RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LINE

1.3.1 Reconceiving infrastructure through typological exploration

Along the rail line, there is a changing attitude about the consistency of height vs variation in height. The question is - what is the reason about why we would either insist upon complete limitation in consistency to height or enabling modulation along a length. The rail line has been traditionally looked at as an infrastructural element that divides the urban blocks in irregular forms, resulting in buildings with reduced fenestrations and a consistent height. But since the last few years, this formal starting point has been reversed. There is a new approach that explores variation in the height and breaking of the mass, introducing a range of thoughts on orientation.

When we look at a place like Bermondsey which is relatively central in the city, several projects show us new ways of not only making use of the space underneath the infrastructure but how to be adjacent to them. But it seems that maybe what we haven’t done yet is to conceptualize little bit further the real potential of transformed approaches to housing for the way in which these areas work.

Looking at a series of projects, Levitt Bernstein has been one of the key drivers and a big part of the logic is about blocks as relatively protective environments based on accepted understandings of the integrity of the estate within the system of affordable housing. With somewhat expanded services based on tried and tested understandings of social housing provision based on the family household as the norm, they’re often thought of relatively protective environments.

But if we look at it from a point of view that there are a whole range of decision makers who seem to be fairly complicit in not enabling the residential environments to embrace ways of creating new opportunity for local people and the possibility of looking at the potential crossover between cultivating opportunity and changing the way of life is relatively unexplored we realize this has partly to do with the reading of these spaces which assume that the key thing is to do a better job of making streets and gardens, streets and courtyards maybe we haven’t gone quite far enough in terms of understanding more innovative approaches to living.

1.3.2 The Neighborhood

The concept of neighborhood is closely associated with the idea of completeness. It encompasses parcels of urban areas that are capable of housing all the necessary services that fulfil an individual’s daily routines. A self-sufficient neighbourhood specifies a bundle of spatial attributes associated with clusters of residences in conjunction with education, health and well-being facilities. Neighbourhoods today demand a more integrated civic realm based on notions of productive differentiation and an attitude of complementarity of contrasting elements within urban areas. Thus, if our attitude about what makes a good neighbourhood is changing then one of the evolving concepts that start to have an impact is the way we look at housing estates.

Today we don’t look at them simply as a refuge from a threatening city but as participants in providing resources of life within a more expanded and better integrated neighbourhood. This idea of an integrated neighbourhood is thwarted by the presence of this rail viaduct – creating an element of nuisance that we want to protect from it. It divides areas such that if you built near it, you could only be at the edge of it rather than the centre. But in the last couple of years, something has happened that allows us to now think of the rail viaduct as a piece of a system of integration.

Viaduct as a piece of integration

Thus, our housing environments themselves have different approach to ground compared to what is there. The spaces under the rail viaducts make particularly good locations for storage and light industries. Also, things that could be a part of the urban dynamic for sports, health and recreation. In other places they could be spaces for furniture makers ad designers as well. But in this particular area, the key driver of change is the crossover between lifestyle and interiors and especially a new kind of artisanal approach towards food. Taking food as the driver of change to explore the opportunities associated with it, as it extends from these spaces underneath the rail viaduct, it begins to help us rethink our housing. In the age of obsessive consumerism, a genuine diversity of food needs to channel and build a collective machinery, something on the scale of the neighbourhood, that brings the civic realm from the outdoors to the dwelling inside the buildings.

This is seen through a few reasonable buildings that start to establish collaborative patterns in the most immediate neighborhood built in capacity to the changing attitude about food. In order to build a new, productive residential environment, there need to be robust steps taken to nurture the relationship between the existing industrial areas and the housing adjacent to them. The area of Bermondsey near the viaduct holds all the pieces that constitute a neighborhood.

If only the viaduct is looked at something that is a field of integration and is no longer an edge or at a limit, then the nature of projects adjacent to it can be interpreted in a new light, creating a new diagram of the neighborhood.

1.3.3 Asymmetry in urban fabric - a driving factor

The rail line creates an interesting geometry in the urban fabric. Through the years, the projects around the line have evolved in a way that creates asymmetry on either side. This asymmetry leading to irregular block pattern allows for the existing and future buildings to have a unique relationship with the viaducts, sometimes acting as service grounds for the industries underneath. If we embrace this difference in the pattern along the line, it enables multiple conditions with opportunities for a new orientation, frontage and open space. It is not about filling the voids in the urban area but to nurture the asymmetry through meaningful interventions, creating an active ground that pulls in the productive nature of the viaduct and the open space that comes with it, as an urban strategy.

The Rouel road estate, consists of a long linear slab building that creates a walllike structure along the rail line, creating an edge, a boundary to shield from the pre-conceived notion of the nuisance that comes with the rail viaduct. With immense potential to establish a relationship with the existing ground conditions, there lies an opportunity to rethink the way housing estates were built on irregular blocks. The three hundred meters stretch can bring in moments of consistency while challenging the idea that linearity has the ability to be permeable and embrace variation.

asymmetry on either sides of the

1.3.4 Linear typology – Through variation and segmentation

The provocative argument is that linearity is the new starting point for housing despite everything we think for housing estates like this, that can help us fulfil our desire for porosity and integration. Through linearity, we retain the morphological approach of an axis with double aspect spaces and also variation through allowing deepening of floorplates. What starts to become apparent as we look at a range of approaches to linear building is in spite of the rigor and continuity of the building as a whole there is a tremendous amount of diversity that’s possible within them. The key point of the research is not to show that this is my answer or the only answer but if we look at this set, it gives us a possibility of reflecting the kinds of ways of life and qualities that we might be able to nurture through forms like these and how they work with dimension, orientation, circulation in different ways that allows us to begin to sort of open up an diversify our experience of the environment in a multi-level way. The proposition explores different sorts of households with a shared environment but as we explore the length of almost 300 meters, there is a different way of organizing individual cells or dwellings compared to the more collective aspects in the building.

linearity as a tool for variation

It is through the incorporation of a range of distinct approaches to the plan and section within a single building that the project provides a source of structure that enables spatial variation. In order to generate this sectional difference, the linear element experiences a rift that creates a shear in the volumes, creating pockets of spaces that nurture their own civic realm on the ground. A new approach towards linear slab buildings is embraced as we allow the slab to be segmented yet connected at a level, fostering multiple ways of collectivity and sharing methods of food production and consumption.

STRATEGIC INVESTIGATIONS - wider circles of reform

1.4.1 Redefining the Pantry

“Who does your housework, then?” I asked.

“There is none to do,” said Mrs. Leete, to whom I had addressed this question. -Socialist Boston, in the year 2000, described by Edward Bellamy, 1888

“Our washing is all done at public laundries at excessively cheap rates, and our cooking at public shops. Electricity of course, takes place of all fires and lighting. We choose houses no larger than we need and furnish them so as to involve the minimum of trouble to keep them in order. We have no use of domestic servants.”1

-Peck, The world A Department Store.

One of the most important yet less talked about element that inevitably dominates the amount of space taken up by the kitchen is the storage space. The idea of a pantry was cultivated in medieval times when the food and supplies were stored in specific rooms according to the needs of the items, like the meats were stored in a larder, the alcohol stored in the buttery and the bread was stored in the pantry. This distinguished the idea of storage from the kitchen in a sense that it left the spatial quality to be as clean and free of clutter as possible. The pantry found its location in the middle of the kitchen and the formal dining room that ensured ease of circulation between the three.

The pantry also held importance in terms of security of the house and was also at one time guarded by the butler to safeguard from thievery. Although in the later years the concept of storage shifted and incorporated quantities of dishes and cutlery that would become items on display for the guests to see. The cabinets become moments of curating fine crockery and utensils that would lure the guests to the kitchen.28

The transition of the storage to display is an interesting one as it expanded the idea of locating items in one space while also changing the use of the immediately adjacent space. This resulted in the kitchen becoming an informal meeting area for the ladies in the house.29 These observations help us understand and question the idea of storage, display and organization when it comes to modern day houses that give little importance to the way kitchens are positioned in the house. The kitchen holds a strong potential in changing the layout of the entire floorplate and even the structure, creating unexpected crossovers while encouraging community gatherings and neighborliness. Today, with the growing lifestyle where offices encourage a culture of providing meals within the office premises, the concept of the pantry as well has been redefined for single/multi-family households.

1.4.2 The concept of the collective - Evolution of the pragmatic household

As we look at the growing trend of outsourcing food on a daily basis or buying groceries that perish before they have been used and are thus wasted, a large amount of working population relies on means of food production and consumption that takes place outside the doorstep of the household. It would sound controversial but looking through a wider lens, one can observe that the increasing rates of accommodation provide less than adequate space for proper cooking or even hosting more than one person at a time while cooking. Unlike the traditional genealogy where the woman of the household or the servants were the only ones occupying this part of the house, the new way of life lets go of the gender bias and sees a mix of people, disregarding the age, sex, profession in the cooking space. Thus, the kitchen can be looked as a space of negotiation to cultivate relationships both spatially and socially.

The time spent in housekeeping duties, food preparation for a single meal, or in using online resources and ordering a bag full of weekly groceries without even being able to pick your vegetables and meat by hand in person portrays a way life that could benefit if some of these tasks were either made a part of the community that one lives in or are shared amongst individuals residing on the same floor or in the same building.

Looking back at Katharine Beecher’s influence2 on the ‘House of Pragmatism’, the prototype house is notable for its efficiency possessing a freedom of space that allows in a clear reduction of the surface area required for the maintenance of the home. According to her, the elimination of suffering in domestic labour led to an elimination of suffering in terms of implementation processes.

This extensive group of feminist activists in 1868 questions interior organizations, putting forth an idea for pragmatic interiors, combining intensity and simplicity in unsuspected ways.3

1.4.2 The concept of the collective - Evolution of the pragmatic household

On the other hand, today, a survey suggests that there is a reluctance to buy items such as homes, cars and luxury goods and instead, people prefer a new set of services that provide access to products without having the burden of ownership. This idea, if applied to the concept of a pantry, a place to store the perishable/ non-perishable groceries and the trend of hyper-localism, where there is a greater emphasis on local supply chains and entrepreneurship, brings out a new typology of living with shared domestic services.

Housing can then be looked at as an urban strategy that brings people together through not only having communal spaces for social gatherings but by providing spaces for shared productivity. Through harnessing the local talent networks of our central urban areas, there lies an opportunity for living and working by sharing the culinary tasks and needs. This would enable a move that focuses on new spatial strategies for living that beings the traditional space of the kitchen outside the home and into a sphere where the domesticity of the household is extended beyond the threshold of the house. By cultivating a new platform for the civic life to flourish, for small scale businesses to expand, this gives rise to exciting crossovers and assemblages at the scale of the neighborhood.

hierarchy of spaces / creating a void to differentiate the collective from the individual units, establishing a diagonal relationship while maintaining privacy through rotating the units

Chapter 2

New inner domesticity

2.1

2.2

2.3

2.4