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The final part of the story about the design of half a dozen houses in the West Midlands…

The next day, exhibition and obligatory drink with fellow bloggers over, I headed back to the office. As I’m recounting to colleagues the story of my discovery of a reference to a similar housing layout in the pages of a seventy year old book called Europe Rehoused, I look over to the book shelf as I’m speaking to find the very book in question looking back at me. I’d been sat next to it for nearly ten years without even realizing it was there.

The text doesn’t expand on the specific house types shown, focusing rather on the general urban design climate in Sweden at the time; but the extra info on the plans provided was reassuring. We were in agreement about fundamental room positions and relationships, regardless of slightly changing space criteria since these examples were first designed. I pressed on with the design and the preparation of a planning application that would take the chevron approach to housing layout from Sweden in the early 20th Century to Stourbridge in the early 21st.

A full set of images can be seen here: Queens Road, Stourbridge

(the images shown are taken from the initial 3D modelling work – the wind turbines shown were subsequently removed due to concern about cost and their likely poor performance in an urban area)

A full copy of the design and access statement is available as a PDF: Saw-tooth housing. As well as street elevations and a video on Vodpod.

I’m delighted to report that it got full support by the planning department, the design and access statement (including a reference to Europe Rehoused) is, I’m told, to be cited as a model example for the borough, and the construction is now about 80% complete. I’ll post some pictures when the scaffold comes down. If you want to buy one and get on the property ladder with the help of a shared ownership agreement, get in touch with Black Country Housing.

I’ve described this project in some length for a couple of reasons, firstly because I think it makes for an interesting snapshot of how we work (let’s call it an extension to my previous post: a day in the life), but most importantly because it confirmed a growing concern I’ve had for the last few years about the trajectory of contemporary housing design in the hands of architects of my generation.

Almost overnight, practices everywhere have started to look for opportunities to add housing projects to their CVs. For a multitude of reasons – economic boom, media attention, McCloud, housing need, keyworker and cost of living debates, environment concerns – housing is once again the word on everyone’s lips.

Here’s the rub: Find me an architect of my generation (I’m 32) that had an education with housing design on the curriculum. I’m guessing you can’t. Only very recently am I beginning to hear about it re-appearing on the agenda in schools of architecture. Next, combine that with the fact that the rebranding of housing as a core (and even cool) design skill has caused a lot of firms that may have traditionally sought glamour elsewhere to turn their hand to the plight of ‘keyworkers’ needing ‘affordable’ housing. The result, I fear, is the reason why over the last few years I’ve seen some worrying examples of projects that repeat the mistakes of the past.

I’ve stood in front of winning competition entries that could have been drawn 40 years ago. I’ve walked around completed schemes that have exactly the same problems as estates from the 50s that I was being encouraged – by residents – to tear down only the week before. I’ve seen worse on the cover of the AJ*.

A recurrent theme here has been (and will continue to be) the benefit I’ve received from the teaching I’ve had from those around me who’ve been here before and are still wearing the t-shirt. I’ll summarise this final post by recounting a question put to me by one of them when I left the school of architecture and started practicing…

Ask an architect to design a Panda compound in a zoo and they’ll go away and spend months researching their habits, needs and precedents before they dare put pencil to paper. If you ask them to design a house for their grandmother, how long do you think they’ll spend on research?

You’re a human, right? You’ve lived in a house? What more do you need to know? If my experience with just this modest scale project alone is anything to go by, the answer is plenty more.

Screw the pandas, they’re too lazy to even procreate anyway.

—–Notes:
* Not, I hasten to add, during the reign of Kieran Long and the lovely new housing friendly AJ.
(see also Part 1 + Part 2)

For the last few months I’ve been working on a project to refurbish 6 terrace properties in Newcastle-Under-Lyme. We won the project after a competitive bid last summer and today sees the launch of the public web site charting the progress of the work. As you might expect, I’ll be recording the project on the eocterrace web site using a number of blogging techniques such as a written diary, a phonecam blog, flickr images and del.icio.us links.

ecoterrace.co.uk

The goal is to substantially increase the environmental performance of the properties and help take part in the progress of the national debate about the importance of improving the quality of the country’s existing housing stock.

One of the most interesting aspects of the project will be the post-occupancy monitoring work we will be completing in collaboration with the guys from Hockerton Housing Projects. In a couple of years time we will hopefully have something valuable to say about the actual results of some of the design techniques and products, as well as an understanding of what it’s like to live in a property like this.

I’ll be covering it in more detail here soon, but if you tune into Radio Stoke this morning at 11:20 GMT (it’s available over the web) you’ll hear my colleague Mike Menzies give a brief interview about the project out on site.

(thanks to Adam Freetly from ArchGFX for his help on the WordPress tweaking and Mat Brown from moblog.co.uk for input on the phonecam RSS… now I just have to create some content!)

I’ve made some disparaging comments about Daniel Libeskind in the past, but their critical value was admittedly low as I’d never visited one of his projects in person. A recent trip to Manchester gave me the opportunity to put that right by visiting the Imperial War museum.

So here’s the thing; no matter what you feel about the heavy handed symbolism or the worrying repetition of familiar forms in disparate projects, there’s no escaping the fact that the guy can make spaces that, technically speaking, get you right in the gut. An architecture of the stomach, or heart if you prefer a more romantic reference, that seems all the more impressive coming from an architect who spent so much of his career working with an architecture of the mind.

Although one has to admit that it’s impossible to distinguish the impact of the excellent exhibition contents from the impact of the architecture (which some would argue is the final measure of success), the fact remains that the Imperial War Museum is an immensely moving building.

Sat in the cafe having lunch, attempting to play devil’s advocate to my new found admiration, I was struck by the idea that the counter argument might be that disjunction, disharmony and formal conflict is easy. That clumsy, clashing, calamitous volumes and surfaces are no more difficult to create than throwing a teapot from a window*. This is hardly a building of firmness, commodity or delight, so is it the sign of someone getting away with getting it wrong? So what does it take to ensure you make the wrong moves at the right time? The answer, I realised, can be found in the work of Les Dawson.

A British comedian of the 70s and early 80s, one of Les Dawson’s comedy routines involved him playing the piano very badly. Except that behind the bum notes it was widely understood that he was in fact a very talented pianist. It was exactly that talent that meant he could play the piano badly with just the right comedic timing. He had to know how to get it right before he could so successfully get it wrong.

Daniel Libeskind is the Les Dawson of architecture.

Should further proof be required I offer the following two quotes; the first is from wikipedia (with only a minor, but crucial adjustment from me):

He loved to undercut his own fondness for high culture. For example, he was a talented pianist but developed a gag where he would begin to play a familiar piece such as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. After he had established the identity of the piece being performed, Libeskind would introduce hideously wrong notes without appearing to realise that he had done so, meanwhile smiling unctuously and apparently relishing the accuracy and soul of his own performance.

The second – a Dawson gag – demonstrates the parallel between Dawson’s propensity for crashing the high brow into the low brow and Libeskind’s journey from ‘paper architect’ to builder:

In awe I watched the waxing moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an ambered chariot towards the ebony void of infinite space wherein the tethered belts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I looked at all this I thought…I must put a roof on this lavatory.

Perhaps even, this last conflict is the very definition of architecture itself; valiantly riding the ambered chariot across the sky while waving a ball cock over your head. Libeskind is clearly onto something, I shall invoke the spirit of Les Dawson in all my future work.

* pieces of a broken teapot were used to create the form of the four three shards of the Imperial War Museum building envelope.

Architecture Week is upon us and we’ll be taking part in Open Practice in Birmingham again this year. Axis Design will be opening it’s doors to the public on Friday 22nd June to talk about our latest work; the topic this year is How Green Is Our Space? We’ve had a very successful year developing a number of projects with a strong green agenda and I’m excited about the opportunity to get some comments and input from visitors.

Unfortunately, to my bitter disappointment, we weren’t included in this year’s paper catalogue. After a few moments of cursing and wondering whether to call it off for fear of lack of advertising I gathered my thoughts and realised I had a secret weapon: You.

Please, help me spread the word and flex my Google muscles a little. Pass it on, tell your friends, link me up – I’ve put an entry on the office web site with more details, please drop it into whatever blogging, bookmarking, digging, tumbling tools you have at your command:

Architecture Week Open Practice Day

Better yet, come and see me next week, I’d love to show you some of the work we’ve been doing. Failing that, I have a shiny new digital whiteboard to play with and if you’re lucky I’ll get some biscuits in.

Continuing in the yearly tradition, I’ve picked out a few items (after the jump) from the Architecture Week events list for the West Midlands. Work your way through as many as you can and then come and tell me about them when you visit next Friday! Last year’s podcasts and Google Earth route is still available to help you find your way to the office.
Read the rest of this entry »

A break from the standard blogging currency of comment, criticism, conjecture and pointing elsewhere … here’s a series of entries about one of my own projects and how it’s been confirming my growing concern about my generation’s appreciation (or rather, lack thereof) of the history of housing design:

Part 1: to a degree

In November last year I was asked by a client to develop a housing layout for a small site on the edge of Stourbridge in the West Midlands. The brief, set by Black Country Housing Association, called for an ‘exemplar’ environmentally friendly scheme. A layout had already been prepared by others using three pairs of semi-detached properties but large storm and foul drains had subsequently been found to be running through the centre of the site and they required a substantial ‘wayleave’ (zone to be kept free of building) on either side. Very little room for development was remaining.

Can you continue the ‘green’ agenda of the initial scheme? Could we still achieve the same number of units on half the site? Can we have a plan by next week? Can you note that the brief asks for ‘award winning architecture’?

Yes, yes, yes and – depending on your definition of award, winning, or for that matter, architecture – yes:

We have a tried and tested technique in our office. It’s a simple thing but it’s value is often overlooked by those obsessed with the black/white, and/or, left/right, x/y world of the perpendicular. It’s called, for want of a more poetic name, 45 degree planning. It’s come to my rescue often. So often in fact that it risks becoming a style rather than a technique, but for the moment I shall stand by the assertion that I’m understanding the action rather than just reaching for a result. It’s a simple thing but instead of its more popular sibling – 90 degrees – it seems to require a certain deftness. It feels more like a vector. A point on a line of infinite possibilities, rather than a line between two points of known characteristics (*cough* thank you D & G *cough*).

Three existing conditions leapt off the site plan in that first meeting to create the response above: the position of the neighbouring house to the north, the narrow space forced on us by the drainage restrictions and the north-south orientation of the site. The last one creating the need for an appreciation of the solar gain to be equally enjoyed by each property to both front and back, and the potential heat loss to be avoided in the north.

A blustery weekend in a coastal cottage with pencil, paper and Jane Eyre on the TV and it developed into this:

The crucial factor in the development beyond that initial site plan proved to be the roof. You can see me noodling about with it on the first 3 sheets (noodling – verb: to apply, through subtle, successive iterations, the full extent of one’s many years of architecture experience to a design problem). The result is a type of scissor roof arrangement in which each plot has two different pitches, one half of which connects to the following plot as the houses step back. We get visual continuity and interest out of the wider street scene, irrespective of level changes, that also creates an opportunity/need to deal with the intersection detail directly above the centre of the floor plan. Ventilation possibilities? Check. Natural light inlet? Check. Character? Innovation? Place making? Check, check and (hello CABE) check.

Returning to the office that week I discussed the layout and house design with older, wiser colleagues. Go and take a look at the work of Eric Lyons, they said. Eric who? said I, not knowing his work. The following week brought the announcement that the RIBA would be mounting an exhibition of his work at Portland Place. The coincidence seemed too great to ignore. I booked train tickets.

Coming up: Part 2 – The RIBA and their terrible muffins

A few weeks ago I read an entry on the always informative downloadsquad.com blog that pointed me to the Google Co-op project. It was a how-to explaining an easy way to construct a list of sites to include in a custom search engine by importing your XML list of sites from your RSS reader. The geek in me who still remembers the day his father came home with a Spectrum 48k couldn’t resist experimenting, so today I’m launching the no2self architecture and design blog search:

no2self.net/blogsearch.

Currently it’s built around the following blogs:

• architecturesketches.blogspot.com
• aggregat456.blogspot.com
• www.brickonomist.net
• www.bryanboyer.com
• www.cityofsound.com
• rob.annable.co.uk
• thingsmagazine.net
• archiblog.info
• no2self.net
• archidose.blogspot.com
• archinect.com
• b2architecture.blogspot.com
• bldgblog.blogspot.com
• www.bryanboyer.com
• www.bronxelf.com
• developingnews.blogspot.com
• doyouwantcoffee.blogspot.com
• www.elasticspace.com
• transstudio.com/tm/
• www.gravestmor.com
• www.christopherdgray.co.uk
• inhabitat.com
• www.interactivearchitecture.org
• javierarbona.net/javlog.html
• www.landliving.com
• lifewithoutbuildings.net
• rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp
• www.rotational.co.uk
• www.spaceandculture.org
• www.strangeharvest.com/mt/
• tesugen.com
• www.brutaljoint.com/blog/
• www.resarch.net
• www.tropolism.com
• varnelis.net/blog
• massengale.typepad.com/venustas
• www.doorsofperception.com
• partiv.blogspot.com
• www.strangeharvest.com
• www.brickonomist.net
• www.neighbourhoods.typepad.com/neighbourhoods
• interconnected.org/home/
• schulzeandwebb.com/blog/

I’ve undoubtedly overlooked many worthy sites so let me know in the comments who I’m missing. I expect to use this in a couple of ways. Aside from the obvious ability to refine new topic searches to specific sites you trust and admire, I think it will also prove very useful for mining for old vaguely remembered entries that passed by you in an RSS blur.

I had to give it a description so I took the line of least resistance and just went for ‘architecture and design’ but this doesn’t really reflect the variety of ideas and topics you’ll find in the above sites. Be open minded with other suggestions too and tell me about thinkers/writers who could bring something fresh to the search engine.

A few final entries about where we’ve been, before we work out where we’re going. Here’s a summary of some of the entries perhaps worth a revisit from the old URL, loosely gathered into a few different categories.

First up…

Architecture and Design

• Architectural Advent
• 24 days of gifts
• Manplan 3
• Volume 3 of seminal 60s issue of AR
• Modern Methods
• Farrell and Grimshaw article from 70′s
• Rainbow Climbing High
• Sony Bravia vs. Richard Rogers
• Brighton Memory Palace
• Commended Euroclad drawing competition entry
• Making Urban Places
• salvaging lecture notes on Urban Design
• The Kids Are Alright – Serpentine Pavilion
• Review of 2006 pavilion by Koolhaas
• Everest Base Camp
• Competition entry
• Le Urban Design
• Gorden Cullen’s TOwnscape meets Pepe le Pew
• Jane Jacobs – 3 rules
• RIP Jane Jacobs
• AR blog review
• no2self mention in AR!
• NLA public comments
• photos of the public comments at NLA centre
• Tyre swings
• good play equipment design
• Half Life + Quake modelling
• architectural modelling in game engines
• MADA Spam exhibition
• 2005 exhibition in Birmingham
• Follow the Light (Walsall Gallery)
• Photo review of gallery
• Townscape
• Cullen’s Townscape sketch
• Mornings in Florence
• Ruskin words with holiday snaps
• Manplan 2
• Volume 2 of seminal 60s issue of AR
• Will Alsop lecture
• Notes from Alsop lecture
• Manplan 1
• Volume 1 of seminal 60s issue of AR
• Architect’s font
• my handwriting fontified
• Incredibles furniture
• Scans from 50s furniture design book
• Ikea again
• Thoughts on Ikea
• Now that says chair
• Thumbs down to Marc Newson
• Decay by 60dB
• Thoughts of reverb times
• Info Pimp Diagram
• The birth of my alter ego – eversion. Shortlisted design comp entry
• That Building – Selfridges, Birmingham
• Critique of Future Systems building
• I am a schmuck – Design Codes
• Do we need design codes?
• Deconstruction and Tea
• Tschumi meets Adams

Architectural Advent day 24:

I saved the most fitting sheet of Letraset till last. Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to everyone, I’ll see you in 2007.

A quick recap:

1. Letraset 1982
2. Rietveld Chair dimensions
3. Letraset 1966
4. Passive solar glazing
5. Driftwood Ergonomics
6. The Machine at MOMA
7. Letraset 1966 – 2
8. Planning Process
9. Farrell Grimshaw interview
10. Letraset 1977
11. Outrigger extension
12. Outrigger extension v2
13. Letraset Love
14. AR covers 1960s
15. AR covers 1970s
16. AD Book Review
17. Letraset 1982
18. Good Gift Christmas Card
19. AR covers 1980s
20. Living Bath
21. Manplan 3
22. Manplan 4
23. Manplan 5

Architectural Advent day 20:

From The Bathroom by Alexander Kira – The Living Bath:

A fascinating book of extensive research on bathroom use. Although admittedly we mostly only reach for it these days when feeling the need to impress in students the value of good ergonomic/psychological analysis. I spared you from the in depth exploratory diagrams of optimum defacation positions in favour of this lovely proposal guaranteed to break the ice at any party. Would be well placed on one of the previous Letraset sheets I think.

Architectural Advent Day 17:

On yer bike.