8 minute read
The landscape legacy of Lafayette Park, Detroit
Townhouses in Lafayette Park in Detroit. Constructed between 1956 and 1959, Lafayette Park contains the world’s largest collection of buildings by Mies van der Rohe. © Alamy
Howells’ David Henderson pays tribute to the work of Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Alfred Caldwell in the design of two East London housing schemes.
At Howells, the sites we build on and the residential typologies we work with cover all scales and densities. There is no one-size-fitsall and, particularly in London, near public transport nodes, we are building housing of significant height. The questions we face include establishing appropriate scale and ensuring that there is always a close and meaningful relationship to the landscape, as has often been the case historically.
In the early 20th century, the idea of the garden city tended towards a low-rise, detached suburbanisation, which threatened the very landscape that made living there an attractive idea in the first place. As Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, architects of the Barbican in London, said, ‘We strongly dislike the Garden City tradition, with its low density, monotony and waste of good country, road, kerbs, borders and paths in endless strips everywhere.’¹ By the time of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse urban planning concepts, the pendulum had swung towards proposed highrise dwelling units seeming to float disconnectedly above an indeterminate salad of greenery.
While the proximity to green infrastructure is important, and the need to build taller and more densely is an increasing necessity, neither extreme offers an answer to the kind of challenges we are faced with now. However, one mid-century development in the US incorporated elements of both philosophies to good effect.
Surprisingly, given its scale, Lafayette Park in Detroit was a commercial enterprise, with the central parkland and street landscape developed by Howard Greenwald, working together with architect Mies van der Rohe, urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell. They shrewdly appreciated this would add significant value to the real estate in exactly the tradition of London squares and parks of the Georgian period.
When Lafayette Park was newly completed in 1963, it looked to be somewhat sterile, dominated by parking, roads and hard surfaces. Now, however, after a period of 60 years, the landscape has matured and what seemed an abstract flexible pattern of development is now a highly valued place. The project has fairly high densities and incorporates a mix of building scales, from townhouses to flats up to 22 storeys, and this variety of scale, alongside its landscape, is what provides its quality and interest.
The scheme is distinguished from its contemporaries by a clear sequence of densely landscaped spaces, moving progressively from open parkland to private courtyard via a network of green streets and pathways.
It is a dwelling experience that is immersed in nature, a humane civilised compromise that recognises both the attractiveness of the garden city ideal and the need for increased density, but which treats the landscape as a key component in a legible sequence of spaces, not just as background scenery.
In its recognition of the value of landscape to housing development, Lafayette Park draws on a historical narrative which still has contemporary relevance. It has a collection of buildings designed by one of the acknowledged masters of 20thcentury architecture, and yet it is the maturing landscape which ultimately gives it its quality. In its mix of scales and multiple uses it could almost be seen as a prototype for what the 15-minute city is now.
Although it has a very different context, Howells’ project at Royal Wharf – a new Thameside district in east London of over 15 hectares – addresses many of the same challenges as at Lafayette Park.
We believe that the key to successful places are mixed demographics, housing types and tenures – with streets and homes that people aspire to live in as a vital part of balanced and strong communities. Looking to the urban characteristics of typically successful residential districts forged in the 19th century, we investigated a new urbanism for this district, which is in the London Borough of Newham, focused on grid densities, building heights, road and pavement widths and people-to-grid-space ratios.
Reinterpreting traditional terraced housing for the 21st century, the townhouses were among the first buildings at Royal Wharf, leading the way in demonstrating a familiar urban streetscape of three- and four-storey terraces, screened by front gardens with hedges and bookended by taller mansion blocks and residential towers.
Looking at the wider area, we analysed the river context several miles east and west of Royal Wharf’s Thames frontage, exploring ways for a new community to experience London’s river. Understanding that the key to a sustainable neighbourhood was to look beyond the site’s high-value frontage, we analysed local networks of green spaces, community infrastructure and transport stretching from Canary Wharf to the Thames Barrier.
We were fortunate to benefit from two significant established green spaces nearby in Lyle Park and Thames Barrier Park. We integrated these, along with our own newly created Royal Wharf Gardens, into the development, with a high street running through the site.
This high street connects adjacent communities with the river, a new Thames Clipper stop and inland Docklands Light Railway stations. Royal Wharf’s high street also gathers essential local amenities, including dentists, doctors and food shops. A new primary school for 420 children, a nursery with 60 places and a community centre located at the heart of Royal Wharf lay the groundwork for a cohesive and socially connected community.
Another of our masterplans, London City Island, presented a different set of challenges and opportunities. London City Island (LCI) is a new residential and culture-led neighbourhood located in Canning Town in the heart of east London, with distinct public spaces and a maturing soft landscape edge to the River Lea. The masterplan includes 1,706 homes, shops, restaurants, cafés, offices, an energy centre and new spaces for both English National Ballet and Queen Mary and Newham College.
We were fortunate to benefit from two significant established green spaces nearby in Lyle Park and Thames Barrier Park.
London City Island was a brownfield site where all evidence of its former use had been erased. A key driver in the development of the masterplan was the dramatic meander in the River Lea, creating access to an almost continuous waterfront while allowing for a less structured urban geometry. Proximity to a major public transport interchange and wider amenities at Canning Town was achieved by providing a new lifting bridge, allowing us to develop more densely while also greening and rehabilitating the previously industrial waterway.
Historically, the buildings on site had been undistinguished other than the original house and orchard, a memory of which survives in the street name, Orchard Street. The surrounding presence of water therefore offered an opportunity to develop a new narrative of riverside buildings surrounding a central garden, an arrival square fronted by the new spaces for English National Ballet and a new landscaped water’s edge.
In all three projects, the housing design was preceded by the creation of a destination: the park in Detroit; the boulevard connecting new and existing green spaces at Royal Wharf; the garden and river edge at London City Island.
The landscaped spaces, one intensively planted and the other more formally surfaced, are critical in creating a liveable environment, a meeting place, a connecting point between visitors, students and residents and leading through to new vantage points around the extensive waterfront. We were able to cluster the tall buildings fairly closely together without compromising daylight, privacy or views, by carefully aligning and angling facades away from each adjacent block. This created a relatively tall and dense but extremely liveable development with daylight reaching deep into the central green spaces.
The buildings share a language of brick architecture distinguished by bold use of colour but acting as a foil to the greenery of the waterfront park. Overall, the collective has a greater impact than the sum of its parts, like a mini-Manhattan.
The common thread between Lafayette Park and our two projects has been the understanding that, for the project to be successful, it cannot simply adhere to an abstract idea (à la garden city or Ville Radieuse). In all three projects, the housing design was preceded by the creation of a destination: the park in Detroit; the boulevard connecting new and existing green spaces at Royal Wharf; the garden and river edge at London City Island.
At Lafayette Park, the landscape has been a 60-year investment in the quality of the dwelling experience. At Royal Wharf, and London City Island, after about five years, it is already apparent that the green spaces are becoming well established and we hope that in due course these two new places in London will mature in the same way.
David Henderson is an architect and Partner at the London studio of Howells
2. Lafayette Park on completion.
