"Golden Lane" is, as they say in London, an estate, but in our opinion - a microdistrict. It was built in 1957-1962 by the architects Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, the very ones who later built the Barbican. The microdistrict is a stone's throw from the Barbican, but the atmosphere here is completely different. In the Barbican - noisy crowds, here - silence. Tourists don't come here. And it would be worth it: "Golden Lane" - the most important monument of London modernism.
In the 50s and 60s, he was famous. The architectural press often wrote about him, discussing his innovative design (the microdistrict was created as a self-sufficient world with a gym and a swimming pool open to all residents, shops, hairdressers, post office) and witty apartment layouts.
Now the whole complex is under protection as an architectural monument. Here, not only the buildings are well preserved, but also the original infrastructure. The swimming pool, gymnasium and hairdresser are working in the same places; so that Golden Lane is not only an architectural monument, but also a monument to the political ideals of the 50s, an island of embodied utopia.
Golden Lane is the first work by Chamberlin, Powell & Bon. Actually, this bureau came into being thanks to this project. Geoffrey Powell, Peter Chamberlin and Christophe Bon, professors at Kingston Polytechnic Institute, agreed in 1952 that if any of them won the competition for the Golden Lane project, they would build the neighborhood together. Powell won, and, true to his word, founded a workshop with his comrades, which took up further development of the project.
Although the area was built in five years and according to a single plan, it lacks stylistic integrity. The last one, in time for 1962, was the long house with a concave façade overlooking the wide and lively Goswell Road, and it is very different from the rest. This is the only building in the neighborhood where exposed concrete is visible on the facades. Its author is one of the junior employees of the workshop, Michael Neilan.
It was interesting for me to see an English residential quarter built in the same years as the first panel microdistricts in Moscow. It seemed to me that the Soviet and British neighborhoods should be similar, just as the British and Soviet furniture of that time are similar to each other. But there were almost no similarities between Golden Lane and the 9th quarter of Novye Cheryomushki.
The style is the same, it is easy to recognize it: facades made of colored glass, a romantic reinforced concrete "hat" on a tower, canopies resting on thin columns, concrete lattices. But this architecture is so differently done that you hardly notice the stylistic similarity.
The Soviet microdistrict is a scattering of houses on the surface of the earth, open to all winds. Golden Lane is a closed neighborhood. From the east and west, he fenced off from the streets with long multi-entrance houses-screens. The buildings stand tightly, forming four courtyards. Of these, only one, "front door", is open to the south. The other three are surrounded by houses on all sides and sunk into the ground. They are deserted and quiet.
Here, wherever you turn, you come across a wall. But here and there passages are found in the wall. These houses are arranged in such a way that more often you have to walk not around them, but through them. In many places, sections of the first floor have been taken out of them. One building is completely torn off the ground and stands on columns. Where the residential buildings touch, they are connected by a "hinge" of vertical communications, and since in English houses the staircase belongs to the street, you with unexpected ease pass through the architectural mass in the very place where it seems completely impassable - in a remote multi-storey corner of the block.
The pavement in the quarter is located on several levels. The courtyards are a series of terraces connected by stairs, ramps and galleries. The structure is not as complex as in the Barbican with its multi-storey stylobate, but in general it is noticeable that the future creators of the Barbican have got their hands on this object. The gymnastic pavilion, a transparent peripter with white columns (hello, Mies van der Rohe!) Opens out into some courtyards with a one-story facade, and into others with a two-story façade. A spiral ramp leads to the spectacular oval "crater" of the playground. An underground street stretches under the block, along which transport drives up to shops (they occupy the entire lower floor of a house overlooking Goswell Road). From the same street you can get to the underground car park. The pavement of the "front" courtyard is its roof, and the concrete cylinders on it are the skylights.
In general, this area was designed with a detail that was impossible in Soviet housing construction. Such a complex composition - with several esplanades at different levels, an expressive central tower, complex trajectories of movement - we did only in the genre of "urban center ensemble".
And yet there are no usual plate houses. Instead, there is a modernist version of traditional rowhouses: the apartments in these houses themselves resemble small detached houses, with a bedroom on the second floor and an entrance from the street. These houses, narrow and tall, with their own garden behind, are mainly the historical buildings of English cities. In the 19th century, more and more rows of houses were built with the same layout and a common facade. Such a row is more likely one building than several separate ones. The next step is to put another one, the same, on top of a row of houses of the same type.
The northern facades of the Golden Lane houses show open galleries on the third and fifth floors. The gallery doors lead directly to the living rooms of the two-story apartments. The stairs connecting the floors are also open. The entrance is a pavilion, passing through which you find yourself on the street again. Stairways, platforms and corridors, hidden in the USSR behind flat facades of houses, are taken out here. Because of this, the northern facades have become porous, multi-layered, and very complex in structure. On the southern facades there are bay windows and balconies, and on the ground below them there are small gardens belonging to the apartments of the lower level.
The border between the private and the public here is not there and not in the same way as in our homes. Our apartments are separated from the street by a thick layer of entrances, stairs, corridors. The first floor windows are always above eye level. And here the level of the floor in the house and the sidewalk outside are the same. Walking around the block, you can see at arm's length, on a level with yourself, a man who cooks fried eggs in the kitchen. The doors to the lower apartments lead directly from the street, and under the feet of the passers-by there are rugs with the words "Welcome".
I heard that on the roof of the tower, under a romantic "hat", there is a beautiful garden and a pool with a patterned mosaic, but no one has been allowed there for several years. And also, as I have already mentioned, there are wonderful interiors of the apartments: the bedrooms hang over the living rooms like boxes, stairs with console steps sticking out of the wall lead upstairs; glasses are inserted above the doors, and because of this, the light spreads freely throughout the house. I haven't been to apartments, but
here a man who was posted a few photos.
