golden lane

In 1951, the City of London Corporation held a design competition for the building of a new community in the boundary area of central London, north of St. Paul’s, that had been heavily bombed in World War II. Geoffry Powell, a teacher at Kingston School of Architecture designed the winning entry in 1952 and along with two other teachers at Kingston, who has also submitted entries, Peter Chamberlin and Christof Bon, formed a partnership to execute the design. The Golden Lane competition received a lot of notoriety partly because of the emphasis on designing a big new residential project for about 1000 people, partly because this event marked the arrival of the planning ideas of Le Corbusier in England, and also because of the attention given to some of the other entries especially that of Peter and Allison Smithson. The photo montage of a cut-a-way axonometric of a high-rise slab superimposed on an aerial photo of the bombed-out remains of what was assumed to be London (actually it was Coventry) was the center piece of the Smithson submission for Golden Lane and came to assume almost legendary status as the icon of Team 10 ideas about town planning in the post CIAM era. The site for Golden Lane was actually part of a larger zone of destroyed buildings to the south. This was called The Barbican because it marked the entrance to the walled medieval city through Cripplegate which was just north of the ancient Roman fort, some walls of which still remained at the southern edge of the site. The two sites totaled 42 acres in area.
Late CIAM town planning principles are applied in the site concept; an urban community, with differentiated functions, building types and sizes, existing in a defining landscape of open public space. Obvious precedents include Le Corbusier’s City for 3 Million, Plan Voisin, and Ville Radieuse projects: a mix of high-rise towers, a form of courtyard housing, a continuous landscape expressed as a multi-level, multi-functional layer beneath buildings, and the separation of pedestrians and autos. The immeubles-villas was the housing model used in these examples, a narrow, single loaded, skip-stop maisonette type arranged in large courtyard groups and later as an undulating slab form, the redent blocks.
The 4 and 6-story gallery-slabs in Golden Lane are completely explained in a detailed section perspective of the 6-story type that was published in the mid-1950’s. This remarkable drawing describes the concept and construction of three maisonettes on top of each other, raised above grade providing private entrances for the bottom dwelling and outside galleries for the upper two, with kitchens along the gallery, living spaces opening to a balcony with bedrooms above that extend out over the gallery. Construction is brick cross walls, concrete floors between maisonettes and wood framed bedroom floors. Exposed concrete balustrades are left unpainted and aluminum windows, and panels are used for the infill walls. In addition to the 6-story maisonettes, there was a 4-story version of the same building and 4-story blocks of flats also with gallery access and balconies.