Shaping the city
The push and pull between buildings and streets, between individual and collective
How to build a good street? It’s a straightforward question, but one that we architects seem to have found very hard to answer over the last seventy years. We could spread the blame for why our cities often feel like random collisions between buildings…but it’s more interesting to look into how we can make places that add up to more than the sum of their parts. As our cities expand outwards and upwards, it’s important that they are shaped by a sense of the whole, not just the logic of parts – and this comes down to what people experience at ground level. How porous or intimate a collective space feels can have a big impact on the quality of social exchange it supports.
In a street or courtyard, there are many small gestures in the gift of the architect: the path that is offered you, the doors and windows through which your neighbours appear or look out, the places to pause, rest and maybe talk, the patches of sunlight when it’s cold, or of shade when it’s not. If we use these elements to the full, they can even support contact and trust. How would it change our experience of living cheek-by-jowl with others if, instead of stacking apartments like repeating units, we treated streets and courts as the building blocks of the city? If, instead of seeing what is left over after dropping predetermined types onto a site, we let the space in-between shape the buildings?
This idea, that the space between is just as important as the buildings themselves, has been a kind of orthodoxy for a while – however, it’s a lot harder to do than it sounds, which may explain why it’s seldom done with conviction. After our cities have been remade many times, there are few ‘easy’ plots remaining, and that requires us to deal with tricky backland sites – old industrial yards, abandoned dog tracks, railway sidings, highway edges. Even apparently clear regeneration areas are cut up by cables, tracks and watercourses – like the London Olympic site, where we worked on the ‘Legacy’ masterplan, or London’s Bankside. These ‘I wouldn’t start from here’ conditions are a symptom of the speed at which our cities are changing and growing – and they ask for great suppleness and invention in judging what is possible, and what is appropriate.
When we finished our first building, for Amnesty in London, the site foreman stood back and said ‘you know, it really makes the street’ – which captured our intent, without our ever having talked about it. In Gistel, in the west of Flanders, we pushed the apartments to the edge of the backyard site, making a small public garden and a terrace for the old inn that sits on the corner. It’s dense by small town standards, but you don’t feel it, because the buildings are kept to a modest height, and all the apartments benefit from the generous shared court. This logic of distributed density and focused sociability applies to big cities too, as our London projects increasingly show. But the relation between buildings and spaces is qualitative as well as quantitative: in Gistel, it feels both collective and intimate: the first floor apartments have private terraces and a shared gallery overlooking the public courtyard. It’s ‘social’ housing, not just in name, but in how the residents experience a sense of sharing with others. Because isn’t designing housing first of all a work of imagining the city?
Photos by: Hélène Binet, Philipp Ebeling, David Grandorge, Maarten Vanden Abeele