What could be better than Le Corbusier's “housing unit”? - only five "residential units", standing on one meadow! And there is such a place in London. This is Alton (Alton) - an area on the southwestern outskirts of the city, near Wimbledon, built in the 50s. Tower houses and plate houses in its western part are an example of "pure" modernism of the mid-20th century, rare for England.
In the late 1940s and 1950s, many residential buildings were built in London, but most of them look traditional: brick walls, tiled roofs. Truly modernist architecture was rarely built and at first, it seems, exclusively by order of the state, as social housing. The Alton borough, for example, was built by the London County Council, and most of the houses there are still owned by its successor, the Greater London Council.
Alton consists of two parts, which were designed and built almost simultaneously by two groups of architects who worked in the architectural department of the London County Council: East Alton (Alton East, 1952-1958) and West Alton (Alton West, 1955-1959). It is believed that the eastern part of the area is closer to the Swedish version of modernism, and the western - to the international, that is, to the style of Le Corbusier and his followers. We mean, of course, the Le Corbusier style of the 50s, the architecture of "rough concrete" and "residential units" - in Altona, as we have already said, there are five smaller copies of them.
Alton is located in a very beautiful area, on a high hill, and is surrounded on almost all sides by meadows and forests. These are not wild forests, but something like forest parks, with ponds and paths. The air in the area is fresh and clean, the city noise is barely audible, and from many points distant views of the meadows located below the slope open up. In the center of Altona is Parkstead House, a 1760s villa built by William Chambers, one of the finest architects of the time.
I walked towards Alton through one of the surrounding woodlands, Putney Heath. Coming out of the woods onto the wide Kingston Highway, I crossed it along an uncomfortable underground passage and soon saw a group of towers with walls of cream bricks ahead of me. I felt almost like at home: a forest park, a highway, brick towers over the crowns of trees … Coming out of the Izmailovsky Park, you can see a similar landscape.
In East Altona, the towers are scattered along the slope, at some distance from each other. It is impossible to cover them with one glance. Behind them stand long four-story brick houses, with a gallery on the third. Apartments in them are two-storey. The lower apartments are entered from the street, the upper ones - from the gallery. There are also two-storey houses, arranged in long rows, wall to wall, and differ from the traditional buildings of the English city only by flat roofs. The paths wind along the slopes with amazingly clean lawns, on which daffodils have already bloomed in early March. The area is separated from the highway by a brick fence, in which breaks have been made in several places.
In general, Alton is a well-groomed and safe area. The people live here are simple, but not the poorest. Many social housing districts built in the 50s and 60s on the outskirts of London have turned into slums, but Alton somehow escaped degradation. The houses are very well preserved, with window frames, old wooden doors, and ceramic tiles in colors that you won't find anymore.
It seemed to me (perhaps because of the good weather) that the architecture of brick towers, characteristic of the romantic modernism of the 50s, gives the impression of lightness, free and happy breathing. The first floor of the towers is narrowed, and the edges of the upper floors rest on "legs". The internal staircase is illuminated by a vertical window covering the entire height of the facade. On the opposite facade there is a similar window, and the house shines through. On the roof there is a superstructure with rounded corners, like on the deck of a ship.
Some of the critics of modernism, I think Charles Jencks, said that modern technologies and design methods do not at all force us to build houses with floor-length windows, flat roofs and white walls. These are not inalienable features of modern architecture, but only signs of style. Modern architecture is much more diverse.
This idea is remembered when looking at the horizontal four-story houses in East Altona. On the one hand, this is precisely the "modern" architecture, they could have been built only in the 20th century. Take at least how famously some of these houses are planted on the relief: part of the house is on the upper terrace, part on the lower one, and between them is the joint of the stairs, whose marches connect the levels of the building, which are at different heights. The staircase also serves as a gateway: through its lower landing you can go through the house, from one courtyard to another.
On the other hand, these houses have very little of modernism as a style. The walls are made of red bricks, the roofs are tiled, inside, it seems, there is a steel frame - such technologies were known even in the 19th century. The galleries and the entrance doors of the apartments are located on the northern facades, and along the southern ones there are traditional gardens - the "backyards" of the lower-tier apartments. These houses, as the song says, "look so out of date" next to the tower houses. Le Corbusier would not approve of such an architecture.
Both parts of the district were built in the 50s, and since then it has changed little. In the 60s, a library, youth club and apartment buildings with shops on the ground floors were built at the intersection of Rowhampton Lane and Dainsbury Avenue, where the main streets of Alton meet. These are concrete brutalist buildings; but the high-rise building above the library is very similar to the plate houses of West Altona, built a few years earlier. This complex, located on the outskirts of Altona, has become, as it were, the main entrance to the area and its main square. Behind it are the newly built Rowhampton University buildings adjacent to the 18th century villa.
East Alton is planned as a park. Streets surround it along the perimeter, and inside there are narrow intra-block thoroughfares, enveloping picturesque groups of buildings. Western Alton looks different. It is a denser space, with a sharper structure. Several streets run through the western part of Altona. One of them is the main one (Dainbury Avenue). It is wider than the others, a bus runs on it, and the most spectacular views open up to either side of it. Buildings in Western Altona are knocked down into dense groups: a row of plate houses, three "bushes" of towers, tight rows of four-story houses with galleries. Western Alton gives the impression not of an environment, but of an ensemble. There is also the center of this ensemble - a wide and gentle slope, free from any buildings, above which there are houses-plates on supports - the most elegant group of buildings in the area. Below them is the final bus stop.
The towers in West Altona are taller than those in East Altona, and with wider facades. Their close groups are visible from afar and make a strong impression, especially since the facades are parallel to each other. It seems that the houses, united by someone's mysterious will, are about to move forward, like the rectangles of battalions on old battle plans.
Houses with galleries have beautiful, but monotonous facades, distinguishing only by the color of the panels, and even here there are few options. Facade panels, as far as I could see, are painted sheets of galvanized iron. These houses either stand in even rows, in which between the backyards of one house and the facade of the neighboring one there is a narrow brick alley, along which one can only walk on foot; or the letter "P", back yards inward.
The row of plate houses looks very impressive from all sides. They stand in parallel, but when you come close to them, due to perspective distortion, it seems that the houses are fanning out in front of you. They stand on a slope, so their northeastern ends "stuck" to the ground, and the southwestern ones are torn off from it and stand on high supports. Because of this, they look great from below, from the main street of the district: it seems that they, having dispersed, take off from the slope.
The complex layout of houses-plates is reflected on the facades by excessive plastic, whose cunning logic I was interested in understanding. In short, the facades are two-layered here. The outer plane of the facade is a lattice, behind it is the main wall with windows. In the house, as is usually the case here, there are two-story apartments, and the cell of the front lattice corresponds to two floors. The structure of the facades on both sides of the house is different, since they have different functions: on the north-west side, in the interval between the two planes, there are galleries and entrances to the apartments, and on the south-east side there is a loggia.
Looking at these facades, I have not once or twice recalled the English perpendicular Gothic. No kidding: it looks like 20th century English architects learned a thing or two from Gothic architecture. Where else does this urge to turn the surface of a building into a logical puzzle come from?
In addition, the supports of the houses-plates are staggered, and when moving past them, they appear in the form of a motley crowd, then suddenly they fold into regular diagonal rows.
I went to Alton to admire the "clean", textbook modernism: houses-towers, houses-plates, infrastructure within walking distance. But it turned out: at first glance, everything is so, but if you look closely - not very much. Fedot, but not that one.
Firstly, there are completely different types of housing here, and there are unexpectedly many of them. Houses-plates in our understanding, consisting of sections, are not here at all. But there are private houses unthinkable in a socialist region with their own garden, two-story (for families) and one-story (for old people who find it difficult to climb stairs). Moreover, in all types of buildings there is practically one type of apartment. This is not even an apartment, but a "house" (the English use the French word maisonette), which retains its isolation even under the facade of the "residential unit"; two-story, with an entrance from the street and a private garden behind. If the “house” is located on the upper floors of the building, the garden replaces the balcony. One-story apartments here, it seems, are only in the towers, and they are intended for the poorest residents of the area.
Because of this, the urban landscape is more complex and richer: houses from one to twelve stories high are piled up in tiers, and the street, in addition to sidewalks and lawns, consists of many backyards, open to all eyes and touchingly cluttered. In addition, you can walk along Alton, not only circling the surface of the earth, but also going up. In most houses, stairs leading to the upper floors, as well as the upper galleries, are publicly accessible. The public space of the district is three-dimensional.
