The Smithsons’ competition entry for Golden Lane in the City of London and the writings that followed: long decks in the air, wide enough to be streets, to give high-density housing the life of the terraced street it replaced.
For the Golden Lane housing competition (1952) the Smithsons proposed continuous slabs with a deck at every third floor, broad enough for children to play and neighbours to meet: “streets in the air” that would connect across the bombed city as a network. They presented it at CIAM IX (1953) as a challenge to the four functions of the Athens Charter, arguing for an urbanism of association (house, street, district, city) rather than of zones.
The idea was realised by others first, most famously at Park Hill in Sheffield (Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, 1957–61), where decks every third floor run the whole length of a snaking slab, and later by the Smithsons themselves at Robin Hood Gardens, London (1966–72). Their ideas were gathered in the Team 10 Primer (1962; 1968).
The book, part by part
I Golden Lane and Park Hill
The deck as street; the slab as a continuous piece of city.