Hallfield Estate was designed in 1947 by the famous Tekton architectural bureau - Berthold Lubetkin, Denis Lasden and Karl Ludwig Frank. A year later, Quake fell apart, and the housing estate was built in 1951-1958 by one of the authors, Lasden, in collaboration with Lindsay Drake.
Holfield is a neighborhood of 14 plate houses. It is located almost in the center of London, near Paddington Station. The houses are arranged in a regular grid, at right angles to each other. The area below them is leveled and tied to the lowest point of the relief, so that the streets surrounding Holfield are on almost all sides above the level of the entrances. It turns out that the massif is located in an artificial basin.
The microdistrict gives the impression of a cunningly rhymed poem or a piece of music with sequences. There are two types of houses: in the longitudinal direction there are long and high ten-story buildings, in the transverse direction there are six-story buildings. All longitudinal houses are similar to each other, and all transverse ones are similar to each other. Each building has two different facades, but all facades that face the same direction are the same. Thus, there are four types of facades, where one theme is played out in different ways - the staggered arrangement of openings and supports.
Although the houses are, as already mentioned, on the grid, not all of its cells are occupied. The rhythm of the buildings is free and intermittent. The district has a "beginning" - a one-story rotunda of a laundry room, where the local administration office is now located - and an "end" - a school and a kindergarten building, which will be discussed later.
The entrances are open everywhere, and you enter the apartments from the galleries, which are located on the northern facades (more precisely, on the northwestern and northeastern facades). There are no internal corridors between the apartments, but the apartments themselves have long corridors. In general, the apartments here are very similar to the apartments in the Soviet panel houses, only larger, and the adherents of rational layouts are unlikely to treat them favorably.
These houses are sensitive to the sun, like plants. All houses have northern facades - cold, white, and southern ones - warm, brick. The windows of the kitchens and bathrooms overlook the northern facades, the windows of the living rooms on the southern facades, and in longitudinal, ten-story buildings, these windows go down to the floor. The transverse houses on the southeastern facades have balconies facing south like flower heads. And only one transverse house - Worcester House - balconies look in the opposite direction, because this house is in the southern corner of the courtyard. If he had the same balconies as the others, they would be looking at the close and dark facade of the neighboring building; therefore, here the balconies have turned around and overlook a wide courtyard.
The vegetal metaphor was not invented by me: Holfield's authors also readily use it. A drawing by Lindsay Drake and Denis Lasden is known, in which the plan of the Holfield School (which is discussed later) is turned into an image of a flowering branch, where the stems, leaves, a flower and a bunch of fruits correspond to the galleries and pavilions.
This architecture is rich in redundant details that show a strong resemblance to the decorative arts and furnishings of the 1950s. Everywhere you come across a line of complex curvature: here the side of the stairs is in the form of a boomerang, there is a support, oval in cross-section. The corners of the longitudinal houses rest on columns, whose shape is so complex that, instead of describing, it is better to call them sculptures. In the middle of the longitudinal houses, strictly along the axis of the northern facade, the pink wall dividing the flights of the open staircase tapers up and down and, thanks to the recess of the railing, resembles a tournament spear on the cut. It can be seen that the architects enjoyed drawing these little things.
The residents of the area support him in exemplary order. The courtyards are carefully cultivated and look like a park on someone's estate. It seems that the residents' money was recently renovated by David Miller Architects, during which the facades were renewed and all windows and doors were replaced. In some places, work on the facades is still ongoing.
But a stranger cannot enter cozy courtyards. They are fenced off with high gratings, which greatly interfere with shooting, and an idle passer-by is annoyed by the look, making it difficult to perceive Holfield as a pure architectural poem. Apparently, the gratings appeared a long time ago. They can be seen in old photographs from the collection of the Courtauld Institute, which by sight, by the cars and the height of the trees, which have now grown very much, can be dated to about the mid-1960s.
The long two-storey building of the clinic, built, judging by the style, in the same 60s, slightly violates the harmony of this architecture. By itself, it looks good, but obscures the spectacular view from the depths of the courtyard to the district school. The school assembly hall, a high and strongly protruding pavilion, is located strictly on the axis of the courtyard and looks into it with a blank convex white wall. It probably used to look spectacular from a distance, framed by two identical facades of plate houses. But now the hospital has closed the courtyard, and the facade of the school faces a narrow passageway.
The school is what is called the primary school here. In one part there is a kindergarten, in the other there are classes for younger students. Lasden designed it later than residential buildings, without the participation of Lyubetkin. This is a famous building, a masterpiece of masterpieces. Parabolic outlines of the plan, capricious variety of facades, pavilions, galleries and awnings with skylights - almost all the techniques of classical modernism are collected here and presented in a dazzling variety.
But I didn't see her. In London, it is customary to surround schools and kindergartens with a very tall, much taller than human height, and an almost opaque fence. Schools are almost invisible in the city and only at recess they give themselves away with the furious squeal of frolicking children, from which ears get covered. I walked around the perimeter of the school site, eagerly looking into every crack, but I never saw the forbidden world of childhood. Behind the fence, low pavilions sank into dense thickets.
