Cambridge Architecture Gazette CA61

CAMBS ARC 2010 61 Final_2008 21/02/2011 12:23 Page 1

CAMBRIDGE ARCHITECTURE

Autumn/Winter 2010

2020 Vision Ten teams tackle Trumpington Meadows site

61 Cambridge Association of Architects www.architecture.com/cambridgegazette

featuring; RIBA and CAA election results Housing charrette report and reactions 2020 housing designs by architect/developer teams Cambridge housing types – a backwards and a forwards look

CAMBS ARC 2010 61 Final_2008 21/02/2011 12:23 Page 2

THE EDITORS

NEWS

A QUALIFIED SUCCESS

SPECULATIVE DESIGNS

Like it or not, the Cityʼs expansion programme is under way. Work has started on Glebe Farm, the second (after Orchard Park) of the cityʼs urban extensions. Consent has been granted for Trumpington Meadows and Clay Farm and reserved matters applications are in progress. Negotiations continue on the NIAB and North West Cambridge sites. Given that the downturn may delay some construction, itʼs a good moment to pause and reflect on the form that the individual dwellings – some 10,000 – on these developments might take.

Such was the view of the Cambridge Association of Architects (CAA) and the City.

Combining with Savills, they organised a design charrette to study possible forms of housing for one of these areas (see News, right). The selected site in Trumpington Meadows was one of those illustrated in our last issue (CAg 60 pp. 10–11). The brief was a loose one, focussing on the likely demands in 2020 and the mandatory energy conservation measures at that time.

What form should Cambridgeʼs new houses take? How should they respond to developing lifestyles? What impact might carbon emission mitigation and climate change have on design? These were the questions posed to participants in the housing charrette, held in the Guildhallʼs large hall on 22 October. Initiated by the Cambridge Association of Architects in association with the City and generously supported by Savills, the event involved sixth-formers, councillors and council officers and ten architect/housebuilderdeveloper teams in a nine-hour workshop.

Involving the young Supplementing that brief, students from Cambridge Regional College and Hills Road Sixth Form College set out their housing wish-lists. The thinking was that these were the likely buyers of properties in ten years time. Forty years ago this might have been a reasonable proposition – but not now.

Charrettes, however, are all about aspiration and, encouraged by the local built environment centre, Shape East, the studentsʼ fluent powerpoint presentations made a great start to the day.

But there was something else that made this charrette unusual. Most such events involve the participation of architects working to a brief prepared by a developer.

This event differed in that the teams were formed of architects working with housebuilder/developers to a fairly general brief agreed by the CAA and the City, supplemented by the studentsʼ – surprisingly conservative – expectations.

An opportunity for dialogue And how did this attempt to link designers and builders turn out? As David Levitt observes in his review (pp. 3–11), there were plenty of ideas here and some very competent schemes. Housing is a far more complex challenge than most laypersons realise and, for the last thirty years, design development has been dominated by housebuilders. So, from the architectsʼ point of view this charrette was an occasion to enter into a dialogue with the builders, although the motivation for the latter was unclear: perhaps some of their eyes were on the possibilities of the Cityʼs extensions!

It takes time to build a relationship between builder-clients and designers. Yet here were ten teams working – at speed – on the basis of ten ʻshot-gunʼ marriages. More time was needed. Let us hope that some of the more productive dialogues continue in rather less frenetic contexts.

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Reflections after the event Architect Oliver Smithʼs team had made the decision to start from its housebuilder partnerʼs standard housetypes in the knowledge that these were highly engineered products that might prove very difficult to change. ʻWe were surprised at the extent to which their planning could be adapted to suit the demands of different

Getting down to it on the Guildhall floor

The talking over, the architects take over

Following a 9.00 am start, the sixth-formers set the scene, outlining the kinds of homes which, as future purchasers, they would expect in ten years time. City director of planning Simon Payne was among many who ʻfelt energised by the way they set out their aspirationsʼ. However, architect Ann Cooper felt that, in concentrating on the traditional nuclear family, the students were ignoring the needs of the increasing number of smaller households.

As the teams set to work, Grosvenorʼs Ed Skeates was aware of a real sense of anticipation and excitement. ʻI wasnʼt at all sure what would come out of it. However, very quickly teams were circling around some very chunky ideas like density, flexibility and security with some very interesting solutions. With the national and local housing market changing rapidly I would not be surprised if a number of the ideas discussed on the day are carried forward.ʼ Work continued apace during the lunch break. Some teams were still involved in animated discussions but others were well ahead, busily drawing and making models – some at tables, others on the floor. Wandering councillors looked bemused, trying to make sense of this extraordinary public display of creativity. By 3.45 pm Cambridge Quality Panel chairman Robin Nicholson, was encouraging teams to pin up their work. Fifteen minutes later all ten proposals were ready.

Nicholson rationed each team to a bare ten minutes. Predictably, architects spoke for most of the teams. All but one completed their presentations in the allotted time. Drawings were impressively clear and complete – an extraordinary accomplishment in the time available. Following the presentations, the four reviewers, Nicholson, architect David Levitt (see page opposite), energy specialist Nick James and university professor of sustainable design Koen Steemers summed up their reactions to the dayʼs work.

climate and patterns of use – simple replanning of spaces to better suit orientation seemed eminently possible. The resistance proved not to be in the design but in the culture – derived from the very hard market context – mitigating against creating a 2-bed house that could easily be extended in time to a 3-bed. If you could get a 3bed in there – it'd be built and sold as a 3-bed from day one...ʼ The concerns of developer John Oldham of Countryside (Accordia and Glebe Farm) were very different. ʻItʼs good to engage with a wider group of people in the community … playing a role and listening to what the young people had to say … Itʼs a capacity-building exercise – since Thatcherism came in local government has lost the skills to understand [the process], so itʼs an opportunity for us to explain things in a particular way.ʼ For the architects, however, this was not a quick ʻin and outʼ exercise. Several are already developing ideas first explored at the charrette (see RH Partnershipʼs illustration on the opposite page). Skeatesʼ prediction may yet be fulfilled.

CAg NEW RIBA COUNCIL MEMBER Cambridge-based Jerry Lander is one of the RIBA Eastern Regionʼs two Council members.

A director of Freeland Rees Roberts, Lander has served on the Regional Council and was for several years an editor of this gazette. Less wellknown is his pioneering work, in the mid-1990s, in leading CPD for year-out and pre-qualification assistants working in the Cambridge sub-region.

His appointment to Council follows a noncontested election and is for a three-year term.

He sits on the RIBA Library Committee.

Any CAA member who would like him to take up a matter with the RIBA on their behalf should contact him at jl@frrarchitects.co.uk The other Eastern Region Council member is Francesca Weal from Welwyn.

CAA ELECTIONS Richard Owers of NRAP Architects is the new CAA chairman (from June 2011).

Zoe Skelding of Purcell Miller Tritton takes over as secretary and February Phillips of 5th Studio continues as treasurer. The new committee members are Ann Bassett of Fielden and Mawson, Ian Bramwell of Mole Architects and Kieran Perkins of 5th Studio.

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1 A simple terrace structure capable of use as a house or flats with a variety of façade options. (RH Partnership/Taylor Wimpey – redrawn after the charrette – see also illus 13)

HOUSING FOR 2020 What form should housing take in ten years time? Housing expert David Levitt reviews the outcome of six hours brainstorming by ten teams of developer-housebuilders and architects.

Their proposals are considered in terms of eight critical aspects ranging from life style to density.

This was an ambitious project. Each of the ten teams – none of which had worked together before – had to start from scratch on a large site with many issues to address and illustrate within the space of a mere six hours. The brief was not particularly specific – beyond observing that Cambridge presents unique opportunities for new housing and stressing the importance of the sustainability agenda, even in the prevailing economic climate. Unsurprisingly, different teams spent unequal amounts of time on different facets of the task. This ultimately gave a certain richness to the outcome but makes comparisons between one set of ideas and another rather difficult to assess.

If the desired outputs of the charrette were relatively unspecific it was hoped that the mould, in terms of plot layout and house/apartment design, would be broken. Each team was composed of both designers and developers, with the intention of covering the extremes of creativity on the one hand and economic practicality on the other. Possibly as a result of this cautious combination, the ideas put forward were not as radical as previous generations might have devised – beyond generally recognising that suburban densities are now thought of as in the range of 60 dwellings per hectare compared with half that number in 1960.

2 The study site (hatched in red) lies in the proposed Trumpington Meadows urban extension – the lightcoloured area in the centre of the plan. The Trumpington park-and-ride and guided bus terminal lie at the lower right centre of the extension. The large yellow rectangle is the John Lewis warehouse

The internationally recognised success of Cambridge’s Accordia development had a clear resonance with a number of the proposals. In addition, the submissions shared some common features such as: • an assumption that the Trumpington Meadows site [2] would be developed to accommodate residents all of roughly the same ability to pay with no distinctly separate social housing. This requires a design solution in which households with sometimes widely differing lifestyles can be accommodated without stigmatising or inhibiting any particular social group – a very difficult thing to do, given the need for owner-occupiers to protect the value of their investments • a general acceptance of the desire to own a private car and to store it safely, even if there is no need to use it on a daily basis • a recognition of the revolutionary effect that dependence on alternatives to fossil fuels will have on design • a shared preoccupation with the need for more space in new housing – allowing a more generous lifestyle comparable to the best of traditional, mostly 19th century, terrace housing in Cambridge • a faith in the good neighbourliness of the new community with few apparent inhibitions about security or anti-social behaviour.

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3 Analysis of proposed neighbourhood (PMT/Grosvenor)

Life styles / life cycles / nuclear family Before the teams set to work, two groups of sixth form students presented their ideas for the future family home and showed a number of images to illustrate them. Unsurprisingly there was an emphasis on ‘space '– meaning the need for plenty of it. Next came a preference for 'open plan' living and for flexibility in terms of future adaptation, closely followed by the importance of living sustainably – in its broadest sense.

Young people are apparently not obsessed with style and gave the impression that, provided a home satisfied the practical needs they had identified, it could be an expression of any style its owners chose to identify with, as long as it was not pastiche. They did however express an interest in features such as ‘green roofs', timber frame construction and the idea of 'self finishing' the interior of new homes.

Outside the home itself car parking was unsurprisingly seen as a major issue, but then so was the usefulness of shared communal green spaces as a preference over the conventional small private garden and the importance of feeling secure. There was noticeably, but

4 Building in flexibility: family home ‘lifecycle’ study (Saunders Boston/Bellway Homes)

perhaps understandably, no reference to the wider neighbourhood, nor a recognition of the impact these preferences might have on the kind of neighbourhood that might result. Even though efficient and plentiful 'public transport' was specifically identified as a vital component of any successful home there seemed to be no appreciation of the effect that generous detached homes, inevitably at suburban densities, would have on the convenience and accessibility of any public transport service.

Reacting to the students’ ideas, Berkeley Homes and AC Architects 'unanimously questioned the sixth formers’ brief – agreeing it should have concentrated less on the needs of the nuclear family and more on a vision of 2020 society. We envisaged the latter as a kaleidoscopic pattern of family relationships resulting in the spatial boundaries of the household unit being spasmodically readjusted.

This focus on shifting boundaries coupled with the need to develop sustainably led us to an exploration of the co-operative community, its possibilities and limitations. Can individual homes interlock densely whilst providing private yet accessible indoor and outdoor places?'

Some teams produced an analysis of the

proposed neighbourhood before looking at the actual site. Grosvenor with Purcell Miller Tritton (PMT) architects prepared an elegant series of diagrams working very much from the general to the particular [3]. These responded to the need to reconcile the lifestyle ambitions of individual households with the requirements of a sustainable neighbourhood.

Related to the issue of 'lifestyle' is the equally important issue of 'lifecycle' and the flexibility which needs to be built in to every new family-size home to anticipate the changes that take place over one or two generations of occupancy by the same family [4]. To quote Bellway Homes with Saunders Boston, 'A key design criterion of flexibility was identified by the team as a result of the briefing by the sixth form students. Five key times, (each represented by a team member) in the ‘life’ of a family were identified: young single person; young couple with no children; growing family with young children; family with older children; older couple where children have left home.’

However, few radical ideas emerged in respect of the 'nuclear family' beyond a perhaps conventional acceptance of the idea of the multi generational family unit.

Building relationships.

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CAMBS ARC 2010 61 Final_2008 21/02/2011 12:25 Page 5

Privacy

proposing ‘space for making music undisturbed and un-disturbing – inexpensive space for creating their own environments.’

Several teams, including Purcell Miller Tritton (PMT) working with Grosvenor, concentrated on narrow frontage, deep plot houses with small internal courtyards onto which some living spaces and bedrooms have their windows [5a-b]. The Lumley/Richards and Bloor Homes team included worked examples of large family houses, totally inward looking except for the street elevation, built round three sides of large internal courtyards [6a-c]. Both of these examples deal well with issues of privacy but the true courtyard house plan can only be employed where land values and density are not priorities.

Although many of the teams experimented with layouts which challenged traditional norms of acceptability in terms of the distances between the principal windows of different dwellings, most seemed to do this without placing much emphasis on the need for privacy. In the modern home enormous importance is now attached to the need for privacy of both kinds – visual and aural. But recent research shows that there is more concern about noise transfer both between and within dwellings than there is about being seen by your neighbours. Building regulations reflect the emphasis on aural privacy in the home, with minimum internal standards for

sound insulation in partitions between rooms, but conventional overlooking distances, the distance between principal windows of habitable rooms, much beloved by planning departments, are now frequently and successfully challenged.

AC Architects and Berkeley Homes recognised the issue of privacy. Quoting from the sixth form students' briefing, they wrote 'Can individual homes interlock densely whilst providing private yet accessible indoor and outdoor places? Our design focussed on a courtyard style of living at the individual as well as the community level'.

Colin Lumley and Ivor Richards working with Bloor Homes also responded to the students’ need for both aural and visual privacy by

5a Design for privacy: ground and first floor plans

5b Section (to larger scale). Houses have access from both sides. (PMT/Grosvenor)

6a Courtyard house plans: starter home/ family home/family home with annex. (Lumley–Richards/Bloor Homes)

6b Section (to larger scale). Privacy is achieved but cost of large plot may be an issue

6c Axonometric view: family home with annex

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7a Two-bay (house plus car port to the side) house type. Ground, first and second floor plans. (Bidwells/Dandara)

8a Another two-bay house design. Ground, first and second floor plans. (HWM/USS)

Internal layouts, flexibility and mechanical services In the short time available the ten teams investigated a huge range of different ways to plan houses, with a smaller number of options for apartments. Certain innovative and in some cases recurring features emerged from their approaches.

First, all ten teams worked principally on options for terraced houses. They set out to overcome the obvious drawbacks to the terraced form that have led to a general public preference for detached houses. It is not the terrace house in principle that has created the stigma against terraces but the disadvantages it appears to bring. The garden can only be reached by trailing muddy footprints through the living room or the kitchen; rooms are narrow and poorly lit; the bathroom will be internal and artificially lit; car owners can never find anywhere to park in the street near their homes; gardens on one side of the street are always in the shade and if you ever want to create a separate flat, the hallway becomes narrow, dark and pokey.

Here were solutions in plenty – provided, of

7b Axonometric view

8b Garden - side view. Note photo-voltaic arrays on roof

course, that the houses would be affordable for the target market. Saunders Boston working with Bellway showed how a house of four storeys, one of which was a basement, could be adapted over the lifetime of a single family to meet its differing needs even if, in its final form, an older couple would find themselves in a house with six rooms, which hardly meets any of the criteria for Lifetime Homes [4].

Second, there were many examples of deep plan, narrow frontage terrace houses with an internal courtyard or a rear garden with a separate building opening onto a 'mews' [5a-b].

This mews building was variously used for a garage at ground floor, combined with either office or residential use. The mews form is a revival from the 18th and 19th centuries but the whole idea of rear access to terrace housing directly contradicts one of the principles of the police crime prevention initiative, Secured by Design. It can also add between 5 and 10 metres to the depth of the plot with a consequent effect on density, but as an alternative to the ubiquitous preference for suburban detached houses it has much to recommend it.

Third, another variant on the terrace house was explored whereby the plot was divided into

two bays, one of enough width to accommodate a more or less standard terrace house and the other the width of a normal carport [7a-b & 8ab]. To an extent this was a re-evaluation of the 'town house' with its built-in garage – an idea that has grown into disrepute as the absolute antithesis of the 'live frontage' with the eyes and ears of householders monitoring what goes on in the street outside. The idea behind this two bay configuration is to have habitable rooms facing directly onto the street as well as the carport and to allow different options for the narrow bay, including one or two additional floors of bedroom-size rooms above the carport which also doubles as a civilised way through to the garden.

Fourth, most teams looked at narrowfrontage terrace houses with an emphasis on the economy of land use and density. However several more generous variations in the form of urban terrace homes, which are not so concerned about economy or frontage are equally important from the viewpoint of selling the idea. Designs by Lumley/Richards with Bloor Homes for family maisonettes above ground floor flats and for mews flats above garaging are an important addition to the repertoire of types with elegant and generous internal plans [19a-b].

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Energy The Code for Sustainable Homes (2006) rates the sustainability performance of new homes on a scale from 1 to 6 and was designed to encourage the construction of more energy efficient homes – eventually reaching Code level 6, complete self sufficiency in energy, by 2020. It is now widely rumoured that the coalition government will announce that the code is to be abandoned in favour of a version of the German Passivhaus, a standard based on the thermal efficiency of the building fabric, its airtightness and the elimination of heat loss through ventilation, rather than requiring individual homes to generate all their own electricity and heat.

One challenge posed by trying to use a single house type on both sides of an east/west street, with the aim of capturing as much solar

gain as possible, is that the houses on one side present their fronts to the street while those on the other side, their backs. Bearing in mind both how messy the backs of houses can become over a period of years and the security policy of the police to discourage houses that can be approached from both sides, the only neat solution is that which, as in the PMT with Grosvenor proposal [5a-b], has an annexe at the end of each garden to form a secure boundary.

Bearing in mind that the purpose of the charrette was to look forward to 2020, Mole Architects with Sanctuary and Circle Anglia Housing Associations concentrated on a single design for terraces of homes to Passivhaus standards [9].

Several teams made proposals for tackling the generation of both renewable heat and electricity on a neighbourhood basis,

9 Capturing solar gain in a simple terrace house. (Mole/Sanctuary and Circle Anglia)

acknowledging that making each individual home autonomously 'carbon neutral' is possible, but unlikely. 5th Studio with Barratt Homes proposed a combination of roof mounted photovoltaic panels with the idea of turning over a segment of the Country Park to produce sufficient biomass for domestic heating and hot water for all their 80 homes [10].

RMJM and the Carbon Free Group with Countryside Properties proposed that 35,000 square meters of Photo Voltaic Thermal (PV-T) panels be installed over the whole of the parkand-ride car park, combined with an underground thermal store – supplying sufficient heat and electricity for all six segments of the Trumpingon Meadows district thus freeing up the individual plots from the need for energy production and making it easier to achieve higher densities.

11a Schematic of heat and electricity system.

11b Detail of panels over park-and-ride car-park

10 Generating neighbourhood electricity through biomass from the Country Park and PV arrays on the housing.

(5th Studio/Barratt Homes)

11c Neighbourhood distribution.

(RMJM–Carbon Free Group/Countryside)

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13 External cladding options. See also illustration 1 (RH Partnership/Taylor Wimpey)

12 Spatial and building variations accommodating a variety of dwelling needs and construction options.

Householdsers can begin with a shell and add space as their families grow. (RMJM/Countryside)

14 Diversity at a cost: Borneo-Sporenburg development in the former Amsterdam docks

designs and employed contractors to build their new homes. In the case of apartments, the interiors would sometimes be left unfinished so that purchasers could choose how much work they would do themselves and how much of the fitting-out they would commission from small subcontractors, thus saving on main contractor's overheads and supervision.

'Self Build' is similar. The terraces of houses on the artificial islands of the BorneoSporenburg development in the former docks at Amsterdam are good examples at the high end of the market. In this case the City leased house-size plots to individual purchasers who then commissioned and had houses built to their own designs [14]. The potential savings through Self Build depend entirely on the interest, energy and skills of the self-builder. These range from total involvement in construction from the foundations upwards – a painstakingly slow and full time occupation – to just the fitting-out of a completed shell.

Several of the charrette teams, each including a commercial house-builder, put considerable effort into construction methods suitable for building programmes up to 2020.

There was a particular emphasis on structures flexible enough to allow for radical internal subdivision and adaptation. Variations included lots with a standard footprint (bay width and

depth) and a principal structure with floors spanning from party wall to party wall to accommodate a range of different internal configurations.

RMJM with Countryside proposed a standard grid and a structural hierarchy permitting party walls and floor plates spanning between them to be constructed either from steel, concrete or timber, or a hybrid combination of two or more of those materials together [12]. Part of the idea behind this was to allow householders at the start of their family lifecycle to begin with almost a shell and, over time, to add space according to need.

RH Partnership with Taylor Wimpey, adopted a similar approach, suggesting in addition a range of external cladding components from which purchasers could choose [13].

One of the difficulties of modifications and additions carried out over a period of years to not only the interior but the main facades as well is likely to be the lack of any cohesive and disciplined street scene. The street and canalside elevations of the private houses in the Borneo-Sporenburg development [14] have been welcomed for their refreshing diversity, but it should be remembered both that the budgets were high and that all the architect-designed house facades were completed at more or less the same time.

Construction, self build and 'co-housing' Much time and emphasis was expended on 'delivery' – how the new houses should be procured and built. The word 'customize' is more commonly applied to products like cars, but when applied to housing it suggests a much earlier and profound involvement of the customer in the whole process of funding, designing and building a new home. This is something which has never really taken off in the UK even though there are, theoretically at least, savings to be made in overall cost as well as greater customer satisfaction.

In 'Co-housing', a group of potential home owners get together, with a professional advisor, to purchase a site and commission or construct a group of houses or, more usually, a development of flats which, in the case of the latter, they then collectively own and manage.

The Vauban urban extension at Freiburg in southwest Germany is a good example. There, the city authorities, declining to allocate large blocks of land to single developers, released small parcels, either for individual houses or blocks of not more than ten flats. Under the professional guidance of a project manager, cohousing groups collectively commissioned

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So far, this review has concentrated on the form, lifestyle and construction of the dwellings.

However, the external environments around and between the buildings are arguably even more important than the housing itself.

At the eastern edge of the site formed by this 1.5 hectare segment of the proposed Trumpington Meadows development, is the present park-and-ride car park and terminus for the Cambridgeshire Guide Bus. The western edge abuts the new Country Park, linking Grantchester Meadows to Hauxton [2]. The site is to be separated from the surrounding areas of housing by subsidiary streets, except where it fronts directly onto the Country Park. To the north and south new streets will be lined with housing, half of it within the study area and the other half within the neighbouring segments to the north and south. Most importantly the 'Primary Street' for the whole neighbourhood runs north /south through the middle.

Several contradictory issues complicate the layout of simple terraced housing; these include orientation, security and street surveillance.

Convention and the ideas of 'defensible space' enshrined in 'Secured by Design' guidance promote the planning of terraces with their private open space (gardens or patios) placed back to back, so that the only access is from the front, street side, thus making burglary more difficult. This inhibits civilised ideas such as the provision of alleyways enabling rear access to

gardens, or rear access for parking. It also means that half of all dwellings running east/ west have sunshine in their gardens all day while the other half only get small amounts in the mornings and evenings. There is also a particular conflict between houses designed to take advantage of passive solar gain (for which orientation is fundamentally important) and the ‘defensible space’ of houses addressing the street. Many radical schemes of the 1960s made orientation the most important issue with the result that the front entrances of one terrace face onto the untidy back gardens of the next.

If the approaches of the ten teams and the contributions from the sixth formers had one consistent theme it was this – developers, designers and the young future customers were all equally optimistic and ambitious about the kind of communities they want to see in Cambridge by 2020. Not for them the endless terraces of houses packed tightly back to back with no shared communal space and no rear access. But nor was there any concern for the sensitive issue of integrating households with widely differing levels of affordability. To achieve such a successful outcome will require both good design and some ambitious new management structures to make it all work.

During the short time available only a few of the studies did justice to the surrounding but equally important street frontages, since their primary concern was to consider one side of the street only except of course for the section of the primary street where it was possible to consider both sides. One or two layouts seemed to concentrate on East / West terraces which

were simply interrupted where they met the North / South Primary Street, resulting in unsatisfactory gable ends fronting it [15].

Because of the time constraints none of the teams attempted a solution to the awkward problem of connecting terraces meeting at right angles on street corners.

Mole with Circle Anglia and Sanctuary Housing Associations proposed parallel terraces of Passive Solar houses which obviously need to be orientated in the same direction [16]. Almost inevitably this is difficult to accommodate between two parallel streets, without the backs of one terrace fronting onto one of these streets.

There were however several very interesting solutions. RMJM with Countryside divided the site very clearly into different typologies for different client groups including self-builders and co-housing in flats [17]. PMT with Grosvenor had a consistent courtyard house type which then enabled them to thread a continuous pedestrian route from the Guided Bus stop to the Country Park, connecting up with Communal Gardens on the way [18]. This attractive idea raises issues of security – would there be sufficient footfalls on this pathway and would the back of these houses generate enough eyes and ears onto the footpath to make it safe ?

Lumley and Richards with Bloor Homes created two rear mews with parallel rows of parking back to back and two storeys of apartments above them [19a-b] – a useful device for providing both parking and accommodation in situations where the depth of the site does not allow a full additional terrace.

15 Blind gable ends to the terraces face the main street where it crosses this site. (HWM/USS)

16 Passive solar strategy with all houses facing south (see illustration 9). (Mole/Sanctuary and Circle Anglia)

17 Different typologies for different client groups.

(RMJM–Carbon Free Group/Countryside)

18 Pedestrian route between courtyard houses from Guided Bus to Country Park. (PMT/Grosvenor)

19a Parking below apartments opening to mews on each side works well on a narrow site…

19b … as shown (at centre) in this axonometric view (Lumley–Richards/Bloor Homes)

Street frontage security

and

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20 Layout mainly based on a single family house (see 7a and b) with integral car parking to the side – thus leaving the mews/service road and house fronts uncluttered by cars. (Bidwells/Dandara)

21 Courtyard houses with access from mews open onto and overlook generous shared open space.

See also the cover to this issue and illustration 5. (PMT/Grosvenor)

Car parking The proposed Trumpington Meadows neighbourhood is very well placed for its excellent links to central Cambridge, using either the new guided bus service or the shuttle buses which ply to and from the city centre to the park-and-ride terminus within easy walking distance of the site.

However, love them or loathe them, the general consensus among all the teams was that the ownership of at least a single car per household was a pre-requisite (the planning authority-approved design code requires 1.5).

Even with occasional use, the convenient and secure storage of a car was definitely seen an important concomitant of the 2020 lifestyle. Five different solutions were proposed, varying in

convenience,with off-site parking in the nearby park-and-ride car park at one extreme, to town houses with 'in curtilage' car ports or garages at the other.

Saunders Boston with Bellway Homes suggested using the park-and-ride carpark, on the basis that it is seldom full during the day and certainly not full overnight. The team conceded that this arrangement might not last and that it might eventually be neccessary to allocate a section for 'residents only'. This strategy would in effect enlarge their total site area. The Vauban extension at Freiburg uses a similar arrangement with a multi-storey car park for residents only at the perimeter of the site, and has appropriately narrow streets between terraces of housing, allowing only temporary 'dropping off' for passengers and goods. This arrangement

makes for streets of very intimate scale in which children's toys are often temporarily abandoned – but there is no denying the hazard that most UK householders would experience, even in Cambridge, if required to park their cars in the park-and-ride and then walk home during the small hours.

Lumley and Richards with Bloor Homes opted for garages and car ports within the curtilage of every house. They proposed a double row of parked cars in undercroft below two storeys of flats in between two parallel mews [19a-b]. While this arrangement may not be inherently economical in terms of overall density, it does permit good use of the depth of this section of the site which is too wide for two parallel terraces but too narrow for four.

RMJM with Countryside Properties opted for two terraces of 7-8 storey flats at the western end of the site nearest the Country Park for which they proposed underground parking [17]. This is an option which most residential developers adopt in areas with high land values, where high densities justify the additional cost which for every parking space can equal around a third of the cost of constructing a flat. One obvious advantage, and why it was chosen in this case, is to provide a generous shared open space between the terraces, opening onto the park.

Bidwells with Dandara produced a layout mainly based on a single highly flexible house type with a 7.5 metre frontage. It consists of a three-storey 5 metre wide house with a 2.5 metre expansion zone next to it, with private open space on a first floor deck at the rear of the house. This allows for a mews/service road beneath the deck giving access to a built-in garage at the rear [20]. Developer Urban Splash devised a similar arrangement at Chimneypot Park in Salford Manchester, although there the houses were too small to allow parking inside the house footprint. This arrangement leaves the fronts of houses and the street that serves them, completely uncluttered by cars and with a good 'passive surveillance' of the street itself.

In a similarly consistent layout, based on terrace housing, PMT with Grosvenor, chose a courtyard house type with a narrow frontage deep plan [21]. There is no mews at the rear with consequently much more communal open space onto which all the houses open and overlook. In some ways this is a modern 'up market' version of the post-war American 'Radburn' planning principle in which all houses have an entrance at both front and back. A disadvantage is that the main street frontages become an endless ribbon of garage doors with very little prospect of 'passive surveillance'. The solution for Team 10, HWM with USS Ltd. was in many ways similar except that the frontage of their houses was based on an A+B bay rhythm [8a-b]. This has the advantage of habitable rooms facing the street at ground level but is clearly a disadvantage in terms of achievable density.

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Density Density considerations – like those of cost – can exert a brake on the imagination when trying to predict 20 years ahead. But they are often a reliable indicator of practicality and economy.

The Trumpington Meadows Design Code recommends densities of around 60 dwellings per hectare. All ten of the teams taking part adopted terrace housing forms which, if used on their own as a single dwelling type, could achieve this density. But attempting to establish the layout densities of all ten teams is relatively meaningless since it would obviously be possible – and might indeed be sensible real estate policy – to construct a single very high density flat development at one end of the site in order to be generous in the use of space for houses at the other. The ideas developed by RMJM with Countryside illustrate this well [17].

Other teams developed layouts substantially based on a single house type, and this makes it much more possible to compare their densities with the Design Code recommendations. For instance Bidwells with Dandara developed their principal house type with a 7.5 metre frontage, yet still managed to achieve a density of 65 dwellings per hectare [20], and PMT with Grosvenor achieved 62 dwellings per hectare based on a house type with a 5.5 metre frontage [21].

In these two approaches, based on very different house types but quite similar layouts.

The Bidwells scheme, which has a handful more flats than PMT, develops the western end of the site more intensively than the PMT scheme with a third terrace squeezed in. This partly accounts for the reason why Bidwells manage to achieve a slightly higher density than PMT. This third terrace in the Bidwells layout obviously eats into the shared open space more than in the PMT layout, so that a detailed analysis would probably show the overall area occupied by buildings to be higher in their scheme.

Although dwelling frontage is normally of the greatest importance in terms of optimising density on sites of a regular shape, the varying widths of this particular site demanded an approach in which different combinations of frontage and depth yielded the most economical results. Anticipating an increasingly radical approach to climate change and the various means of capturing solar energy is also likely to have an increasing influence on layout. It is usually possible to orientate roof mounted solar collectors or photvoltaics independently of which way the house underneath it faces, either by using a flat roof or by pitching the roof to face south. But for the optimum amount of sunlight, houses designed to capture passive solar as proposed by Mole architects with Sanctuary and Circle Anglia Housing Associations [22] are difficult to incorporate into a conventional street layout, as they all need to face the same way, unless different house designs are developed in subservience to the layout with a range of house types to suit every orientation.

22 Passive solar houses may need to face the same way. Different types to suit other orientations are required if they are to be incorporated in conventional street layouts. (Mole/Sanctuary and Circle Anglia)

Assumptions, ambitions and the reality The most intriguing revelation of the charrette was the discrepancy between the low-density implications of the students’ assumptions and ambitions – the continuation of the nuclear family with privacy for each member, double garages and plenty of green space – compared with the reality of the challenge presented to the architect/housebuilder teams who were conforming to the Design Code’s 65 dwellings per hectare and the requirements of the Code for Sustainable Homes.

But there were ideas a-plenty here and, given the amount of ground to cover within a sixhour time frame and the ‘shotgun marriage’ team-formation, a remarkable degree of coherence in the individual proposals.

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INHABITING CAMBRIDGE Housing is a key element in making a good city. John Sergeant considers Cambridgeʼs stock, the potential of the terraced townhouse and how new developments can gain a sense of identity. He concludes that it is time to think of a new form of city – the sub-region.

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Minimal cottage: Orchard Street Minimal house: Jesus Street 2 up- 2 down: Parsonage Street Terrace house with bay: Hertford Street 4-storey terrace house with narrow area: enriching change of scale 4-storey, 3-window with Regency balcony: Park Terrace Gothic Revival: Pemberton Terrace 4-storey terrace: Chesterton Road at Staples gyratory Monster on Barton Road: No 29

Cities consist of civic, monumental buildings and background. Background contains commercial and production elements, but consists for the most part of housing. We think of the quartier of Paris or the barrio of Barcelona; together these community areas make up the city. They were formerly parishes centered on a church and can have unique properties as in the palatial squares and crescents of Bath, the arcades of Bologna or Prague or the rows of Chester. However, while Cambridge possesses memorable cultural buildings, until recently it has had little good housing.

Viewed urbanistically, the northern approach from Huntingdon Road and down Castle Hill is unmemorable and disfigured by the Shire Hall gap. In contrast, one of the southern approaches runs past decent terrace houses (Brookside) to a good street (Trumpington) with nearly continuous terraces of varied scale while the other flows through the new Gateway quarter of Hills Road offering scale and energy before the defile of Regent Street. The eastern approaches are either past the irredeemable retail sheds of Newmarket Road to the brief quality of Maid's Causeway, or through the mean scale of Mill Road or the largely suburban Cherry Hinton Road. The western approach with its 20th and 19th century villas, is also suburban – although there is one point (29 Barton Road) where some Victorian decided that Cambridge would have an urban scale and built a run of 4/5 storey houses: he guessed wrong [9].

Both Hills and Newmarket Road approaches encounter minor urban disasters – the War Memorial junction with Station Road and the KwikFit roundabout with East Road. Both are wounded urban spaces and need healing. Cambridge lacks the confident elegance of Bloomsbury, even Islington. But we do have some strong and spacious Victorian housing – such as that in Harvey Road. However, this must be set against the acres of tight and minimal terrace houses in the areas around Gwydir Street and Romsey Town. Further out there are only those semi-detached and detached zones that can be found anywhere in Britain. Urbanism, the city as a work of Art recognized by statute on the Continent, is still an infant concept in the UK. We tend to view good urban spaces through the lens of Town and Country Planning, which is by comparison more concerned with traffic flow and drainage.

Elegance, gloom and little innovation Cambridge has little pre-19th century housing. There used to be narrow-streeted remnants of medieval houses in the area between Portugal Place and the Round Church and around Petty Cury, but a multistorey car-park and the Lion Yard destroyed them.

Before the canalization of the Cam and the later enclosures there was the great West Field, extending from the backs towards today’s M11, while Midsummer and Stourbridge Commons formed part of the East Field until the coming of the railway. Together, these

large common lands gave the town a rural aspect and restricted its expansion. Enclosure and the coming of the railway prompted unprecedented amounts of construction and account for the predominantly 19th century character of Cambridge's residential areas.

There are some elegant episodes in this expansion (New Square [13], Downing Terrace, Scroope Terrace, the north and east sides of Parker's Piece, Maid's Causeway [11], all with an 18th century flavour) followed by solid, gloomy Gothic terraces, (Harvey Road, Pemberton Terrace [7]) reducing in density to the semi-detached villas of Lyndewode and Glisson Roads.

Lower down the income scale were the railway worker, college servant, two-up two-down terraced housing, first with unrelieved flat facades, then with splayed bay windows (Devonshire Road, Newnham). Small builders constructed many areas piece by piece and it was this that gives the variety of heights and detail that enlivens such streets as Clarendon and Gwydir. 100 years later we have extensive low-density semi-detached and detached housing, and little innovation.

The townhouse – an urbanistic achievement What makes good housing in the English culture? A garden and somewhere to park the car, it seems. So, if we are to have a reasonable density – avoiding loss of countryside for production and leisure – we are left with the 'townhouse', a great invention. The Georgian square, whether in Edinburgh’s New Town or in the quiet precincts of other cities, is eminently liveable and this country's great urbanistic achievement. It also has a remarkably high density.

10 Eighteenth century terrace house cross section

The key feature of the terraced townhouses is their cross-section [10]. The soil from the excavated basements was used to raise the street level and create the sunken 'areas' that lie between the pavement and the houses This arrangement gave dual access to each house – an entry at or slightly above pavement level for those who lived ‘Upstairs’ and one down through the area for tradesmen and those who worked ‘Downstairs’ at basement (and often garden) level. This shallow zone between pavement and house and the raised ground floor gave enhanced privacy from passersby. It is this feature that has allowed later sub-letting and conversion to office or other use. There are other ways to achieve this, such as the full stairflight up to a principal floor, as in the New York brownstone or parts of Chalk Farm, Camden, but that works best with a falling site, and this Cambridge lacks. A second way is by having a shallow, wide-frontage plan with doors at

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* As the great 17th century architect Inigo Jones put it: ‘Outwardly every wyse man carrieth a gravity in Publicke Places, yet inwardly hath his imaginancy set on fire, and sumtimes licentiously flying out, as nature herself doeth often times stravagantly...’

Planning controls should be relaxed for these private places. Behind the Georgian facades of the Royal Crescent, Bath, are backs full of personal joys, and above the cornice-line of the great Renaissance Foundling Hospital in Florence or Regent's Park terraces are villages of invention. Good places for solar-collectors, gardening, thinking or sun-bathing.

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Maid's Causeway streetscape: sunken area with front gardens Details: full height windows, ironwork, fanlight.

New Square: public decorum versus wheelie bins. Can we not consider communal recycling bins at street corners as in Europe?

Details, Park Parade: private joys at the rear, conservatory lantern 8-storey flats, front, off Union Street 6-storey flats, rear: off Union Street

both street and mews ends. The upmarket houses of Accordia, off Brooklands Avenue, achieve this.

The alternative to forever walking up and down stairs is the flat, as on the Continent, and recent projects have shown that it is acceptable to British culture. This is probably more the result of mobility (been to the country, done that) and demographic change (the rise of one-person units) than of changed sensibility, but this is outside the present argument.

Again, Accordia has good examples with semi-sunken parking below. But the cost of lifts ensures that prices will be high unless a height of at least 6, as opposed to 4, stories is permitted. There are successful 1970's high-rise (for Cambridge) blocks off Union Street, in New Town, but post-war experience suggests that this dwelling type is best suited to single and 2-person units, especially the commuter market near the railway station, and is not seen presently as suited to family dwelling.

Successes and disasters Finally, Cambridge now has the phenomenom of the mixed-housing project (houses and flats). Reducing or removing private gardens (Riverside or St. Andrews Road, Chesterton) has been shown to liberate contemporary housing from the house or flat straightjacket: what is known in the USA as the condominium.

The aesthetic has generally been historicist (Ravensworth Gardens, Tenison Road) and the architectural quality pitiful. The shining beacons are Highsett (1960's) and Accordia (1990's), which are wellplanned internally and with respect to the city, yet whose buildings reflect the culture of their time.

However, a recently completed project in Chesterton, marketed as 'Vie la Riviere', shows that large-scale intervention can utterly destroy village scale. With the potential for such large, rapid-build, projects in Cambridge’s proposed urban extensions, this issue of scale and identity must be a major concern.

How are we to give a sense of identity to these new communities far from the urban centre? The parish church no longer attracts, nor, it seems, do the post office or pub. Moreover, the current cut-backs are paralleled by climate-change and biosphere concerns.

We must surely consider new communitarian ideas, such as combined heat and power, a school assembly hall doubling as community centre, separate rainwater, sewage and industrial waste systems, allotment gardens or hydroponic greenhouses on the roof of the supermarket, a market hall for both farmers and home gardeners. We must 'grow' roads and footpaths out of what exists: my one great disappointment with Accordia is that its avenue leads nowhere, it is a culde-sac.

We must also raise densities; rising prices and world populations will mean that Britain may once again have to grow its own food. 'Flown for freshness' will be a memory, like 'drive anywhere', except for the rich.

Planners, who mostly have no training in urban history, must be separated from their love-affair with fake villages; not one more infuriating Cambourne-wiggly road! Variety and individual identity can be found at the rear or on the roof, not in arbitrarily inverted plans and specious detail.* Workshops or laboratories for light industry or the knowledge-economy can be integrated with housing, and the dead disaster of the University's

West Cambridge avoided. It will be a challenge to include the garden shed, no less than the car, in a form of development which is less land-profligate than the semi-d.

The sub-region as a form of city Finally, affordable housing and generous street layouts are issues that need to be integrated into the new peripheral quarters of the city. Whatever the present Government intends, there is a national shortfall of 3 million houses. The high cost of construction suggests production of 'efficiency apartments' of some 40 sq.m.

The high cost of land suggests that great ingenuity will be needed if Silicon Fen is to take a share of this housing growth and the economic benefits that will accompany it; higher densities or enlarged settlements linked by adequate transport will be required. Presently each peripheral site is planned as a separate unit with ad hoc connections to an already overloaded road system. Is it not time to consider the sub-region as a form of city? An entity bounded by Huntingdon, Ely, Newmarket, even Saffron Walden could be linked by drawing the threads of existing roads into a loose grid.

Grids offer alternatives in the case of overloading.

17 Cerda’s grid plan for Barcelona, 1859. Lower left, Old City

These thoroughfares would need to be more than just roads: they would need an identity. They might be tree-lined avenues with cycleways and a tram median.

Historic Cambridge could sit centrally, much as the Old City of Barcelona within the Cerda-grid [17]. This realisation can transcend and accompany existing local concerns and authorities.

The author John Sergeant is a Cambridge-educated architect. He iives in a 3-storey 1970's terrace house in Cambridge.

It zones perfectly for family life. But the 5mx12m (16x40 foot) garden is small for four bikes and three wheelie-bins. Being able to walk into town is an excellent trade-off against small rooms.

Where else has he lived? In a 2nd floor flat in a Jain area of Ahmedabad, India. A converted 19th century factory near Royston. A small-holding in Hertfordshire.

A fourth floor flat in central London.

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Cover: Proposed housing quarter at Trumpington Meadows designed by the Purcell Miller Tritton/Grosvenor architect/developer team at the recent housing charrette organised by the Cambridge Association of Architects, the City of Cambridge and Savills. See News on p. 2 and David Levittʼs extended review of this and other proposals on pp. 3 – 11.

Cover design by Bobby Open.

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