STRATEGY

Transects and linear studies:

Above: Dundee Shanghai Studio 2019/20.

Below left:: Nolli v Piranese, Bryan Maddock. https://thecitythecitythecity. tumblr.com/post/67554157062/nolli-vs-piranesi-bryan-maddock; and from Venturi and Scott-Brown, Learning from Las Vegas.

Below right: ESALA M.Arch 2018, photos of student degree show models. Island Territories V: Havana, Re-Making Islands, Dismantling Insularity. Tutors: Adrian Hawker and Victoria Clare Bernie.

Below far right: ESALA M.Arch 2018, photos of student degree show models. Para-Situation [Calcutta / Kolkata]. Tutor: Dorian Wiszniewski.

Strategic Presentation:

Left below: Hypothesising on an urban future of uncontrolled growth of cities: Mélun Senart New Town Competition, OMA, 1987. A series of carefully orchestrated voids, from which the “average-contemporary-everyday ugliness of current European-American-Japanese architecture” is banished, ‘irrigate the city with potentials’ to stimulate different programmes and patterns of growth.

See: Surrender, Ville Nouvelle Mélun-Senart, France, 1987 – in R. Koolhaas and B. Mau, SMLXL, Rotterdam, 010, Publishers, 1995, p972.

Right below:

Urban strategy for Jamsil Olympic site, Seoul, Korea, Andrew Stoane Architects, 2012. A mat-plan challenged the scenographic view of the city, promoting a full homology between inside and outside with no residual. New programmes connect to the existing stadia, physically and economically, filling the temporal voids left by the low frequency cycles of the sports events.

London’s pre-eminence during the industrial revolution and the zenith of the British empire, led to population growth of 1 million to 7 million between 1800 and 1900. The ramifications of such unprecedented growth on metrololitan life shed new light on the need for architecture to adopt a reformist position on housing provision through the twentieth century – with solutions as far reaching as the first example of council housing at Arnold Circus / Boundary Estate (1890), the garden city movement (1898), and innovations in low-rise, high density schemes such as Alexandra Road (1968-78) conceived as part of a new egalitarian societal vision. In the UK, such experiments have been long-forgotten – architecture’s sociopolitical mission abandoned in favour of a market-driven conciliation in housing provision. The ensuing crisis of unaffordability now threatens both the social and economic fabric of the country. In the UK Government’s 2005 Review of Housing Supply, conducted by economist Kate Barker, we were warned of “. . . increasing problems of homelessness, affordability and social division, decline in standards of public service delivery and increase in the costs of doing business in the UK - hampering our economic success.”1 Our inability to provide housing is cited by Barker as “the UK’s biggest policy failure”, with resulting “indefensible economic distortions”2 leading potentially to complete social failure.

London will be used as a field city to discover, view and analyse now historic seminal examples of housing typology which responded to the demands of an age which recognised good housing as part of a mechanism for social change.

Much of the housing of that era was provided by the state, known in the UK as “Council Housing.” Private acquisition of this housing now means houses constructed in the post-WW2 years for lower-income families sells for millions of pounds on the open market. UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’3 programme from the 1980s (which incentivised private home ownership as part of a political manifesto) meant public housing assets transferred to the market without replacement, representing a continual escalation of the importance of housing to economic growth.

Private accumulation of housing stock has entirely conflated ideas of home and asset - in a society of ever-rising demand for houses and ever-diminishing availability of land. This has delivered asset structures in which the housing market plays a central macroeconomic role. Its performance imperatives serve to escalate continual under-supply, bringing about ever increasing cost.

In such a system there is little space for contributions to discourse on new forms of social organisation. What is the role of the discipline of architecture in this crisis? Must it be one of capitulation to the market or can it have a critical view? Might there be alternate modes of engagement, where new solutions, market-led and otherwise, can promote ideas for collective life - for housing all of our population and for helping avoid both social failure and economic distortion?

Alongside illuminating socio-political ideas, the study of London’s seminal twentieth century housing projects aims to develop your understanding of essential parameters in the design of apartment buildings, particularly scale, spatial organisation, access arrangements, relationship between apartments and their common areas, and morphological relationships with the surrounding city. Within these parameters, the key studio themes are embedded. The spatial articulation of a dwelling connects its inhabitants with each other and with their neighbours. The building envelope expands that interaction into the full public realm of the city. It is there that architectural design has the capacity for social transformation.

The housing projects are mainly from an age where public housing provision was an important part of our political and economic landscape and where experimentation in housing typology was seen as a vehicle through which a political commitment to provide low and mid-income families with high quality environments could be instantiated. Many are around Camden, whose council had an extraordinarily ambitious and prolific housing programme between the mid 1960s and late 1970s.

High rise / high density list:

Golden Lane Estate, Chamberlin, Powell & Bon, 1952-62

Keeling House, Bethnel Green, Denys Lasdun, 1957

Highcliffe Drive blocks in the Alton West estate, Roehampton, LCC, 1959

Hallfield Estate, Bayswater, Berthold Lubetkin, Denys Lasdun and Lindsay Drake, 1951-58

Trellick Tower, Erno Goldfinger, 1966-72

Low rise / high density list:

Izokon Building, Lawn Road, Wells Coates, 1934

Willow Road, Erno Goldfinger, 1939 Winscombe Street, Neave Brown, 1963-66

Alexandra Road, Neave Brown, 1968-78

Fleet Road / Dunboyne Road Estate, Neave Brown, 1971-75

Brunswick Centre, Patrick Hodgkinson, 1967-7

Robin Hood Gardens, Alison and Peter Smithson, 1970 (now demolished)

Raydon Street, Peter Tabori, Camden Borough Council, 1978

Maiden Lane Estate, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, 1979

Lamble Street, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, 1978-80

Branch Hill Estate, Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth, Hampstead, 1978