Street Deck

Definition

The street deck names the wide covered access gallery — "streets in the sky" — that Alison and Peter Smithson theorised for their Golden Lane competition (1952): decks 12 feet wide, "wide enough for milk floats to circulate — although an optimal, an 'ideal', width was never prescribed," all four blocks interconnected, illustrated "with a number of collaged-in groups of people, engaged in an intense, though unspecified, kind of communication" (p. 123). Its doctrine: besides "providing the space, or 'place', where people can meet, it expresses the connection between flats or blocks of flats" (p. 123) — communication as both association and movement. Its sources were "extremely diverse": Tyneside ship decks, the Unité's internal street, and above all "the notion of the 'street' itself" — the un-monumental English working-class street the Modernists had otherwise condemned (p. 123).

Its built career: Park Hill, Sheffield (Lynn & Smith under Womersley, 1953–59) — "Twelve feet wide, they run from one end of the scheme to the other" — the era's most praised public housing project; Lasdun's cluster blocks; and the deck-access blocks of the 1960s (Robin Hood Gardens 1968, the Smithsons' only sizeable built housing; Southwark's Aylesbury; Divis Flats, Belfast). Its analytical career: the deck was the design answer to the sociology of 'community' — the Smithsons' "human association" against "functional organisation" — and thus the concept whose failure became the emblem of architectural determinism ("the street decks were found to lack the 'focal points along their length' which streets on the ground normally seemed to provide," p. 128). Glendinning & Muthesius's audit: balcony access was "for dirty people" (Keay, 1935) before it was for community; the deck's English fate is the reversal of its Dutch counterpart (galerijbouw advocated "precisely on grounds of greater privacy").

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Glendinning & Muthesius ingest; the Smithsons' own texts and the deck-access demolition record await fuller sources.

Key Thinkers

• Miles Glendinning & Stefan Muthesius — the concept's historians: the Golden Lane doctrine, the Park Hill apotheosis, and the 'focal points' audit (1994).
• Alison & Peter Smithson (not paged — see log) — the concept's theorists: "Community is by definition a comprehensible thing" (p. 122); the deck as communication's architecture.
• Jack Lynn & Ivor Smith (not paged — see log) — Park Hill's project architects: the deck realised ("no man's land" in conventional lobbies vs. the deck's balance of privacy and contact).
• Denys Lasdun (not paged — see log) — the cluster block variant: the 'vertical street of stairs' and 'garden path scale' balconies.

Related Concepts

• zeilenbau — the layout order the deck complicated: horizontal continuity against the free-standing slab.
• public-housing — the system that built decks at scale; the deck as public housing's most theorised circulation.
• event-space — Hannah's performance model: the deck as a designed stage for unscripted social events.
• spatial-segmentarity — the deck as a linear segment in Deleuze/Foucault's sense: a shaped space of passage and encounter.
• eyes-on-the-street — Jacobs's counter-principle: the street's safety comes from its ground-level and shopfront ecology, not from a corridor in the sky.
• mixed-development — the deck-access block as 'Late Mixed Development's' residue after the type-variety was stripped out.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Tower Block (Glendinning & Muthesius 1994) — the concept's founding source: the Golden Lane doctrine and its sources (ch. 18, p. 123); Park Hill's decks (pp. 127–128); Lasdun's cluster blocks (p. 127); the 1965 doubt ("focal points along their length," p. 128); balcony access's history and 'dirty people' genealogy (ch. 9, p. 69).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

Open Questions

• The deck was designed to continue the working-class street; its critics said it replaced a street with its image. Is the deck a street (an institution of contact) or a corridor (a segment of circulation) — and did the 12-foot width ever get decided on evidence?
• Park Hill "seemed to 'work'" in 1960 and failed by 1970 with the same form. Glendinning & Muthesius point to allocation and management: does this shift the deck's assessment from architectural-determinism to housing-crusade (the letting policy as the decisive 'design' act)?
• The deck's spatial promise — horizontal community at height — matches the wiki's topological-interiority and threshold-to-gradient registers. Is the deck the threshold's failure case, and what would its interior analysis (doors, corners, sightlines) need?
• Robin Hood Gardens and Park Hill are now listed/preserved. Is the deck's heritage rescue a verdict on the concept, or on the verdicts?