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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?

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 »

From comments I’ve had in the past I think a fair number of readers and passers-by here at no2self are either students currently at schools of architecture or people considering joining a course. Driving home this evening it struck me that today’s events gave a pretty good representation of what it’s like to practice. So if you’re considering a career in architecture I offer the following as a taste of things to come.

07:30 - Leave house.

08:30 - Meeting with Police Architectural Liaison Officer to discuss crime prevention performance of my scheme. Agree to re-think some parking and highway, think about Oscar Newman’s ‘Defensible Space’.

09:00 - Meet site manager and guy with digger. Find missing manhole under abandoned kayak. Acknowledge hill, think about retaining wall tanking detail.

09:30 - Stand around in rain with structural engineer, stare down a hole provided by aforementioned guy/digger combo, rub earth between fingers, think about geology.

11:00 - Arrive at office. Phone client and explain latest development regarding confusion over legal boundary of site, who ground is to be conveyed to and what the landscape design will need to accommodate. Talk about procurement. Think about thermal mass.

12:00 - Explore timber cladding detailing. Talk about cedar, larch, Thermowood, Accoya, oak. Think about UV and rain weathering.

13:00 - Lunch with fellow architect. Debate current state of our profession. Agree that suburbia is being attacked by modernists who think the word ‘vernacular’ is a pejorative term. Think about staying in bar.

14:00 - Back to office. Draw a house. Think about today’s IT problems.

15:00 - Get telephone call announcing we’ve won bid to design environmentally friendly refurbishment of Victorian terraces in Stoke on Trent. Think about blog entry to announce it.

16:00 - E-mail environmental design consultants to discuss timetable for collaboration on detailed design of passive solar spaces we recently won funding for. Think about 3 year post occupancy research.

17:00 - Visit home of resident group chairman to discuss anecdotal survey design and local resident training to monitor success of aforementioned solar spaces. Think about the fact that he’s known me since before my children were born.

18:00 - Visit home of resident objecting to my planning application. Apologise for things I could have done better, discuss complicated commercial realities, demolition techniques and future market value of property. Find a solution. Promise client you can solve it by the end of the week. Think about going home.

21:00 - Go home.

Rod, knowing I’ve finally started reading Thousand Plateaus, flicks his del.icio.us wrist and points me towards the sweetest spot of the latest BLDGBLOG interview with Mark Wigley. It’s too good not to repeat at length here:

BLDGBLOG: There also seems to be a huge reliance today on extra-architectural theory, like Gilles Deleuze. But if students were instead locked in a room with some science fiction novels, or even a comic book, it might actually stir up some new ideas. At the very least, science fiction actually addresses architecture. So perhaps the problem is one of reference? Or even of genre? Or just specifically Deleuze?

Wigley: To cut to the chase, if it’s a choice between being locked in a room with a science fiction book or being locked in a room with Deleuze, go for the science fiction book, for sure. No doubt about it. But that’s not a choice against theory – because, in fact, science fiction is an incredibly important mode of theorizing about technology and about space, and the people who produce science fiction are often incredibly canny theorists.

So the problem in the current discussion about theory is that when people say theory they really mean a particular thing. For example, when you say: what do I think about the use of these extra-architectural theories? That makes sense only if we know what architecture is. In fact, what’s so exciting about architecture is that its limits are not clear. It’s a way of thinking; it’s not a fixed territory. In a way, you can reach what seems a long way away – to somebody like Deleuze – in order to get a feel for how those limits are moving. At certain moments in time, Deleuze might seem to be totally inside the limits; at other moments, he might seem a long way away – but that’s not necessarily a move toward or away from theory. Mies’s famous saying: build, don’t talk. Well, that’s a theoretical statement. He had a theory about practice. It’s amazing how many people quote him saying that – they quote a piece of theory against theory.

The more important question is: which theory, at which time, mobilized in which direction? I, myself, would like to be locked in a room with a science fiction book – but that’s just me. Someone else would like to be locked in a room with Deleuze, and generate some thinking for architects that seems much more urgent and seductive and accurate. And somebody can read science fiction and come up with trash – I mean, there’s a lot of junk science fiction out there, and there’s a hell of a lot of bad architecture out there, too.

But I think it’s great that people are reading different books now than they were reading five years ago. There’s no subject an architect won’t talk about. And that sort of restless promiscuity is entirely positive. What’s interesting is that architects have often been informed by a very precise theory, whether technological or political or scientific and so on; but we also learn a lot by just paying attention to the seemingly ordinary details of the city around us. And architects are fantastic at stitching ideas to objects. That’s what we’re really good at.

Architects are builders who theorize – articulate builders.

Which theory, at which time, mobilized in which direction?

This week I ‘ave been mostly constructing a 4 dimensional project program charting the route of the smooth space of the drawing as it passes through the striated space of tasks, people and landscape.

Next week I’d better reach for some science fiction.