no2self.net

A long time ago I wrote a blog entry on the back of a paper bag. It was a review of a chapter from a Calvino book – the author who, as Kieran Long once twittered, architects always turn to when they want to appear arty and sensitive. At the risk of further proving that theory I can honestly say it remains one of the most satisfying posts I’ve ever written. Lately I’ve been trying to get our office to think about paper (and bags) more.

For most of the latter half of 2009 I was working on the city’s new housing development project, the Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust. Like many other local authorities around the country, Birmingham hurried to stake its claim for a share of the funding made available directly to local authorities for the first time in many years. Alongside another local practice we had 5 sites to take from nothing to a detailed planning submission in about 6 weeks. This is an insanely short amount of time. Weekly design team meetings with numerous departments ensued and the process was, to put it mildly, intense. Turning to others for moral support, encouragement and inspiration was an absolute must; as was the occasional bottle of Rioja.

Giles Lane helped by offering me a new notebook. Not the regulation issue Moleskine, almost as cliched as the Calvino reference, but a bespoke notebook just for us which we could make with our own bare hands. Giles and Proboscis have been using their Diffusion notebook format in consultation work and arts projects for some time. Printed (crucially) on single sided A4 the format is carefully designed to cut and fold quickly into a small, robust A6 book that can be either landscape or portrait.

Here’s a video showing how to fold one:

Diffusion eBooks from stml on Vimeo.

Got it?

We made a blank one, experimenting with different templates to assist with writing and drawing and I carried it around in my jeans pocket for most of the 6 weeks, proving that the design is perfectly robust enough despite only being crafted from a few folds. What I’m most interested in though is what happens when it’s finished. I can unfold it, and because I can unfold it I can easily scan it in and share it with others or work over it again with other tools. Chunks of it would quickly get extracted and thrown into presentations to the client and ultimately some of the sketches informed the design and access statement that went with the planning application. That’s interesting; the ease and speed with which you can align the analogue with the digital.

Then there was Owen Hatherley. I asked Owen to help me fill in the back story for the other team members and make sure we knew where we’d been before we decided where we wanted to go. He wrote a short essay on the history of municipal housing, talking us through projects such as Eric Lyon’s Span housing and Sheffield’s Gleadless Valley. Initially I gave it to Birmingham City Council in standard A4 format, but later when self-publishing a booklet became possible with Gile’s bookleteer.com I could create my own notebook, this time by uploading a PDF then getting it back immediately in the Diffusion format to fold and issue myself. You can download a copy yourself from the diffusion.org library. That’s interesting too, I self-published a book.

More recently, when the dust had settled and it came time to tell other people what we’ve been doing lately at the West Midlands Built Environment and Design Fair I published a newspaper in about 48 hours with the help of newspaperclub.co.uk.

Like bookleteer.com, newspaperclub.co.uk connects a web interface to a production process but this time it gives you the power to command a newspaper printing facility usually reserved for massive print runs. You can upload a PDF of any design as long as it follows the template size or you can use the newpaperclub interface to upload text and images from your machine or source either from other locations on the web such as blog entries or flickr pages.

I’ve rarely seen a web service in early beta stage nail the interface design so succesfully first time. It adjusts the 4 column layout and shows a clear snapshot each time you make an adjustment. I pulled in text from here at no2self.net and lifted images from my practice flickr account and turned out a 12 page newspaper in little more than an afternoon. 2 days and £120 later I had 100 beautiful objects to give away to clients and colleagues. We gave them out along with bookleteers by the staff in paper bags that had been rubber stamped with our logo.

So it’s a useful PR tool and in the same way Moo mini-cards still do after all these years it’ll help me cause a stir in a generally conservative, predictable industry; but what else? What interests me most about tools like newspaperclub is how I might be able to connect it with the hyperlocal debate and the work a practice like ours does with neighbourhoods like Blurton in cities like Stoke on Trent. If I can plug the outputs from amateur community blogging quickly and cheaply into professional looking trusted formats like a newspaper then the credibility, the reach and the power of the voices being supported become reinforced. Not only that but you can leave it on a bus for someone else to read and you’re not likely to do that with an iPad.

Before you wrap your chips in it however, there’s something else you could do when you retrieve it from the bus. The bookleteer experience teaches the value of being able to easily send the paper format you produced with the digital tools back into pixels to be worked on again. There are more layers to be added, further annotation to be inserted and new ideas to be traced.

When I spoke about the blurtonvision.co.uk project at Be2camp Birmingham last year I finished by enthusing about the Walking Papers project created to allow people to annotate simple paper copies of their chosen section of Open Street Map. Once complete they can be scanned in again and traced over thanks to the QR code that aligns the analogue with the digital automatically. Self publishing formats like bookleteer and newspaperclub are perfect for this type of process, flipping constantly between screen and paper (and indeed the experiments at SXSW have begun to explore this), but what I’ve come to realise is that I need the process to take place at many scales. What I need is a walking papers process that works on a building scale.

This collaboration between paper and screen knows no limits. It won’t care about file formats and it couldn’t give a damn if you’re a Mac or that Windows 7 was your idea. There’ll be no more excuses for a lack of communication.

And I’ll be able to go back to writing on paper bags.

Of course back in the day, the oldest and wisest of us knew that instinctively.

(picture circa 1997, taken from 2005 blog entry “Death of a Drawing Board“)

I hinted at one the projects I’ve been working on in a recent post and followed it up with a presentation at Ecobuild. The full write up is on the new BSD blog and images available at Slideshare, but I should offer an excerpt and some further notes here.

Vision-lozells.org represents my first attempt to get closer to the ideas in Dan Hill’s ‘Personal Well Tempered Environment’ concept and the subsequent notes in my own post, ‘Up On The Roof’. I’ve been collaborating with the guys at Slider Studio to develop the next stage in our investigations into online consultation work; but this time, by developing the platform they created for the self-build market, we’ve moved into the third dimension.

You know what I’m into. I want to start plugging it in to stuff. Getting data from the real world in and out of it. The notes below and the Ecobuild presentation I gave start to describe how we might do that using solutions most of you will know well.

I’ll be spending this weekend at our last public open day for ecoterrace.co.uk, followed by an event with the residents of blurtonvision.co.uk to start our version of the Open Street Map / public data mashup. Unfortunately this means I won’t be able to attend the Homecamp event on Saturday and get more connected with the folks developing exactly the ideas I’m pitching here. However I will be able to come along to the next Be2camp and do my bit to draw connections between the social bits, the media bits and the home bits. Come along and criticize/help.

BIM and Social Media

Axis Design and Slider Studio have created a new tool for Birmingham City Council called YouCanPlan Lozells. Slider’s ESP software has been resigned to suit the challenges of the diverse people and places of community consultation work. The software will be distributed via both CD and online to over 2500 households. It can be used both online and offline to ensure it can be used in any venue, but we hope that the benefits of the online mode means that people using it from home can make the most of both the live updates to proposals in the coming months, as well as using survey and chat tools to tell Birmingham City Council what they think about the designs being proposed by the city’s urban design team.

At its first public test during an event in the local park it was well received. In particular by the local teenagers who instantly took to the interface and chat tools. Making contact and building enthusiasm with the younger generations is often one of the biggest challenges with consultation work so in this case we hope that we’ve created something that will help us hear the voices of the future generations and perhaps bring some parents with them, curious to see what their children are using. Whilst the ability to consult with people from the comfort of their own home is huge step towards a more representative mandate from a neighbourhood, we’ve always described this as a tool to supplement the vital face to face debates that need to go on. With that in mind the software can be used in offline environments and the investment in 3D modelling can be used to produce rapid prototyped physical models that match the software .

What of the future and the implications for BIM? How can this tool help us manage data about a building or street? In its current format the model and software is a framework that can take inputs and changes in a top down fashion from stakeholders whose roles are well understood. It will receive new models and designs of steadily improving detail and can display images and links to other sources of info provided by local authorities and RSLs, but what of the community? How do we build a system that allows data rising from the streets – in a bottom up fashion – to manifest itself in the model and record live information about the neighbourhood. Our experience with web 2.0 tools and consultation work tells us that there are tools available to help us and they come under the title ‘social media’. Let’s look at a few examples and then imagine how YouCanPlan could use them to bring BIM, post-occupancy monitoring and community consultation together.

Pachube, developed by architect Usman Haque, is a service that aims to broker data for you. It takes information from physical objects that can record things, tidies it up, then spits out the results in a number of useful formats that you can plug into (or point at) another location. The simplest example is electricity meters. I have a meter at my office recording the number of kW used. It sends the info to Pachube allowing me to access it from anywhere and do anything with it. A number of visualisation methods have already been created by others, allowing me to either simply display the info online or feed it into other tools such as the AMEE carbon emissions calculator, letting me know how many tonnes (gulp!) of carbon I’m churning out.

Another social media tool that takes simple inputs and creates powerful outputs is Twitter. Unless you’ve been living under a particularly analogue rock lately, you’ll have probably heard of this web site. Twitter simply wants you to tell it what you’re doing. No, really, that’s it. Just tell it what you’re doing and do it within 140 characters. I’ve been using it for a couple of years for keeping in touch with like-minded architects and bloggers and more recently using it as a tool for dispatching the lyrics of one of my favourite bands one line at a time. Others, like Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, have found ways to use it for recording more than just bon mots and satirical one liners. By plugging it into all the activities around the house Andy has found a way to make his home twitter. A live feed of building information as devices switch on, doors open and phones ring.

Mapping is an important part of information modelling; the data is most useful when tied accurately to location. However, mapping can be a prohibitive field as commercial restrictions can often make extensive availaibility and re-use of map information costly. Open Street Map allows us to avoid this problem by providing up to date maps that are completely free to use and adapt. The wikipedia of mapping, Open Street Map is by the people and for the people, created by volunteers with GPS devices all over the world. Its open source nature allows us to look at ways of combining the info with other tools such as phonecam sites like moblog.co.uk or flickr.com. Marking the position of a photo – an option increasingly done automatically by some phone models – allows us to track the latest events and activities in a neighbourhood visually. This has been succesfully developed, alongside other services such as planning alerts and transport links, by Tom Chance and Thomas Wood and their interactive map of Sutton.

Tools like these will turn platforms like YouCanPlan into a virtual environment augmented by reality. By allowing the model to plug into other information modelling systems the buildings will convey live information about the current state of a house or street or neighbourhood. The data shown in the model will help local authorties record and assess public information, and the residents will be able to keep in touch with the activities of friends and family and show landlords and local authorities what the most pressing issues are right now. The recording and public display of energy information for a household introduces the possibility of encouraged energy saving through competition. Who has saved the most money in the street this week? Who has created the most carbon?

The successful reduction of carbon emissions in the built environment to meet the targets of 2050 is entirely dependent on an improvement in performance informed by regular post-occupancy monitoring. BIM can continue to play a vital role in this process beyond the completion of the construction and there are powerful social media tools available to help make it happen. A creative approach to the field and an open mind to the power of open data formats will help the profession to share knowledge and avoid the usual debates about interoperability. We need to improve the communication between the designers and users throughout the life of the building, not just as we hand over the keys.

I’ll be parachuting into the capital on Friday to take part in the first be2camp unconference. I’m really looking forward to being able to properly announce one of my latest projects: YouCanPlan Lozells.

A few weeks ago, Birmingham City Council put out an invitation to tender for an extremely innovative and ambitious proposal that would allow the residents of Lozells to comment on the plans for their community through a dedicated virtual environment. The bespoke software was required to be accessible both on and offline, allow the user to explore their neighbourhood in 3D, adjust the model themselves and make comparisons between design options then submit feedback to inform the next stage of development. It should show varying levels of detail, from the widest to the smallest and it should be ready to go in a matter of weeks.

It was a tall order, but I’ve managed to meet it with the help of the guys at Slider Studio. We’ve been collaborating on the development of their YouCanPlan software to create a model better suited to wider public consultation and aim to have the new version in the hands of the Lozells residents by December. In its original outing YouCanPlan was designed for the self-procurement market and saw its first big test during a competition featured in the AJ. The challenge for our Lozells project has been to improve usability for a more diverse user group and test the way hardware restrictions meet the breadth of parameters you need to accomodate in urban design critique.

Michael Kohn from Slider will be joining me at be2camp to talk about what we’ve achieved so far during the afternoon session of stream 2, so please come along and join in the debate about how (or if!) web 2.0 can play a part in the built environment. There’s also going to be a Pecha Kucha session in the evening and I think it still needs more participants…

Still here. Like a Norwegian Blue, I’ve just been resting. I return with some summer frippery.

First, another day in the life post, since the past one proved quite popular. This time delivered via twitter, an offering made even more poignant perhaps by yesterday’s news that they’ve pulled the plug on the UK.

So, from the bottom up¹:

I’m going to keep these up for as long as I see other blogs in this industry complaining about what a career in architecture is really like outside the cozy world of academia. Too many posts these days about how rarely you actually get to Design, or how undervalued the client makes you feel, or how rubbish everyone else is.

Cheer up you miserable buggers², your career is what you make it.

Next a repost of summer reading and listening suggestions that Phil Clark at Building magazine asked me to help with. You can see many more on his original post.

Books:

100 Houses 100 Architects: Editor – Gennaro Postiglione

Refreshingly critical coffee table picture book that even has some
floor plans. Worth it for Till/Wigglesworth house alone. Euro-centric
cast list means it misses Charles Moore though.

Bay Area Houses: Editor – Sally Woodbridge

Making up for lack of Charles Moore in previous with this one. Perfect
case studies in beautiful suburban housing. Effortless English Arts
and Crafts sensibilities jump the turn of the last century Atlantic
and learn to loosen up in the Californian sunshine. Expect to see
timber shingles in my next project.

This Is A Man – Truce: Primo Levi

There’s a generation of Italian writers who cannot be surpassed. Well,
two at least – Levi and Calvino. Levi tells the story of his time in
Auschwitz and in doing so defines the furthest corners of every human
soul in history. Nothing can prepare you for the visceral contents.

Music

The Red Album: Weezer

Flawless grunge is an oxymoron. If that’s so this the best damn
oxymoron I ever heard. Another perfect album from the guys who started
with little more than a poorly knitted jumper. Includes an ideal
soundtrack for architects: ‘I Am The Greatest Man That Ever Lived’.
That was a joke. Maybe.

Seldom Seen Kid: Elbow

I’m praying with all my atheist might that Elbow don’t get struck by
the Mercury Music Prize curse. If they win we all have to promise not
to make a fuss and let them carry on crafting such heart stopping
moments of metaphysical revelation. Not to mention the moments of
(less-than-meta) physical revelation that you can scream along with
them perfectly; as long as you’re in the car on your own. With the
windows up.

Piazza, New York Catcher: Belle & Sebastian

A novel in one track. I think I finally ‘get’ Belle & Sebastian. Took
me bloody long enough.

notes:
1. ‘designing a house for myself…’ – watch this space, I’m currently making a bid for a plot of land
2. this month’s Monty Python quote quota has now been met. Next month: The Two Ronnies

Time to put my money where my mouth is, as they say. Here’s the fourth and concluding part of the ‘architecture re-housed’ trilogy – photos of the completed houses.

Of course, although I’ve been quoted on the Building web site this week about the need to focus on existing housing, that doesn’t mean I’m not delivering new build as well. The trick is to make sure you’re getting that right too. It’s a modest scheme, there were some changes along the way, but I’m very pleased with the end result.
For the eco geeks among you these properties scored an ecohomes ‘exellent’ rating and a SAP rating of 87 – band B.

Further images and the original sketches are in a flickr set: Queens Road

Despite booking my tickets late, the session on reducing carbon emissions in existing housing was one of the few that still had some places. A few days later, when the proceedings were kicked off by Alan Simpson MP, there were still some empty chairs. Perhaps, I twittered, refurbishment work just isn’t glamorous enough.

If that’s the case, then we’re all in much bigger trouble than we’ve been led to believe. The stats on carbon emissions from existing properties make the concern about new buildings seem positively futile.

Here’s a few notes from some of the presentations I found most useful at Earls Court a few weeks ago.

Sustainable cities – what we would do if we were serious
Alan Simpson MP, Chair, Parliamentary Warm Homes Group

Simpson proved to be a rare breed of politician; seemingly walking the walk as well as talking the talk, giving an excellent overview of the key issues and speaking knowledgeably about his own efforts to improve matters. Admitting that the current government simply wasn’t doing enough, he cutely announced himself as ‘…inline early for the next manifesto…’ rather than out of line with current policy. The remainder of his speech was largely informed by his admiration for German sustainability policies; citing inter-city competition for improvement, preferential rates on energy sold back to the grid and the resulting community empowerment that has grown to an extent that it is shielded from party politics. Even a regime change wouldn’t be enough to derail it.

Carbon trading? A mythical market with mythical benefits that only benefits the financial services industry. He pointed us to cheatneutral.com for a comparison. Expanding on the topic to look at food production and consumption cultures he talked about Cuba’s enforced self-sufficiency – if they can do it why can’t we?

Further anecdotes about Germany brought us to a summary that proclaimed the need for greater sharing of ideas between countries, which he eloquently summed up by quoting Edward Thompson’s description of ‘…cargo’s of intellectual contraband…’.

Refurbishment according to building type
Dr Paul Ruyssevelt, Director, ESD

A rousing opening polemic delivered by a seasoned politician is a tough act to follow when you’re armed only with Powerpoint. Enter Ruyssevelt with the reassuring news that there is some good work being done in the refurb field already, despite the fact that Yvette Cooper suggests we should think about it for another 10 years before taking any action. (By which time the Pandas will almost certainly be dead – Ed.)

The importance of carbon emission reductions on existing stock was quickly demonstrated with the following graphs (taken from his slides, a version of which is available online here: The Built Environment is just that – BUILT!)

First, this one shows the reductions possible if we just spend the next 40 years just fiddling with new build:

Next, we see the number of existing properties per year that we need to refurbish to reach the hoped for 60% reduction by 2050.

And here’s the rate per year we have to hit if we mooch about doing nothing with existing houses for the next 10 years as Yvette Cooper suggests.

While we wait there are three main initiatives tackling housing refurb: Decent Homes, Warm Front and the Energy Efficient Committment. The level of change from these being perhaps best explained by highlighting that Decent Homes calls for only 50mm of insulation – a provision that Ruyssevelt prefers to call indecent.

Once again the Germans are doing it better with examples such as the KFW Housing Modernisation Grant. An example of a scheme benefitting from this is Freyastrasse in Mannheim:

Having spent time looking for comparable precedents for my ecoterrace project, I was delighted to learn about the next few references.

Ruyssevelt encouraged us to get in touch with John Doggart from the Sustainable Energy Academy if we had a project that might be suited to his Old Home, Super Home project.

A network of exemplar energy efficient old dwellings, which are local and publicly accessible within 15 minutes to nearly everyone in the country. Making them accessible to the public helps homeowners and local authorities to get hands-on knowledge and be inspired to transform their own housing; we plan to have 1000 exemplars within 5 years, equivalent to one per Tesco.

I’ll certainly be offering ecoterrace.co.uk. Also, May this year will see the launch of the Existing Homes Alliance, which will be seeking to build up a database of best practice refurb examples. Ruyssevelt’s very informative talk finished with a slide that reassured me that our project could prove to valuable to the rest of the industry. Of the innovative refurb schemes he was aware of, how many were being monitored to assess their performance?

—-

That dramatic action needs to be taken quickly to reduce carbon could hardly be argued, but as we listened to the discussion panel at the end of the session talk about the housing market and sustainable investment it seemed to me that something was missing from all the debates we’d heard. Spending the money on technologies like efficient boilers, solar panels and high levels of insulation may make for good carbon emission reductions, but does not result in an attractive, enjoyable place to live. Housing market renewal is equally dependent on the quality of the living environment delivering long term financial sustainability, than whether we get complete carbon emission neutrality.

In the midst of all the maths, graphs and scare stories I want to hear about housing that keeps its place in the market and continues to be desirable to buyers because of its design quality. Where’s the discussion about how to make our houses into better pieces of architecture?

cross-posted at ecoterrace.co.uk

Found on a dusty shelf…

Scrapyard Windpower Realities: Building Windmills with Recycled Parts by Hugh Piggott (1992)

Complete with diagrams:

And Basic computer program to help you design the blades:

This morning’s Today program brought the news that Help the Aged’s campaign to bring Lifetime Homes standards to all new properties appears to have made some progress:

Ministers want all new homes to include 16 features such as stairs wide enough for stairlifts, downstairs bathrooms, and room for wheelchairs to turn.

The government wants the standards to be adopted from April. If not taken up, they could become compulsory in 2013.

Lifetime Homes is a set of guidelines created by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in the early 90s. The goal is to ensure that your house could be easily adapted to meet your changing needs as you get older or suffer from an accident or illness that causes disability, or both. Here’s a diagram from the Joseph Rowntree site that shows the 16 recommendations:

Social housing for rent has demanded this system is applied for a number of years. Here in Birmingham, the council went a step further when it first came out and made it a planning requirement for any affordable scheme.

The 16 steps were also covered by Mark Brinkley over at House 2.0 a few weeks ago and this post is really an expansion of my comments there. Keeping up the good work as usual, he has also caught this morning’s report and points out the somewhat predictable lack of joined up thinking – Code For Sustainable Homes already covers it anyway.

So, which ever way you look at it, it would seem that you and I are destined to keep applying it. Most of these recommendations are a no-brainer and have little or no impact on the layout aspirations of a house, but there is a point where you move from 2 bed to 3 bed properties that can have frustrating consequences. Rule 10 – the ground floor WC – and rule 10a – the provision of space/drainage for a future shower – which comes into force on the larger property, often becomes the biggest hurdle to efficient, successful, elegant, economic floor planning.

There’s a good reason why a number of the recently published narrow terrace properties shown in the Architects’ Journal (18.10.07) are 2 bed properties. Frankly, it’s easier to do.

Enough of this, it’s beyond boring. Cutting edge interweb journalism talking about toilets for goodness sake. There are a couple of questions worth asking though.

What if making it easier to stay in your home throughout your life results in a static housing stock, making it even more difficult for first time buyers to get on the housing ladder because nobody is moving on from the smaller units. Should we be creating housing that encourages people to stay put for most of their life? A robust stock is arguably dependent on a combination of accommodation breadth and balanced level of churn.

That’s a discussion point over an individual lifetime, what about longer time periods? Of the many definitions of construction sustainability, one of my favourites is also about balance – balance between the heavy and the light, the durable and the ephemeral. One growing and shrinking, living and dying thanks to the ongoing, immovable support of the other.

To build successfully into and onto the landscape we need to think in geological timescales. Like this:

Alp Workers Settlements by Bird, Portchmouth and Russum from 1995, dragged from my memory of a wonderful lecture during my undergraduate course. Masonry chimney cores that stand for eons, watching the coming and going of the prefabricated lightweight homes over many, many lifetimes.

Yet, here in 2007 2008*, we’re still talking about showers in downstairs toilets.

* In my defence, this was at least grammatically correct as I wrote the second half of this entry last year – more slow blogging. I’d like to blame the Panda I employ to proof read, but I fired him last week when he began to show signs of lethargy and ennui.

First prize to Avril for spotting the almost deliberate mistake. She wins a ride in my time machine.

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)

Just received by e-mail, news of a new lecture series here in Birmingham:

Sadly, I can’t do Tuesday evenings. Who’s going to go on my behalf and blog about it?