A brief paen to Peter Salter

I've recently moved flat and therefore have an enormous pile of books sitting in the middle of my living room. Whilst sorting them out into vaguely respectable piles I came across the book pictured above, an extremely dog-eared copy of McDonald and Salter, Buildings and Projects, published by the AA school in the very early 1990's.

I bought my copy in the second year of architecture school and it followed me around through various, vaguely squalid residences where it acquired its present mangy look. It's fair to say that I loved this book with its seductively heavyweight paper and the strange yellow bull on the cover that reminded me vaguely of Andy Warhol's design for the Velvet Underground's first album.

During my degree, Peter Salter was my architectural hero. At first it was Aldo Rossi, but Rossi's stripped down austerity was hard to recreate at college, especially if you didn't know what you were doing. Deficiences, either of the technical or artistic kind, tended to show up when the forms were that simple and pared back.

Salter's drawings by contrast were fabulously complicated, full of idiosyncratic shapes and inexplicable protuberances. I had very little idea what was going on in them even though I spent a great deal of my studying them. Boundaries of inside and outside were obscure, circulation routes opaque and programme more or less indefinable. What they did have was a giddy excess of detail and a strange ability to evoke dilapidated machinery, vegetative forms and ambiguous body parts. They involved spindly and fragmented frameworks which held bulbous, vaguely obscene looking objects, all detailed with an obsessive technical fluidity.

Salter's drawings alternated between complex technical plans and watercolour perspectives populated by tall naked women and short fat, naked men. I shamelessly copied both styles of presentation for a while, adding my own strange protuberances and naked people for good measure. At the time Salter was a tutor at the AA and I would study the enigmatic lumps of lead and rusty models set in the Po Delta or the Cambridgeshire fens that populated his unit's pages in the school's annual Projects Review.

Despite its popularity with students then, Salter's work was unplaceable in many ways. It was utterly uncommercial looking but also totally believable in that every component required to build it was drawn in detail. Its dirty realism removed it from the kitsch zoomorphism of someone like Calatrava or the cool shape-ism of Peter Wilson. It was too crafty to be Archigram, too down-to-earth to be Zaha and altogether too nuts for most English architecture.

Recently I got to see a number of original Peter Salter drawings and I was amazed all over again at the remarkable dexterity and obsessiveness of their draughtsmanship. There were mistakes of course - tiny misalignments where one arc met another, or slight blobs of ink at the end of a line - but these are important too, like the crackles of an old LP. Mostly though there was the half-forgotten pleasure of following the lines as they looped and zig-zagged across the paper, changed thickness and weight or dissolved into dots and dashes.

For architectural tutors of a certain age, the hand drawing represents both a lost art and a much-missed rite of passage. For those of us reared on battling with sheets of tracing paper and blobby rotring pens, the CAD drawing is suspiciously easy. Mistakes disappear, erased into the ether, rather than becoming part of the drawing's story. Scratched-out lines and occasional rips where the razor blade had finally gone through the paper were testaments to the sheer effort of hand-drawing. Opening up a new document isn't comparable to the mild terror of starting a new drawing. Marking an initial line on some vast expanse of milky-white trace is never quite the same thing as zapping a new Vectorworks 'page' into life.

Salter is currently designing a housing project (for Baylight Properties) in West London. Reassuringly, he remains committed to the hand-drawing, which presumably now someone has to translate into construction documents. The same naked people and bulbous forms appear in the drawings for this scheme, seemingly blissfully unconnected to pragmatic concerns of Lifetime Homes requirements or the number of recycling bins.

The houses are currently on site too, so they will be the first buildings by Salter in this country. His only other previously completed schemes are in Japan where he built a wood-carving museum, a strange pavilion in the mountains that is covered in snow in the winter and (with former partner Chris Mcdonald) a peculiar, earthy and rotting pavilion in Osaka. Somehow the exotic locations and programmes of these buildings renders them less real, less alarming even, than a group of flats  in Notting Hill.

The strange thing is that, after all those years obsessively looking over Salters's drawings I have genuinely no idea what this building will look like. Looking at the plans (reproduced above) gives little clue. Salter's drawings were always both explicitly literal and almost completely opaque. Everything is rendered with utter deadpan realism apart from what it might look like.

All of which points to a paradox in Salter's position. His rise to architectural fame came at the height of what used to be known as paper architecture, designs made by people who were primarily theoreticians. Their drawings were never meant to be built, although - as Liebeskind, Zaha and Peter Wilson have shown - they ended up being. Salter - who always wanted to build and whose drawings contained little in the way of visual rhetoric - was the one who stayed in the academy. I'm excited to see that they finally let him out. 

A Short Piece About Colin Ward

The following piece about anarchist writer Colin Ward appeared recently in the Architect's Journal. 

It’s probably fair to say that current government policy regarding planning is a hopeless, contradictory mess. Recent policy statements have veered between so-called ‘muscular localism’ and centralised overriding of local planning decisions. Commitments to building affordable housing are likely to be torn up, and there is to be a temporary relaxation of the need for planning approval of domestic extensions.

I’ve been noting these announcements whilst reading Talking Houses, a collection of the late Colin Ward’s lectures on planning and the environment. This has been particularly interesting because there are aspects of planning deregulation that he might have approved of. Ward was a lifelong anarchist and a sceptic when it came to any form of centralised power.

His career as a writer spanned the second half of the 20^th century, taking in the Local Authority building programme of the 1950’s and ‘60’s and the right-to-buy revolution of the 1980’s. Ward was equally critical of both approaches. Although he was on the political left, he disagreed with what he saw as Labour’s embracement of “bureaucratic managerialism”, regarding at as an infringement of personal liberty. At the same time, he saw through the Tories’ libertarian cant.

Ward argued instead in favour of ‘dweller control’, and the right for people to construct their own houses. He criticised the legislation that seeks to limit such activities, suggesting that only a self-built environment would allow people to live in peaceful co-existence with the land and one another.

The closest model we have to what Ward meant are the ‘Plotland’ developments of southeast England; higgledy-piggledy landscapes of folk-architecture  intermingled with gardens, allotments and small-holdings.

Ward was not without his faults – his rigid scepticism about the role of the state is questionable – but his thinking seems particularly pertinent when the government is intent on tearing up the planning rulebook for all the wrong reasons. Whilst disagreeing with their motives for doing so, it’s worth reading someone with genuinely radical ideas about how to deliver houses for all.

Crimes Against Design

The following short rant appeared originally in Icon (issue 112) and I thought it worth posting up here as it's not appeared on-line before.  The photograph is my own and nearly resulted in me being arrested.

Judged alongside their other ‘crimes’, the design of high street banks would seem to rank pretty low. But my irritation at the state of their interiors long predates Libor and government bailouts.

I have been going into my local HSBC for something like fifteen years, during which time it has had numerous ‘facelifts’, each more awful than the last. Matters are made worse by the fact that this particular branch is housed in a fine, Edwardian building which has been defaced with polystyrene tiles, crude strip lighting and clumsy spatial divisions. Hanging a suspended ceiling below a beautiful, classical dome or driving a cheap partition into some elegant timber mouldings, may not be a crime in every branch, but no bank is entirely innocent.

There are common problems. One is the plethora of services and personnel involved. As well as counter-staff there are people called ‘business advisors’ who lurk inside strange booths or perch on random, primary-coloured stools offering pre-scripted advice. Then there are various people who merely mill around the entrance area asking if you need to deposit a cheque or borrow £50,000. The walls and much of the floor area is taken up with posters and banners beseeching students to commit to a lifetime of customer loyalty in exchange for some free headphones. 

The essence of all this confusion lies in the fact that banks no longer quite know what they are offering. Ultimately they would prefer to mutate into an on-line only service, one where the customer is free to wander around in virtual confusion with no staff to complain-to. However, they recognise that people remain bewilderingly old-fashioned when it comes to where they put their money and cling to the certainties offered by a man behind a counter and a biro attached with a beaded metal chain.

The endless revamps, with their cheery fonts and cheesy furniture, mask an underlying confusion at to what a high street banks’ actually for. It’s not a shop, or an office, or an institution, but a strange hybrid of all three. The result is a thoroughly dissonant experience combining the remnants of old-fashioned service with the contemporary hysteria of full-on commercialism. All this occurs within in an atmosphere of cheap’n’cheerful high street branding shoehorned into once elegant buildings that now seem like relics from more confident times. 

Electric Edens

(Image: LogPLug, David Greene. Image sourced from here) 

So, school term has started and once again I am teaching a diploma studio at UCA, Canterbury. This year's theme revolves around the rural and I am aiming for a kind of super-charged, high-tech, neo-psychedelic vernacular. With a bit or rural brutalism (rutalism?) thrown in. 

Here's the brief. More to follow, on a specially bucolic network themed tumblr site.

“As an ideal aspired to over centuries, the village, traditional or model, cannot suddenly be consigned to limbo, regarded as an irrelevancy or an ineffective solution to the problems of modern life.”

The final chapter of Gillian Darley’s book Villages of Vision – entitled No New Villages? – ends with a provocation. What would a modern village look like? What does it mean to build in the countryside in the early 21^st century, with all the cultural, economic and ecological issues associated with it?

Following last year’s foray into Ruburbia – the rural edge of suburbia – the studio will venture out into the countryside proper. The focus will be on the design of new rural settlements. We will look at the economic, social and ecological issues facing rural communities and explore the symbolic and cultural associations of the countryside. In doing so we will focus on the role of modernity within rural life.

Modernity is intimately bound up with the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation. What place does it have outside the city? Is modernity inimical to rural life, which values tradition and heritage?  Is it possible to be modern and rural at the same time? 

The lure of the bucolic is a recurring theme within architecture, a form of anti-modernity that runs from the Arts and Crafts through the garden city movement and onto the work of Archigram and beyond. David Green's prediction of a globalised, network culture suggests an ability for us to live anywhere, no longer tied to the city. Whilst a beatific rural life is seen as an antidote to the problems of urbanisation, it also raises questions about sustainability, technology, land use and infrastructure.

This research will form the background to proposals for new rural settlements and specific design proposals within them. The first semester will involve research into modern village forms along with design, film and video-based projects. During the second semester 4^th year students will focus on civic/public buildings within rural settlements whilst 5^th year and MA students will have a wider remit to develop the topic into individual thesis projects.

In search of the bucolic

Another plug, this time for an exhibition organised by the artist and photographer Andrew Cross. A Bucolic Frolic: Distractions from the Modern "takes a look at tendencies in English art, design and music which indicate a refusal to accept an inevitable onslaught of economic and technological modernity".  

This is of particular interest to me at the moment as I'm hoping that next year's teaching studio will be looking at the idea of the rural, and the role or place of modernism within it. It also gives me an excuse to post up a picture by Roger Dean - who features in the exhibition - something I've been meaning to do for a while. Dean's beyond-the-pale sci-fi utopian fantasies are interesting not only for a kind of kitscher-than-thou cheesinesss but for a more unsettling combination of technological utopianism and rural romanticism, two things its almost impossible to imagine co-existing today.

While we're about the relationship of ruralism and modernity, here's a second link to an interesting exhibition/event curated by Postworks, a collaborative practice involving architect Matthew Butcher and artist Melissa Appleton. Writtle Calling takes the form of a temporary radio station broadcasting from Writtle in the Essex countryside, home to Marconi and the first regular radio broadcast. 

Self-Build

A couple of quick links to things I've written elesewhere, and a plug.

Firstly, my piece about speedboats which somewhat outrageously involved a trip to a boat yard and a sea trial in northern Italy is online at Iconeye. 

The Architecture and Infrastructure issue of AR Australia is also out which includes an essay by me about electricity pylons. I have another piece in the upcoming issue of AR looking at retro-fitting office blocks in south London for residential and other uses.

Finally on the link front, my review of the Shard is in the latest issue of Domus. Also in Domus this month is an excellent piece by Justin McGuirk on London's housing crisis (see previous posts ad nauseum). 

Finally, finally, a quick plug for Jeffrey Adjei, one of my students from last year's UCA Canterbury diploma studio, who won the Adaptable Futures international design competition. His project explored recent planning legislation such as the community right to build, village green status and neighbourhood plans to propose a kind of self-build civic architecture for New Addington, in Croydon.

The image at the top of the post is one of two remarkable panoramic views of the process drawn by Jeffrey to illustrate the project. 

Plot lines

One of the potential answers to the UK's housing crisis suggested by the current government (and, to be fair, other saner people) is a resurgence in self-build housing. Self-build has never been as popular here as elsewhere in Europe and the majority of our decreasing housing construction is delivered by volume house-builders or, pre-Thatcher by local government. Small-scale community and co-operative developments are few and far between. 

If we put aside any reservations about self-build as an answer to the national housing shortage -especially given the major stumbling block of land prices and availability - then we might ask what kind of houses it would create. Could it lead to an outpouring of creativity and innovation in the field? Would it facilitate some sort of spontaneous flowering of ad-hoc, folk architecture? Reading any of the general self-build consumer magazines would suggest not as the designs featured are almost uniformally horrible and difficult to distinguish from existing developer-fare.

But there are other precedents for self-build that already exist, mostly on the margins of what we consider to be ordinary housing. Most particularly there are the plotlands, small communities of self-built housing in the south east of England, mostly constructed in the period after the first world war. Plotlands developments were often built in marginal and undesirable places sold off cheaply by farmers and other landowners. They were not particularly intended to last or to be permanent, year-round homes, but in a couple of cases such as Jaywick Sands in Essex their communities have clung on somewhat against the odds.

The slightly creaky and knocked-together aesthetic of plotland developments offers a clue to a more vibrant and diverse form of self-build housing, one that bypasses both the mean-minded conformity of developer housing and the overbearing tastefulness of architect's solutions. Combined with a less land-hungry model than the one off house in its own site on higher density sites, the playful ad-hocism of the plotlands might allow looser, more adaptable forms of housing to develop. 

Recently I visited a small enclave of plotlands housing in Essex and took the photos that accompany this post. The houses sit on the foreshore of the river Stour and vary considerably in material and style. Some are simply oversized timber garden sheds mounted on legs to protect them from the tide. Others suggest more exotic associations, such as the seaside shacks of LA's Venice Beach and Santa Monica. There are certainly touches of early Frank Gehry or even bargain basement Rudolph Shindler if you are feeling romantic enough. There are several houses made from different bits of other buildings cut up and jammed together in the spirit of allotment sheds and Dungenesse's old railway carriages. Others just have a nice, easy simplicity about them.

These buildings sit somewhere between the typical beach hut and a permanent house. They are lived in but not all year around and they are pretty perilously situated on a tidal estuary. Some appear to have disappeared altogether with only their old wooden legs and concrete footings still visible. Nonetheless, they offer a glimpse of what our houses could look like if we built them ourselves:

Housing: What to say?

I/FAT made an appearance in The Guardian last week talking about housing along with Lynsey Hanley, Dickon Robinson, Kevin McCloud, Sarah Wigglesworth and Glenn Howells. It's one of those pieces where an interview is transcribed to look like something you've actually written so it reads a little jumpily but I think the main points are there apart, notably, from a call for a council house building programme. As this isn't a new idea but an old one disastrously abandoned, it probably doesn't engage people's interest that much. 

My main argument though would be for a combination of top-down, government funded, local council implemented council house building coupled with measures to encourage bottom-up, self and community build schemes. Both would have to deal with the cost and availability of land as a starting point. 

Surprisingly, the comments are worth reading too, many of which make the same points more thoroughly. In fact, one of the things that strikes me about the housing crisis is that the answers seem painfully obvious to anyone who has given the issue any thought and who isn't wearing neo-liberal blinkers. Unfortunately as all the current members of the government are, don't expect anything positive or useful to happen any time soon. 

Kitchen Sink Realism

A couple of weeks ago I took a trip out to the wilds of East Anglia to look at some architecture. I was accompanied on my rural odyssey by Matt Wood, the writer of this blog*, and Adrian Friend, the head of the new Norfolk School of Architecture. So, a pretty learned trio is what I'm saying....

The object of our obsession was the work of Tayler and Green, two architects who uprooted themselves from the demi-monde of the Architectural Association and London in the late 1940's and settled in Lowestoft of all places. From here, their practice developed an impressively consistent body of work, some 700 houses for a single client - Loddon District Council. These houses, unremarkable in some ways, still stand as an exemplary way to build sensitively and well in the countryside. What's more they represent an itinerant strain of modernism that embraced decoration and ornamentation as well as an interest in everyday life. Built largely in the 1950's and 1960's you could call them an architectural equivalent of the kitchen sink realism prevalent at the time in British films and literature.




We began here, with a terrace of simple, two-storey houses and a small number of detached bungalows hiding behind dense hedgerows. The bungalows have a couple of mannered touches in the form of their too-tall chimneys and cat-slide roofs that slope down almost to the ground.




There are Scandanavian touches here and there and an obvious debt to architects like Asplund and Utzon in their most social realist mode. Having spent too much time lately watching Scando-Noir thrillers such as The Bridge I cheerfully imagined a particularly grizzly murder occurring inside this one. The exaggerated cookie-cutter barge boards suggest the more thorough embracing of decoration that the pair would later adopt. 

Many of Tayler and Green's housing schemes are now listed meaning that people need to apply for permission to replace windows or paint them different colours.....




...but not thank goodness, to embellish them with the fine details of English domestic life. Oddly, the fastidiousness of T&G's approach, the evident sense of care in their work, seems quite at home with the accumulated clutter of garden ornaments etc.

Almost all of their schemes are dated, usually in brick on the gable end walls. I particularly liked this one though which had a kind of dry, utilitarian abstraction all of its own.

Elsewhere, decoration and ornamentation crept steadily onto elevations, becoming increasingly self-assured and unashamed as time went on. Bear in mind that this was the 1950's, when Robert Venturi was yet to stick some timber mouldings on an abstract facade and thus enrage an entire profession for generations. 

Windmill Green in one of T&G's best known and most ambitious schemes. Simple terraces form three sides of a large grass covered central space, something between a recreation ground and a village green. The houses clearly borrow from the tradition of pastel-coloured East Anglian farmhouses but are corraled into much more formal arrangements. They slip past each other nicely at the corners too in order to create subtly hidden spaces for garages and parking. This informality would no doubt fall foul of the secured-by-design freaks but seems to work just fine here. 

For unassuming types there's a lot of branding on T&G's work. Their name pops up a lot, not just on formal plaques but carved into special bricks or inserted subtly into a decorative wall, as if they were making it easy for architectural pilgrims to seek out. Despite the seeming modesty of their designs, the architects were very aware of its quality. 

The thing about T&G's stuff is that it is very normal. Not just in the sense that it looks familiar and unremarkable - which it does if you aren't looking at it particularly closely - but also because in this part of Norfolk it's everywhere. If you drive around without particularly looking for it you still notice random outcrops of their work. They built a lot in a small place and it has in some senses become that place. Other people have copied it too, normally fairly badly because for all its everydayness it is sophisticated and clever architecture. 

It's quiet and unassuming but in a generous rather than austere or hairshirt way. It convinces you that if you plan things intelligently and with beauty and care you can leave the rest to itself. The houses seem to cater for life rather than prescribe it, which is something that modern architecture finds incredibly difficult to do generally. 

To say that the work is a form of modernism inflected by localism - a kind of proto-critical regionalism - seems to do it a disservice. Damned with faint praise perhaps.  It is more interesting than that sounds and less puritanical. For a start there is a highly developed compositional sensibility behind their work, a scenographic interest in how it reads as a whole. These are artfully composed pictures of village life, slightly mannered and a little camp, although none of that seems to stop them from working in a more basic, functional way. 

The subject of rural housing and of how to build in smaller villages and towns interests me a lot. Partly this is because it seems so difficult to do. The default setting when hearing about new rural development is to suspect the worst. Quite rightly so I guess, because in most cases new architecture in such places is usually rubbish. 

There's also the suffocating myopia of things needing to 'fit-in', a banal and meaningless term that is bandied around as some kind of unassailable truth. Building, and in particular housing, in the countryside has almost entirely negative associations,  regarded always as a loss (of nature, of views, of character) rather than a gain.

Looking at Tayler and Green one can imagine a much more invigorating kind of rural architecture, one that borrowed freely from modernism as much as the arts and crafts and took on the ad-hoc roughness of plotland developments. A sampladelic, surreal vernacular that avoided the pitfall of preciousness that architects often fall into when faced with the rural landscape.

But maybe that isn't Tayler and Green's style either. Their architecture suggests a relationship to a place and to a (municipal) client that now seems almost positively arcadian. The possibility of evolving some simple house types and decorative ideas over the course of a career and of not having to take part in the endless scramble for work, well,  I wish, basically.


* My thanks to Matt for generously offering to show me around Tayler and Green's work. I have deliberately not expanded this post into a more general survey of their work, mainly because Matt has already done it perfectly well. 

Horrible Histories

My review of BBC2's The Secret History of Our Streets is currently on line at BD. I'll post the review up in time for anyone that's interested who doesn't subscribe to the paper, but I wanted to add a couple of comments here now.

SHOS has generated a lot of discussion, well at least among architect and planners in the UK. Mainly this is because the documentary makers have gone out of their way to blame them (us) for the destruction of many of London's finest streets. The programme even repeats the cliched line that post-war planning did more to destroy London than the Luftwaffe. 

When people talk about "fine streets" they invariably mean Georgian ones. As fine as they, the consensus that these are the only legitimate way to plan a city seems deeply problematic to me. Undoubtedly it is often better to refurbish than demolish buildings but SHOS veers into sensationalist demonisation at times and this is never particularly helpful.

Although highly aware of the social and class based issues inherent within urban planning, SHOS also tends to sentimentalise working class community life whilst appearing ignorant of the exploitation these communities often faced (or still face) from exploitative and unscrupulous landlords. Post-war reconstruction was an attempt to alleviate this as well as rebuild a genuinely bomb damaged city. 

To be fair, this bias manifests itself mostly in the first two programmes which look at Deptford and Camberwell. After that the series settles down a bit and begins to tell a less ideologically biased story. But the episode on Deptford High Street perpetrated a number of falsehoods, some of which this website attempts to rebut. Most unfairly, it went out of its way to demonise Nicholas Taylor, a post-war planner who was held responsible for the sins of everyone. That Taylor was the only person prepared to talk to the programme makers and attempted in vain to articulate a more nuanced position than they would allow made it look like a bad case of bullying. This is doubly unfair because Taylor was/is a particularly enlightened and sensitive thinker. 

As David Knight points out in the comments on this website, Taylor wrote a book called The Village In the City and campaigned against precisely the wholescale 'slum' clearance attacked by the programme makers. Although later episodes lighten up on the anti-modernist rhetoric they also inadvertently reveal the extent to which urban planning has returned to a kind of pre-war, pre-social democratic state. 

The large scale housing projects of the post-war period can be seen as an aberration not in a positive sense but in the sense that the exploitative landowners they attempted to remove have returned with a vengeance. The episode on the Caledonian Road was particularly revealing in this respect, visiting some horrendous and quite probably illegal modern day slums built for students and migrant workers in the basements of wealthy Islington. 

Revealingly, these flats didn't appear to have planning permission, something that would undoubtedly have stopped them from beings such highly unpleasant places to 'live'. This was an irony that the documentary makers were not keen to point out having demonised the planning profession in earlier episodes. The fact that the present government are so keen on running down and reducing the role of planners sits happily with SHOS's own agenda against any form of top-down planning. Far better it seems to leave such things to the market that bequeathed us all those fine Georgian streets as well as slums containing forty people per property.

As I tried to make clear in my review, I'm not a wholesale apologist for post-war planning or architecture. But the idea that the streets in question should be left to some kind of 'natural order' is a highly dubious one. To intervene in this supposed order was shown to be, at best, an example of mis-guided do-goodism. That this line fits neatly with a neo-liberal, anti-welfare state agenda was one of the more troubling subtexts of an otherwise intriguing and interesting series. 

Excuses, excuses

A bit of a dog ate my homework post this in that I've been busy writing elsewhere and therefore neglecting my blogging duties. I'm currently busy on some longer pieces including something on the Shard for Domus, one on pylons and infrastructure for Australian Architectural Review Asia Pacific and various things for Icon including My Most Glamorous Commission Evah. All of these will see the light of day in the next few weeks. Incidentally, my interview with AR editor Simon Sellars from some time back has just been posted up on French site Le courrier de L'architecte. 

I'll also be doing some more speaking in public. My lecture at the London Institute may have been postponed until October 9th, but I will definitely be speaking at the Collaborative Urbanism event in Birmingham on June 14th.

I will also be popping up (hopefully) on superior footballing blog Minus The Shooting which has been reprised for Euro 2012. There's already a couple of posts up on this, including an excellent nailing of the terrible "anti-expectation expectation" of Roy Hodgson's England, the first manager to go into a major footballing tournament with absolutely no-one expecting us to win. This, as author Loki brilliantly observes, has formed a new and terrible form of perverse hope. Such is the lot of the England fan.......

Finally, new posts are likely on the architecture of Tayler and Green and a short tribute to Richard Rogers' house. 

Housing: What to do?

Why is providing new family sized housing such a difficult thing? Why is there so little built in our country? And why are most of the houses that are built so poorly designed and cheaply constructed?  

Recently I went to an event focusing on exactly these questions. One group of people - let's call them the 'enablers' - clearly identified the problem, which is this: There is a massive shortfall in housing provision. New housing starts are at their lowest for 65 years. Rents are rising, mortgages are unobtainable for anyone who doesn't have a very large deposit and house prices, at least in London, are still unbearably high due to limited supply. 

On top of this, benefit caps, higher rents for 'social housing' (up to 80%) and stalled regeneration projects have created growing homelessness numbers and rising housing waiting lists. One of the speakers at the event put up a graph illustrating new house build starts since 1947. The graph showed that up until the end of the 1970's, the number of house starts had remained pretty much even between private and public developments. Since 1979 however, the number of publicly funded projects has dropped off to almost zero. This is little surprise given the Thatcher administration's curtailing of the ability of local councils to build houses and encouragement of them to sell off their existing stock. What the graph also showed was that private sector house starts have stayed pretty much constant throughout that period, that is until the last three years when they have also tailed off dramatically. In other words, the private sector has emphatically not grown to plug the gap left by the emaciated public sector.  It is also currently largely moribund.

There are some other important issues too. Aside from sheer numbers, the quality of housing provision has diminished. The UK has the worst space standards for new housing in Europe. The conservative nature of the market, the limited land available, the difficulty and uncertainty of achieving planning, the high risks involved and the abandonment of  local authority built housing has stifled not just supply but also innovation, quality and creativity in this field. There have been decent, forward looking developments - I've been lucky enough to have been involved in some - but nowhere near enough. 

Having had the problems outlined clearly, a second group of people - let's call these the 'deliverers' - presented a number of residential developments they were working on. Almost exclusively these schemes focused on one and two bed flats, many sold to overseas bulk buyers and investors. Very few family or larger units were included. None of the 'enablers' had identified a shortage of coffee bars, luxury spas or interesting fenestration patterns and yet that was all  the 'delivers' were offering to provide.

So, here was the problem laid bare. An under supply of houses is answered by an oversupply of one and two bed flats. Town centres in need of life and revitalisation are given new developments full of one bed flats bought up and left empty by overseas investors or by landlords as buy-to-let properties. 

The market simply cannot supply decent, affordable housing. In reaction to this the current governments instincts are of course simplistic, erroneous and driven by the same deregulating, under-investing, state-averse neo-liberal ideology that has created the problems in the first place. Faced with evidence that the private sector emphatically doesn't deliver what is required, the government calls for more deregulation, more marketisation and less planning, control and investment.

One thing the government have done which might not be totally wrong headed is introduce the community right to build element of the NPPF and offer support (ish) for self-build, or more likely self-commissioned, housing. If these policies resulted in a growth in housing cooperatives and community land trusts along with an itinerant strain of ad-hoc self-build then it might do some good. But this needs to be developed alongside a reinvigorated and dynamic planning system not a demoralised and underfunded one.

So here's some other suggestions about what should be done:

• Strengthen the power of local planning authorities to actually plan and allocate land for development and draw up proper spatial plans. Some local authorities do this but they are facing massive cuts and are being undermined by the NPPF.

• Fund and empower local authorities to directly commission the kind of housing that is desperately needed but that the market won't provide.

• Invest in new construction technology research, innovative energy conservation measures and progressive housing design.

• Reintroduce statutory minimum space standards for new dwellings. 

• Tighten 'buy to let' regulations, introduce a land value tax and remove tax loopholes that encourage bulk buying, empty homes and overseas property investment.

• Extend the fair rent act to control spiraling rental costs. This would reduce the vast sums paid out to landlords in the form of housing benefit to provide over priced flats. It would also allow people to stay in their current homes rather than face eviction.

• Move away from a focus on 100% home ownership and the ridiculous and destructive notion that houses are primarily a source of investment rather than a place to live.

• Reform the lending markets to offer much more diversity and recognise different forms of home ownership and house building.

• Instigate a massive house building programme. Now. 

Status Update

Post writing opportunities are rare these days, so for the moment this blog will have to get by on the thin gruel of what-I'm-doing and what-I've-written status updates. Such is my desperation to post something though, I have resorted to using Blogger's iPhone app to write this on the bus, a time I normally like to reserve for ranting on Twitter.

I have been lucky enough though to be commissioned to write two lengthy pieces, details of which will be available forthwith. I've also contributed a number of pieces for Icon, including a tribute to the Swiss Army Knife in next month's edition. The following issue includes my review of the diminutive Hawksmoor exhibition at the RA where I attempt to wrest the architect's reputation back from the demonic grip of the psychogeographers. I can also recommend Gillian Darley's excellent review of the same exhibition in the AJ (£).

I will be making some public appearances in what architecture tutors like to call the near future. The first of these will be at Colchester's First Site gallery where I will be going back to my roots and discussing the architecture of East Anglia. The event, part of the RIBA's Love Architecture Festival, is called New Architecture in the East and also features Meredith Bowles and Adrian Friend. It may help my cause that the much anticipated fact-finding mission to Norwich to look at the work of Tayler and Green is now officially on.

Finally a link: Agata Pyzik has written a very interesting piece on the architecture of the former Eastern Block and, in particular, the swing between Socialist and Capitalist Realism styles (or Stalinist and PoMo architecture respectively). Two sides of the same bad penny you could say. Given that I am occasionally berated for a lack of interest in Moscow PoMo, it's nice to read someone who has something to say on the matter. On this note though, I can add that Aldo Rossi was a big fan of Karl Marx Allee style Stalinist Realism. When Rossi came to London to give a lecture at the RIBA he requested a viewing of the similarly bombastic and roughly contemporaneous Ministry of Defence building, much to the bafflement of his hosts.

In the country

It's a long time since I've done one of those links to stuff-I'm-reading posts so here's a nice country themed one in celebration of current reading matter. So, partly inspired by Matt Wood's excellent Ruralise blog, I've bought myself a copy of Alan Powers and Elain Harwood's book on Tayler and Green, architects of a number of remarkable houses in the Norfolk countryside, including the one illustrated above. 

Tayler and Green's work prompted the first known use of the term Post Modern in relation to architecture when their houses were described as such by Pevsner in the 1950's. Their international modernism deflected via both Scandinavia and the East Anglian vernacular employed overtly decorative elements such as brick patterns, colour wash walls and lettering that seem highly pertinent today (and were, incidentally, a subtle influence on FAT's Islington Square). They also developed clever and intelligent house plans that were admirably discussed by Rob Annable in a lovely blog post for BD a while back as well as in Matt's extensive series of posts at Ruralise.

Staying on a Norfolk tip, Adrian Friend, the new boss of the new School of Architecture in Norwich, has started up a blog dedicated to Reyner Banham's birthplace. In a nice bit of cross pollination, Banham also turns up to talk about Tayler and Green on Ruralise in relation to the thorny issue of Kenneth Frampton's Critical Regionalism. I was never a particular fan of Frampton's theories in this regard but following this year's Canterbury studio teaching looking at 'Ruburbia', I'm hoping to venture further out into the dark mysteries of the English landscape next year. Issues of regionalism and ruralism will crop up hopefully with some doses of obscure mysticism thrown in. Think Rob Young's Electric Eden meets Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker, soundtracked by Soft Machine. Well, hopefully, anyway.

I'm also currently researching a longer piece about the Essex/Suffolk countryside, so-called Constable Country, and the self-conscious preservation of views and a specifically visual understanding of rural space. More on that to follow here in due course.

Finally, talking of contemporary re-visits of older housing ideas, there's a good piece by Gillian Darley in BD. Link here, lurking no doubt behind a paywall but well worth checking out. 

To play out, here's Norwich boys and short-lived 80's indie hopefuls the Farmers Boys doing their version of In The Country and looking not so much rural miscreants as contemporary Dalston hipsters. 

Wearing Architecture

The photo above raises a number of interesting questions: where Richard Meier’s legs might have gone and whether Peter Eisenman’s trousers are representative of his Derridian or his Deleuzian period notable amongst them. It depicts the four surviving members of the so-called New York Five (see previous post) inhabiting models of their own buildings. The serious expressions and self-consciously arty arrangements have the air of performance art about them, a heavy handed surrealism that only adds to the the overall silliness of the enterprise.

The image is part of a small but notable tradition of architects wearing their own buildings. The best known of these is a photograph of the Beaux Arts Ball of 1936, a picture made famous by its inclusion in Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York. At the ball, New York architects came dressed as their own skyscrapers, their faces appearing comically out through the recognisable icons of early Manhattan. The egotism of the gesture is partially offset by both the amateurishness of the costumes and by the fact that, combined together, they serve to illustrate the the competitive gaggle of the New York skyline.

The New York Five photograph appeared in 1996 in a Vanity Fair feature, presumably as a self-conscious homage to the earlier image. Even without knowing this it might be possible to guess the date by studying the buildings each architect has chosen to wear. While Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier use buildings that could have been designed at almost any stage of their careers, such is the consistency of their output, Eisenman and Graves are both architectural chameleons who have changed artistic direction on several occasions. Eisenman’s ‘Deleuzian trousers’ date the shot to the mid-1990’s as surely as the date on the magazine's masthead.

The image also exposes the distinct character of each architect. There's Meier with his consistency and business-like approach, Gwathmey with his upstate clubbability, Graves’ odd combination of whimsy and commercial bombast and Eisenman, the quintessential New York intellectual. Eisenman’s outfit - minus the trousers, as it were - is an interesting statement in itself. With his bow tie and braces combination he appears part-architect and part-Wall Street broker: Le Corbusier meets Gordon Gekko.

The image serves an obvious purpose of self-promotion and of furthering each architect's personal brand. It does so by attempting a crude conflation of personality and product, an only slightly more absurd extension of the ways that architects choose to mythologise their personalities such as Corb's glasses or Hadid's habitual Issey Miyake. The collapsing of the distinction between the artist and their work is supposedly a sign of authentic expression and artistic sincerity. To be indistinguishable from one's own work is the ultimate sign of true artistic worth: you are the work and the work is you. 

This is especially important for architects who always struggle to impose their personality and vision on projects that belong in the financial and practical sense to other people. The conflation of a single named architect with the complex product of a team endeavor is a strangely unquestioned aspect of the construction industry. Architectural prizes are handed out habitually to one person who is invariably the architect, and not even the one who may have spent most time designing the building. In many industries this might be seen as monumentally bad form although in architecture it may increasingly act as consolation for a loss of influence in general away from a few rare instances of 'starchitecture'.

There is another issue here which is the association of buildings with economic (rather than artistic) power. Not only is there an obvious symbolism of thrusting structures and phallocentric towers, but skyscrapers are the most clearly venal building type of them all. The recent protests against Wall Street from the Occupy movement in the US involved people dressed as pantomime towers and cardboard skyscrapers as symbols of remote and self-interested power. 

The Beaux Arts Ball and the Occupy protest portray two opposing visions of the skyscraper, that of cartoon hero and cartoon villain. In both these cases though, the conflation of person and building is played up for comical or absurdist ends. There is another, more ambiguous version of the person = building conflation though which could be characterised more as wearable architecture. The collapsing of the distinction between clothing, building and body was a particular theme during the '60's and '70's, when it played out scenarios to do with nomadism and temporariness. 

The concept of architecture as little more than clothing offered the chance to avoid the restrictions of heavy masonry and stodgy classicism, replacing it with an ability to roam free in hermetically sealed "Suitaloons" or "Cushicles", to cite two of Archigram's efforts. These projects represented the shrinking of Buckminster Fuller's bio-domes to the scale of the individual, the perfect accoutrement for an atomised world of urban nomads. Such visions of architecture also imply the dissolution of the architect too, at least in any conventional sense of what that role might mean.

As a nice post-script to this post, I'll finish on a photo that combines both tendencies. Here, Mobile Studio have taken buildings by other architects and turned them into wearable objects forming a mash-up of London. In the process they turn various well known London buildings (ahem) into mobile bits of architecture/furniture removed from their original function. They propose a riff on the Suitaloon that appropriates as-found bits of architecture in a knowing but far more humerous take on the famous Beaux Arts Ball photo. 

Digging Graves

Image: Michael Graves, Portland Building. 

In From Bauhaus to Our House, his somewhat leaden satire of post war US modernism, Tom Wolfe described the battle between The Whites* and The Greys. The Whites – a group of mainly New York based architects heavily indebted to the early work of Le Corbusier also known as the New York Five – consisted of Peter Eisenman, John Hejduk, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey and Richard Meier. The Greys were led by Venturi and Scott Brown, Bob Stern and Charles Moore. 


The battle appeared to be between modernists and post modernists, except of course the lines were more blurred - or as Wolfe has it, more illusory - than that. For a start, The White’s re-interpretation of Corb’s early villas was itself a historicist project. Their buildings – mostly wealthy one-off residences in up-state New York – were heavily stylised and collaged amalgams of not just Corb, but Reitveld, Van Doesburg, Terragni and others.

The architecture of The Whites was really early European modernism uprooted and removed from its social and political context** so that it could become a complex but purely formal game. Peter Eisenman represented the hard-core end of this activity, arguing vociferously for architecture’s autonomy and concentrating instead on a self-referential examination of its ‘deep structure’ divorced from context. 




Image: Michael Graves, Hanselmann House

Michael Graves’ presense in the White camp seems an odd one at first since he is now heavily associated with post modernism. His early work though was definitely more white than grey. He designed prismatic boxes that looked as if they had been gently exploded from within. Being something of an architectural trainspotter, I’ve always liked this early Gravesian period with its arcane references and grammatical games. He is an odd figure in the recent history of architecture though, having been an early and enthusiastic embracer of the more commercial, Disney friendly brand of po-mo. In fact he moved speedily from being the darling of the avant-garde to being something of an apostate, an apologist for the worst excesses of corporate schmaltz.

I’ve tried and (mostly) failed to find some redeeming factors in this mid-period Graves (I might write another post on his more recent work) but the forms are too overblown, the pastel shades too icky, the classicism too insistent. Buildings like Portlandia have correctly been identified as strangely neo-nazi like in their vast blankness, hiding behind jaunty colours and vast, kitsch appendages. But the 1970’s houses, those I can like. Partly this comes from the Ice Storm effect, the fact that all of them appear to be the setting for some elaborately brittle psycho-drama about upper middle class family life. 




Image: Michael Graves, Cleghorn House.


They are most interesting at exactly the point when Graves shifts gear towards the 'Grey' end of the spectrum, when vestigial classical and vernacular elements creep into the De-stijl like compositions. The house in Princeton is probably the best in this respect with its shifting chimney frontage and bands of colour. I have little interest in Graves’ quasi-meta-physical justifications for this colour scheme (earth, vegetation, sky etc.) but I like the graphic effects it has on his elevations (how’s that for autonomy?). The architecture here is not much thicker than the paint slapped onto the clapboard walls, but it achieves impressively disorientating effects. 


I also like the bits of garden trellis and cheap siding that cling to the backs of his houses and I especially like the totally over-complex compositions, the fact that several hundred things seem to be going on at once when any one of them would have got the job done. It’s this lack of pragmatism that appeals, the constant over-reaching towards Architecture. Graves is trying unbelievably hard with very little material and in the most modest of circumstances. Little wonder he was known as the ‘kitchen-king’ with his endless baroque extensions and mannerist lean-to's. 




Image: Michael Graves, House in Princeton


Most architects can relate to this situation I'm sure, the sense of chucking everything including the kitchen sink into a project. I like it too because it defies the deadening hand of too much maturity. There is something very youthful about Grave’s early buildings, a liberating sense of immaturity in a profession not known for its youthful zeal. So much of architecture revolves around the considered statement and so much of its mythology strives towards effacing youthful bravado. Not only that but, as we know, most architects are depressingly old before they get a chance to build and by that point youthful silliness has been expunged. Shame.

There’s no restraint to those early Graves’ projects. Later they would become much more difficult to love, partly through maturity but mostly through bombast. The Plocek House in Warren, New Jersey represents the shifting point where the same tricks of layering and fragmentation are employed but in a much more heavy-handed and traditional composition. Early on though he looked like he was having fun, the formal games leavened by visual wit and an endearing skimpiness in the detailing. I've no idea what those houses look like now although the Hanselmann House was recently up for sale, a snip at just 300,000 dollars. If I just had the money.....


* I'm not sure what to say about the dubiousness of the title of 'The Whites' to start with other than that it was always mean to be derisory. 


** For Wolfe, the evacuation of socioRandian politics here.