Innovative Housing Ideas

Linus Pauling the great American scientist once said "The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away." His words sprang to mind as we sifted through the couple of hundred entries for the NLA’s Ideas for Housing Competition; although, I have to say, there were gratifyingly few really bad ideas. There were good old ideas, a lot of overlap of ideas and a lot of thinking that is hard to express within the confines of day to day practice. There were ideas from the large scale - top down prefabricated products - and the local community-level process involving the home owner or occupier in design and construction.
 

I​f necessity is the mother of invention we should be very busy inventing right now. In the post-war period there was a lot of invention: there was a substantial number of prefabricated housing systems, some using heavy concrete and some produced by the car and aircraft industries; soldiers returning from the war were encouraged to assist in group-build projects. In the 1960s and 70s the UK was able to build up to 500,000 homes per year in contrast to the measly 220,000 we built in 2014. Although we know well enough now that not all of what was built was not fit for purpose in the longer term, it was a gargantuan effort in a period of austerity and today’s critics of that period should bear that in mind and rue our own failure to get anywhere near required numbers.
 
There was a flowering of thinking and designs for new housing in the capital. In the public sector the low-rise high-density schemes designed under Sydney Cook at Camden Council, were revolutionary and remain exemplars of high quality urban living. Alexandra Road, Branch Hill, the Brunswick Centre – these developments provide humane living environments and striking architectural forms rarely matched in today's housing supply.
 
The Greater London Council delivered many sound and well-built estates as well as radical ideas-led schemes like the Primary Support Structures and Housing Assembly Kits method (PSSHAK). Developed by Nabeel Hamdi and Nick Wilkinson from their Architectural Association thesis project, PSSHAK allowed the mix of accommodation to be altered to suit specific demands through participatory design methods, with the designer acting as ‘skilled enabler’ instead of the ‘expert architect’. PSSHAK homes consisted of a basic structural shell fitted with all the necessary wires and pipes. Tenants could then design their own interiors and subdivide the space.
 
Walter Segal's houses were of such simple construction that their construction could be undertaken cheaply and quickly by anyone, while Lewisham council provided sites whose tricky topography made it uneconomic for standard public housing schemes. Segal’s work has recently been featured in a splendid video produced by The Architecture Foundation called ‘Walter’s Way’.
 
Stuart Lipton has asked why houses aren’t built more like offices; Farrell and Grimshaw were doing just that in the 1960s. The Park Road apartments designed in 1968 were a pioneering design with a central core that allowed potential occupiers no less than 73 variations in plan. The flexible layout, owing more to office technology than residential, remains unmatched in its ability to adapt to resident’s changing needs and lifestyles. It was delivered by a housing association set up by the architects; by avoiding the developer’s overheads a cost saving of 50 per cent on the market price was achieved.
 
It would be hard to look around London today and find such levels of innovation. The large residential developers deliver standard products in towers or mansion blocks of contemporary design; even the Athlete’s Village for the Olympic was a simulacrum of the Barcelona grid; we see Boris Johnson’s New London Vernacular popping up throughout the metropolis. They’re fine, but can’t deliver the numbers this way - you can’t get bricks for love nor money and labour prices are going through the roof.
 
Reasons to be cheerful include Pocket Housing who have been building smaller homes that make up for the lack of space with really thoughtful design; dRMM have plans to build a floating village at the Royal Docks in East London; construction companies like Laing O’Rourke are developing really efficient off-site production technologies; Rogers Stirk Harbour is working with the YMCA to develop affordable starter accommodation for young people. Their Y:Cube units are 26m² one-bed studios that arrive on site as self-contained units.
 
But it’s not enough. London needs to build something like 60,000 homes a year yet is currently not delivering half the number required. Land and housing prices are such that young professionals are finding it a struggle to live in the capital while those at the bottom of the housing ladder are being forced out of the city altogether.
 
We launched the competition to promote lots of ideas that will make a contribution to this currently intractable problem. There is no silver bullet, but a bit more innovation and imagination I believe can help to put a big hole in those numbers.