to and from their entrance doorways day-after-day with out incident – and even fairly get pleasure from doing so. This isn’t a narrative, nonetheless, that lends itself to nuance.
Alternatives to design deck-access public housing had been killed off within the Eighties after a lot of high-profile structural failures within the prefab design of such estates, in addition to Alice Coleman’s skewed 1985 report Utopia on Trial – mentioned at size in a latest piece from Anna Minton – which linked them to social unrest.
So why, after a 30-year hiatus, is the typology – the once-ubiquitous answer for mid-rise mass housing in England – having fun with a comeback, with the likes of Haworth Tompkins, Apparata and RCKa main the drive?
That’s the query we’ve got sought to reply in The Deck Entry Housing Design Information. Co-authored by Andrew Beharrell and with a foreword by Owen Hatherley (a proud deck-access dweller himself), the ebook features a historical past of this evolving housing sort, latest British and European case research, and sensible steerage produced by Pollard Thomas Edwards’ data hub.
The brief reply is that the revival was kickstarted, considerably surprisingly, by former mayor Boris Johnson’s 2009 draft of the London Housing Design Information. It harassed a choice for dual-aspect properties and cited deck entry as a viable technique of reaching this, linking the suggestion to a name for an acceptable vernacular.
A lot of the architects we function had been too younger to have practised within the “peak deck” period
A lot of the architects we function – Stirling Prize-winners Haworth Tompkins, Maccreanor Lavington and AHMM, finalists Mae, HawkinsBrown and Henley Halebrown, plus a number of different civic-minded studios from Pollard Thomas Edwards and Levitt Bernstein to Collective Structure and RCKa – had been too younger to have practised within the “peak deck” period of the ’60s and ’70s, coming into a occupation formed not by the general public good however by market economics.
Nostalgic for the public-spirited modernism practised by their Boomer-age mentors, this new “college” of architects took up the mayor’s problem, defining an anti-iconic housing type – the New London Vernacular (NLV). Simply tailored to deck entry, NLV was pitched as a de-risked developer technique solid within the wake of the 2008 monetary crash: simpler to price, design, construct and promote, and, consequently, higher at offering correct land values than the icon-led regeneration tasks of the Tony Blair years.
There’s a dose of coverage too, in NLV’s formulation. For instance, the London Housing Design Information did not really say “use brick” but it surely did, as Hatherley notes in his essay Constructing the Austerity Metropolis, “place nice stress on that floating signifier, ‘context’ – which in London means bricks”.
The information additionally known as for “tenure-blind” housing with welcoming entrances and spacious balconies, options recognized by David Birkbeck and Julian Hart in a 2012 report for City Design London (UDL), which strove to outline the rising type. And so, whereas post-war deck-access housing was applied to allow the separation of pedestrians and vehicles, at the moment it is meant to offer dual-aspect properties in high-density housing and grant every residence a entrance door.
In contrast to the extra dynamic continental exemplars, the British tasks seem conservative at first look. The European case research with lengthy decks and intensive use of timber, for instance, would not be allowed within the UK. However a more in-depth look reveals appreciable vary: Henley Halebrown’s playful bridges, arches and loggias; Matthew Lloyd Architects’ new properties harmoniously blended with the historic Bourne Property; Haworth Tompkins’s brick facades for the Silchester Property that construct on the custom of early philanthropic dwellings.
Not each British exemplar is NLV: Murray Grove, the oldest of them, is pre-fabricated high-tech, whereas the uncovered concrete of Apparata’s A Home for Artists recollects James Stirling’s muscular Seventies deck-access scheme in Runcorn. Our retrofits embody a lot of eras and constructing varieties: Park Hill’s personal sector makeover, a remodeled barracks in Greenwich and a horse stables with cobbled decks reworked by Collective Structure to offer reasonably priced properties to lease in Glasgow.
Deck entry means dual-aspect properties with cross-ventilation
Elsewhere, RCKa’s timber lattice-wrapped stair tower and winter gardens in Seaford present a robust foil to its brick-clad avenue elevation, whereas DO Structure’s stark reinvention of the Glasgow tenement ploughs its personal furrow.
“Housing for soiled individuals” is again and I welcome it, particularly when put next with alternate options like residential towers: deck entry means dual-aspect properties with cross-ventilation, daylight from each side and number of outlook. Each residence has a “contemporary air” entrance door lending an enhanced sense of identification in addition to the well being advantages of elevated contact with the surface world. And a well-planned scheme can yield round 300 properties per hectare too. As Hatherley writes in his foreword: “An excellent deck is a delight – a brand new means of strolling via town, a convivial and neighbourly area, a type of second balcony shared along with your neighbours.”
Thus far, most new deck-access housing has been developed by city reasonably priced housing suppliers on comparatively small plots. Giant-scale housing developments are typically delivered by consortia of business home builders and enormous nationwide housing associations on the extra conservative finish of the design spectrum, and lots of are sceptical about deck entry. It will absolutely change in response to planning necessities for dual-aspect flats and the expansion of factory-built housing. Till then, the exemplars in our deck entry information – the very best in Britain and past at the moment – present how it may be carried out.
Rory Olcayto is a author and critic at Pollard Thomas Edwards and has written and edited a number of books on structure. The Deck Entry Housing Design Information is printed by Routledge, with a launch social gathering going down in London on 29 March.
The photograph, exhibiting the Park Hill property in Sheffield, is by Jack Hobhouse.
