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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)

Proving that blogging can be a slow medium too, here’s the second part to an entry written almost a year ago…

December 2006, London, RIBA HQ. Flicking through the pages of the book to accompany the Eric Lyons exhibition at the RIBA, I send a text to Rod: In the RIBA cafe, muffins are terrible. A quaint, pre-twitter messaging technique that now seems obscenely intrusive.

Not all muffins you understand, just these ones, in that moment. Taking the edge off an otherwise enjoyable exhibition. Criticized in reviews, fairly I think, for being little more than a version of the book blown up and pasted on the wall, I was nevertheless glad I made the trip to see for myself. Sedate, linear, easy to follow, suburban even, I made the most of having the time to soak it up slowly; something that my parental duties usually prevent me from doing.

Colleagues had recommended I look at Lyons after I designed a project that reminded them of his work (see part 1). Pouring over the images on the wall I certainly had to (proudly) admit there were moments when we spoke in the same suburban dialect; the same vernacular language, but a direct reference didn’t jump out at me.

Until I opened the book. Muffin in one hand, page 30 in the other, I found the connection.

And, not for the first time, I had to admit that without the benefit of input from older, wiser colleagues I would have continued to believe that I’d reinvented the wheel. The image shown in the brilliant essay by Alan Powers is taken from a book published in 1938 called Europe Rehoused and is cited, along with the work of Trystan Edwards, as a likely influence on the young Lyons. Shades of it can perhaps be seen in the plans for New Ash Green or Templemere.

I wonder with increasing regularity, how often my peers, currently finding their feet in senior positions in offices across the UK are fortunate enough to be directed to moments like this. Helped, gently through the Total Persepective Vortex of housing design history and reminded of where we’ve come from.

Humbled and reassured I went back to the exhibition with Rod (and his camera) and before long we homed in on the drawings. All two of them. This is where the exhibition missed out, there simply wasn’t enough drawings. Surely there are piles of them in storage somewhere?

I’ve been thinking about this drawing and the importance of landscape to Lyons work ever since.

Continuing the theme of slow blogging, I offer it to Sue Thomas from Writing and the Digital Life as a possible answer to her question from December 2006: “How might one build a physical groupspace for work and leisure according to Web 2.0 principles?”

The answer is found in landscape. The communal spaces between the private thresholds of the Span houses engender social networking. There’s no need for me to expand on this further because, thanks to the unique way the BBC is funded, it’s already been written up for me. Look:

He placed three basic principles at the heart of the Span projects:

• community as the goal
• shared landscape as the means, and
• modern, controlled design as the expression.

Many developments focus only on the creation of private domestic space - they treat the area beyond the front door as incidental.

But Eric Lyons turned this on its head. Each development found ways of building the homes around central or shared green spaces. The architect’s aim was to engineer a sense of community by forcing people to interact.

from the BBC article: A house like no other?

Treat Span as interchangeable with web 2.0 and Eric Lyons as interchangeable with your favourite interaction designer and you’ll see what I mean.

Could there be a relationship between the form of the media we are using and the wide ranging appeal of some of the sites that curate the analogous topic? Landscape, blogging, topography, delicious, geology, fffound, urbanity, flickr - medium and content seamlessly linked.

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?

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!)

Recently received by e-mail, here are some alternative lyrics for use during any karaoke event over the coming festive period:

THE ARCHITECT SONG

(to the tune of I Will Survive)

At first I was afraid, I was petrified
thinking I could not design what you had specified
But then I spent too many years redrawing what you just built wrong
and I grew strong
and I learned how to get along
And now you’re back
With more floor space
I just walked in to find you here
with that QS look upon your face
I should have changed that stupid plan
I should have made you pay that fee
If I had known for just one second
you’d be back to bother me
Oh go now go,
delete that door
move the wall around now
you don’t wanna pay for it anymore
Were you the one who tried to break me with your RFIs
you think I’d crumble you think I’d lay down and die?
Oh no not I
I will survive….

Some work on a lecture I recently gave about Secured by Design (more on that coming up) produced a spin-off diagram worth sharing. Unashamedly following the Indexed model (what’s the formal name for this diagram type?), it pitches three elements of urban design (accommodation, people, transport) against each other and marks intersections, inputs and outputs.

What I’m interested in here is the way this type of diagram turns boundaries or edges - lines - into space to inhabit, both intellectually and physically. Territory that is usually microscopically small, like the surface tension between liquid and its container - such as the boundaries that bump into each other between a path alongside a garden, or a pavement alongside a road - is ripped open, forming a space (A, B and C) that must be negotiated and moved through, rather than stepped over.

I like the idea that these rifts, as Jack Harkness might call them, have a temporal viscosity, as Fassin Taak might say, that could range from foggy pea-soup to sticky treacle. I like the fact that the intersections, the crossing of streams, as Egon Spengler might say, rather than “…causing “total protonic reversal”, destroying the gate and removing Gozer…”, denote the rainwater outlets. The gutters. The connection to the wider infrastructure beyond the diagram.

At the end of all this, when I’m cross-hatching the bits in the middle, I’m defining that qualitative quantity ever-present in urban design discussion: density.

Update: Let’s be more explicit with our hyperlinks: the foggy link is an overlap with some recent posts by Adam Greenfield commenting and expanding on the work of Steven Flusty - see this post also: Foggy, further to Flusty’s five.

Also, I realise now that this was merely a continuation of my previous posts, Vacant Space and Theory about practice.

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.

Do you hang out with architects? Need a reading list to help you get by at parties? Don your black roll neck jumper and tuck a few of these in your satchel. Here’s the latest update to the chart of most commonly shared books over at the librarything.com group, Architext:

Most commonly shared books (weighted): What is architecture? : an essay on landscapes, buildings, a… by Paul Shepheard (10), Towards a new architecture by Le Corbusier (17), Delirious New York : a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan by Rem Koolhaas (14), Complexity and contradiction in architecture by Robert Venturi (12), Small, medium, large, extra-large : Office for Metropolitan … by Rem Koolhaas (13), The image of the city by Kevin Lynch (14), Theory and Design in the First Machine Age by Reyner Banham (9), The poetics of space by Gaston Bachelard (17), Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Sym… by Robert Venturi (11), Experiencing architecture by Steen Eiler Rasmussen (10)

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 quick note to point out that the brief for this year’s Euroclad competition has been launched.

Last year was Brighton, this year your site visit will take you to the moon.