Taking the time to write something considered and share it online is not easy, so getting reminded why it’s worth it is always welcome. I’ve certainly appreciated all the supportive comments about my first submission to the housing blog over at bdonline.co.uk and much more importantly I’ve learnt lots in return from people sending links and sharing knowledge. The real star of that show though is undoubtedly the delightful book by FRS Yorke and Penelope Whiting: The New Small House.
The added bonus being this suitably charming cover by none other than Gordon Cullen. As a student of the mid-nineties, surrounded at the time by all the linguistic gymnastics of post structuralist decision dodging, I’ve noticed that with age my later interests appear to be an act of rebellion and I’m becoming an arch-empiricist. Yesterday I was into linguistics, but today I’m not Saussure.
I was unimaginably flattered then to recently receive an e-mail from a reader who likened my own sketches to the work of Cullen and even more excited to discover an opportunity to share some more of his work.
Here’s Eric Osbourne describing the history of the sketch he’s been the proud owner of for years:
I have been trying to remember the firm I shared 16 Carlisle Street, London W1 with from about 1968 to 1970, I think they were called Phillip Chandos, because they were drinking in the Chandos Pub opposite the Nurse Cavell Statue, St. Martins’ Lane when the company was conceived – drinking was important to the company ethos! They use to write, design, edit and sub-contract printing for books and leaflets on various aspects of construction and architecture. The Lead Association springs to mind. Gordon Cullen was in and out all the time and very good friends of the main man (a tall guy with a long horizontal moustache and always sporting a bow tie), who had his office on the first floor. All their names are gone now but I remember Gordon would arrive at 11.00/11.30, the office manager would go down and we would hear peals of laughter. At opening time they would either go to the ‘Bath House’ pub on the corner for a ‘quick one’ which lasted until 3.00 or the Braganza, Soho Square in which case you did not see the three of them again that day. After they moved, I do remember going to their new offices in Neal’s Yard, Covent Garden for a very quick drink, with accumulated post and the drawing which I had found amongst the serious piles of rubbish they had left behind. I was told I could keep it and I have treasured it every since – it’s the nearest thing I have to a William Blake/Picasso/Durer – a true masterpiece.
I don’t know whether it was commissioned for anything else or used in any publications so perhaps this is its first outing beyond Eric’s home. Thanks for taking to the time to share it with us Eric. I dream, literally, of being able to muster such line quality so effortlessly.
My hope of getting back in the blogging saddle has resulted in agreeing to try the occasional entry for bdonline.co.uk and their new housing blog. I’ve kicked off by relying on some fairly classic texts for comfort and expanded on what began as a twitter message musing on the value of sculleries. You can see the results here:
I’ve no doubt the breadth of the topic will give opportunity in the future to wander into both theory and practice and I look forward to trying to weave both together. I’ll also hopefully be using it to subtly introduce other links to online content that you might not find in other mainstream media. You’ll note for example that I’ve snuck some links in to the first entry to the fantastic librarything.com
This is of course partly because of my involvement with…
be2camp
Thanks to Sir Clive Sinclair, his rubber-keyed Spectrum 48k and several copies of Computer + Video Games magazine I am what the technology industry likes to call an ‘early adopter’. During the last 6 or 7 years I’ve been trying to take the geek enthusiasm (ranging from furtive activities such as mucking about late at night with the beginnings of this blog or organising flash mob assaults on Oxfam shops) into my office during the day and use it to change the Way We Work. It’s proved valuable in many ways; from public facing projects that have benefitted from the openness and agility of communicating on the web and in three dimensions, to experience with behind the scenes project management tools that we can include as part of our normal service through to just the simple ability to be able to run an office without being beholden to an IT Department or causing unnecessary overheads.
What’s perhaps been most surprising about these past few years is how long I kept feeling like an early adopter. We’re a conservative bunch in the construction sector it would seem and encounters with fellow geeks were few and far between. This is particularly odd given how obsessed us architects tend to be about concepts of technique or process, making us prime targets for the Getting Things Done philosophy found in many of the online tools available. Our interest in craft and production combined with, say, a predilection for pretentious graphic design and a pedantically chosen font would also suggest we’d be suckers for offshoots in this digital territory like, let’s say, Moo business cards. Yet for years I could cause an embarrassing amount of fuss at a meeting by pulling one out of my pocket and explaining that it was the simple connection of an image sharing site, short run, print-on-demand services and web 2.0 user generated content principles. Admittedly, we’ve adopted blogging and twitter with gusto in the last 4 or 5 years but then we always did like to Go On A Bit (see aforementioned BD blog entry) and frankly, there’s more possible with Web 2.0 Revision B than that.
This is changing however and meanwhile, like a scene from an episode of Heroes, others like me have been gathering to share the powers invested in them by their binary mutated DNA sequence, forming crack squads of digital communication experts ready to infiltrate the-
OK, enough with the uncharacteristic and fairly unattractive hyperbole. I’m allowing myself such melodrama because it’s with no small amount of pride that I highlight tomorrow night’s event at the Building Centre in London.
After several years of be2camp events around the country, the network’s founders will be announcing the results of the nominations and voting at be2awards.com. Those listed, along with many of the folks who came along to support at past be2camp sessions will have given their time and knowledge free at events like the ones I’ve been involved in organising in Birmingham for the last two years. Whilst the meetings and unconferences may not have reached a mainstream audience in the construction sector yet, we know that much has been learnt, shared and developed by all of us who’ve been able to take part.
So, it’ll be a worthwhile celebration. Please do register on the site and come along and join us during the afternoon. Alternatively, just keep your eye on twitter for the most important category of all: Nearest Public House.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve just finished listening to McCloud’s (Sennett referencing) lecture on the importance of craftsmanship, or the exhaustively comprehensive work of Joseph Little I’ve just been reading on condensation in walls, or even just the day to day experience that gives one cause for concern over trade skills; but either way it’s hard not to find the AECB’s statement on carbon reduction attractive:
“So the AECB team looking at this is recommends that the carbon compliance level is set at 10-12 kgCO2/m2.a, for all dwelling types. The reasoning behind this is, that this level can be achieved with a highly efficient house heated with gas/lpg, without being forced to add in PVs, biomass or other bolt-ons.
The 10-12 kgCO2/m2.a level equates to an ‘emissions reduction’ from 2006 building regulations of about 50%. It recognises that the additional reduction we need as a nation is much easier to afford with large-scale offsite renewable plant, than on-site. So the idea is that the remaining carbon reductions to achieve the “zero carbon” target will be via “allowable solutions”, allowing the developer to invest in nation-wide offsite renewable generation, giving us all the best value for the developer’s money.”
I’d better go and catch up with their closing their ‘Closing The Gap’ (PDF) paper.
As you may have noticed from all the (t)wittering a few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be offered a place on a field trip to Germany to study Passivhaus construction principles. As my practice continues to try and raise the energy efficiency bar in the social housing sector and travel along the seemingly never ending path to zero carbon (thanks to the fact that we can’t agree a destination), adopting Passivhaus strategies makes perfect sense.
Perfect sense – that’s the very essence of Passivhaus thinking you might argue, its seemingly unarguable logic that simply asks that we build well insulated, draft free, carefully detailed, properly ventilated buildings. What’s not to like?
There are a full set of photos available on Flickr, more notes and audio in an Evernote folder (although the audio is too quiet unfortunately) and if that’s not enough there’s even a hand crafted booklet you can download and fold yourself thanks to bookleteer.com. Never let it be said that I don’t give value for money.
The trip began with a presentation on board the mothership – the Passivhaus Institute in Darmstadt. Our host talked us through the key principles of super insulation levels of below 0.15, super air tightness that allowed no more than 0.6 air changes per hour, super rigorous detailing that eradicated connections between the outside and the inside, super seductive triple glazing products and ventilation heat exchangers that performed at an efficiency that was, well, super. The examples shown to us offered timber frame construction for new build and wrapped existing buildings in a cozy blanket and all new air tight skin. The almost hermetically sealed results providing their inhabitants with a life free from cold and heating bills. We left shaking our heads at the insanity of the normal, slapdash world of construction then shook them again at the thought of the work in front of us required to fix it.
A trip to building membrane supplier Pro Clima came next. An impressively detailed, technical description of the science of moving moisture around the building proved to be the perfect accompaniment to the previous day’s discussion on air tightness. Stop the wind blowing in, but let the moisture out. Graph after graph and detail upon detail proved it beyond doubt, but you should never underestimate the value of the ‘you mean it’s a bit like Gore-Tex?’ moment to really convey the core principle.
Lothar Moll, Pro Clima founder, gave us a demonstration of their products and detailing recommendations allowing the geeks amongst us to stroke a few things and get up close. The gale blowing through the tiny punctures he made in the membrane for the final demonstration gave us further proof of the unassailable logic.
He made a passionate plea to use that same logic when considering whether to demolish or refurbish, pointing out that when you do the maths alone it often doesn’t make sense to retain existing buildings. A tidy balance sheet alone doesn’t necessarily make for a healthy society though, despite what our coalition might think.
On from there to some actual examples of Passivhaus buildings, with Ludwigshafen Brunck Quarter first on the list and a tour from the architects Luwogue Consult. A project that had created new build Passivhaus properties:
As well as refurbished existing dwellings:
A key feature worth noting here is the use of level changes and the acceptance of basement parking, lifting the floor slab and the tricky insulation details up out of the ground. Not so straightforward perhaps in a world of Lifetime Homes and Secured By Design guidelines here in the UK social housing sector, even if the rules have been slightly loosened lately.
Inside we found a sensibly laid out floor plan around a well placed service core and kitchen and a better finish quality to important elements like stairs then we might have found at home. The connection from kitchen and hall space to the stairs and first floor must surely create some noise problems though. The temperature? Warm. Everywhere. More on that later.
Next we visited Hoheloogstrasse and here felt the shame of our tardy arrival to the Passivhaus party as our guest seemed genuinely uncertain about what to tell us at first, given that we were making a fuss about a 5 year old project whose principles were now almost standard practice.
We’d spent hours being talked through the Passivhaus Haynes Manual and had poured over every component in this high performance machine for living in but that afternoon had been our first look at all the parts assembled and being test driven. The obligatory canter through the Top Trumps statistics had told us what we’d come to expect of the fuel consumption and efficiency, but what of the aesthetic? A pattern had been evolving in the images in the lectures and the previous project and Hoheloogstrasse continued in the same style.
Rendered external insulation that leaves little opportunity for relief or material change is perhaps the most obvious common feature and combined with the metal clad windows a somewhat industrial style ensues. There’s a more subtle issue here though that’s also a direct result of the science and it’s the simple fact that you can’t fix anything to, or through, the building. Projections – those parts of a building that hint at the heart of a structure and it’s spaces – become divorced from the main body of the architecture. The rigorous avoidance of any ‘cold bridge’ that might allow heat loss to seep out through a continuous material conducting warmth wastefully outwards results in the architectural equivalent of a restraining order.
Don’t touch me, says the increasingly uptight building, leaving balconies, canopies and even mail boxes to shiver in the cold. It was with some disappointment that our host had to acknowledge a small connection from the balcony structure to the building, included thanks to concerns about wind load, that resulted in a minor flaw in the thermal performance. A brief moment of almost Ballardian eroticism as the coming together of body and metal was acknowledged in slightly hushed tones.
I’m exaggerating to make a point of course but this seems significant. The insulation strategy predominantly used in this type/size of building combined with the casting out of architecture’s most fickle elements that usually flirt with both inside and out threatens to create a depressingly homogenous Passivhaus Style. However, a problem can soon become an opportunity once you’ve spotted it and I wonder about a future that capitalises on these issues and plays with the possibilities. An embracing of the stand-off facade that dances to its own tune in a manner not too dissimilar to the work of FAT perhaps? Or the suburban stage set imagined by Archigram?
On smaller scale buildings and simple masonry cavity construction the question of material choices should be wider though and the buildings listed in the UK Passivhaus Open Days this weekend certainly seem to provide some variety of language and vernacular. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who visits one. Then next week we’ll talk about that perfect temperature…
A long time ago I wrote a blog entry on the back of a paper bag. It was a review of a chapter from a Calvino book – the author who, as Kieran Long once twittered, architects always turn to when they want to appear arty and sensitive. At the risk of further proving that theory I can honestly say it remains one of the most satisfying posts I’ve ever written. Lately I’ve been trying to get our office to think about paper (and bags) more.
For most of the latter half of 2009 I was working on the city’s new housing development project, the Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust. Like many other local authorities around the country, Birmingham hurried to stake its claim for a share of the funding made available directly to local authorities for the first time in many years. Alongside another local practice we had 5 sites to take from nothing to a detailed planning submission in about 6 weeks. This is an insanely short amount of time. Weekly design team meetings with numerous departments ensued and the process was, to put it mildly, intense. Turning to others for moral support, encouragement and inspiration was an absolute must; as was the occasional bottle of Rioja.
Giles Lane helped by offering me a new notebook. Not the regulation issue Moleskine, almost as cliched as the Calvino reference, but a bespoke notebook just for us which we could make with our own bare hands. Giles and Proboscis have been using their Diffusion notebook format in consultation work and arts projects for some time. Printed (crucially) on single sided A4 the format is carefully designed to cut and fold quickly into a small, robust A6 book that can be either landscape or portrait.
We made a blank one, experimenting with different templates to assist with writing and drawing and I carried it around in my jeans pocket for most of the 6 weeks, proving that the design is perfectly robust enough despite only being crafted from a few folds. What I’m most interested in though is what happens when it’s finished. I can unfold it, and because I can unfold it I can easily scan it in and share it with others or work over it again with other tools. Chunks of it would quickly get extracted and thrown into presentations to the client and ultimately some of the sketches informed the design and access statement that went with the planning application. That’s interesting; the ease and speed with which you can align the analogue with the digital.
Then there was Owen Hatherley. I asked Owen to help me fill in the back story for the other team members and make sure we knew where we’d been before we decided where we wanted to go. He wrote a short essay on the history of municipal housing, talking us through projects such as Eric Lyon’s Span housing and Sheffield’s Gleadless Valley. Initially I gave it to Birmingham City Council in standard A4 format, but later when self-publishing a booklet became possible with Gile’s bookleteer.com I could create my own notebook, this time by uploading a PDF then getting it back immediately in the Diffusion format to fold and issue myself. You can download a copy yourself from the diffusion.org library. That’s interesting too, I self-published a book.
Like bookleteer.com, newspaperclub.co.uk connects a web interface to a production process but this time it gives you the power to command a newspaper printing facility usually reserved for massive print runs. You can upload a PDF of any design as long as it follows the template size or you can use the newpaperclub interface to upload text and images from your machine or source either from other locations on the web such as blog entries or flickr pages.
I’ve rarely seen a web service in early beta stage nail the interface design so succesfully first time. It adjusts the 4 column layout and shows a clear snapshot each time you make an adjustment. I pulled in text from here at no2self.net and lifted images from my practice flickr account and turned out a 12 page newspaper in little more than an afternoon. 2 days and £120 later I had 100 beautiful objects to give away to clients and colleagues. We gave them out along with bookleteers by the staff in paper bags that had been rubber stamped with our logo.
So it’s a useful PR tool and in the same way Moo mini-cards still do after all these years it’ll help me cause a stir in a generally conservative, predictable industry; but what else? What interests me most about tools like newspaperclub is how I might be able to connect it with the hyperlocal debate and the work a practice like ours does with neighbourhoods like Blurton in cities like Stoke on Trent. If I can plug the outputs from amateur community blogging quickly and cheaply into professional looking trusted formats like a newspaper then the credibility, the reach and the power of the voices being supported become reinforced. Not only that but you can leave it on a bus for someone else to read and you’re not likely to do that with an iPad.
Before you wrap your chips in it however, there’s something else you could do when you retrieve it from the bus. The bookleteer experience teaches the value of being able to easily send the paper format you produced with the digital tools back into pixels to be worked on again. There are more layers to be added, further annotation to be inserted and new ideas to be traced.
When I spoke about the blurtonvision.co.uk project at Be2camp Birmingham last year I finished by enthusing about the Walking Papers project created to allow people to annotate simple paper copies of their chosen section of Open Street Map. Once complete they can be scanned in again and traced over thanks to the QR code that aligns the analogue with the digital automatically. Self publishing formats like bookleteer and newspaperclub are perfect for this type of process, flipping constantly between screen and paper (and indeed the experiments at SXSW have begun to explore this), but what I’ve come to realise is that I need the process to take place at many scales. What I need is a walking papers process that works on a building scale.
This collaboration between paper and screen knows no limits. It won’t care about file formats and it couldn’t give a damn if you’re a Mac or that Windows 7 was your idea. There’ll be no more excuses for a lack of communication.
And I’ll be able to go back to writing on paper bags.
Of course back in the day, the oldest and wisest of us knew that instinctively.
I may not be the only one seeking support from the Bay Area idiom and the work of Charles Moore I mentioned yesterday. I opened today’s BD magazine to find a review by Ellis Woodman of a fantastic project by James Gorst and was struck immediately by its similarity with a Moore project I’d seen before.
I wasn’t quite correct. It turns out it was another architect’s work praised by Moore in an essay in the book Bay Area Houses; the 1960 Rubin House by George Homsey…
Moore’s description is a lesson in itself.
A splendidly paired down and precise world of space and light (especially of light), this house managed to be a clear diagram of itself, altogether modest, yet at the same time rich in its development of spaces.
There’s something very satisfying about the way this building keeps facing you as you round the bend. Successfully enfronting the site I think Charles Moore would say.
update:
Yep, enfronting it is:
I should get this out of my system. It must be getting quite dull, all this relentless referencing to Charles Moore. I’ve been wallowing in it for over a year. Let me explain.
I’m building a house. I’m attempting to be both client and architect and it’s not easy living this split personality. So I’ve been turning to seminal texts for support – comfort blankets if you like – wrapping myself in them at night and sharing a bath with them occasionally.
You’ll know the books I speak of – Poetics of Space, In Praise of Shadows, The Place of Houses to name but a few.
If you follow my twitter feed you’ll be heartily fed up with it by now. Elsewhere, more discretely, I’ve been noting stuff down for the last year and a half over at home4self.tumblr.com and over the festive season it finally started to fall into place. Gaston started talking to Charles, Junichiro got on better with Peter and the seeds of a home have begun to grow.
Of all the spirits I’ve called on though, it’s the ghost of Charles Moore that has been most supportive. The Place of Houses, written with Gerald Allen and Donlyn Lyndon is the best book on housing architecture I’ve got and the best book you should get. Its influence has been broad and many levelled; for example:
At Ecobuild last year I cited the ‘saddlebag’ technique in my talk about passive solar and it me helped explore the social/spatial benefits of the bolt-on, extra space that sunspaces provide. A buffer zone of many uses that breaks social housing out of its tight regulatory framework and minimum/maximum room sizes.
After the Stirling Prize was announced it explained to me one of the reasons that I, like the judges, had decided who should win.
The fundamental principle is that in places where people live all space should seem to belong to someone or something; space either should seem to be inhabited, as if it belonged to or could be claimed by particular groups of people, or should be understandable as part of a coherent larger order, such as the natural landscape or the traditional fabric of the town or system of altogether new urban spaces.
So if I get that all off my chest here on this blog then perhaps I can stop sounding like a broken record. I’ll be making no such promises over on home4self though, as I’ll no doubt need plenty of help from Moore and his colleagues to take the sketches you see there and work out the order of rooms, the order of machines and the order of dreams.
I hinted at one the projects I’ve been working on in a recent post and followed it up with a presentation at Ecobuild. The full write up is on the new BSD blog and images available at Slideshare, but I should offer an excerpt and some further notes here.
You know what I’m into. I want to start plugging it in to stuff. Getting data from the real world in and out of it. The notes below and the Ecobuild presentation I gave start to describe how we might do that using solutions most of you will know well.
I’ll be spending this weekend at our last public open day for ecoterrace.co.uk, followed by an event with the residents of blurtonvision.co.uk to start our version of the Open Street Map / public data mashup. Unfortunately this means I won’t be able to attend the Homecamp event on Saturday and get more connected with the folks developing exactly the ideas I’m pitching here. However I will be able to come along to the next Be2camp and do my bit to draw connections between the social bits, the media bits and the home bits. Come along and criticize/help.
BIM and Social Media
Axis Design and Slider Studio have created a new tool for Birmingham City Council called YouCanPlan Lozells. Slider’s ESP software has been resigned to suit the challenges of the diverse people and places of community consultation work. The software will be distributed via both CD and online to over 2500 households. It can be used both online and offline to ensure it can be used in any venue, but we hope that the benefits of the online mode means that people using it from home can make the most of both the live updates to proposals in the coming months, as well as using survey and chat tools to tell Birmingham City Council what they think about the designs being proposed by the city’s urban design team.
At its first public test during an event in the local park it was well received. In particular by the local teenagers who instantly took to the interface and chat tools. Making contact and building enthusiasm with the younger generations is often one of the biggest challenges with consultation work so in this case we hope that we’ve created something that will help us hear the voices of the future generations and perhaps bring some parents with them, curious to see what their children are using. Whilst the ability to consult with people from the comfort of their own home is huge step towards a more representative mandate from a neighbourhood, we’ve always described this as a tool to supplement the vital face to face debates that need to go on. With that in mind the software can be used in offline environments and the investment in 3D modelling can be used to produce rapid prototyped physical models that match the software .
What of the future and the implications for BIM? How can this tool help us manage data about a building or street? In its current format the model and software is a framework that can take inputs and changes in a top down fashion from stakeholders whose roles are well understood. It will receive new models and designs of steadily improving detail and can display images and links to other sources of info provided by local authorities and RSLs, but what of the community? How do we build a system that allows data rising from the streets – in a bottom up fashion – to manifest itself in the model and record live information about the neighbourhood. Our experience with web 2.0 tools and consultation work tells us that there are tools available to help us and they come under the title ‘social media’. Let’s look at a few examples and then imagine how YouCanPlan could use them to bring BIM, post-occupancy monitoring and community consultation together.
Pachube, developed by architect Usman Haque, is a service that aims to broker data for you. It takes information from physical objects that can record things, tidies it up, then spits out the results in a number of useful formats that you can plug into (or point at) another location. The simplest example is electricity meters. I have a meter at my office recording the number of kW used. It sends the info to Pachube allowing me to access it from anywhere and do anything with it. A number of visualisation methods have already been created by others, allowing me to either simply display the info online or feed it into other tools such as the AMEE carbon emissions calculator, letting me know how many tonnes (gulp!) of carbon I’m churning out.
Another social media tool that takes simple inputs and creates powerful outputs is Twitter. Unless you’ve been living under a particularly analogue rock lately, you’ll have probably heard of this web site. Twitter simply wants you to tell it what you’re doing. No, really, that’s it. Just tell it what you’re doing and do it within 140 characters. I’ve been using it for a couple of years for keeping in touch with like-minded architects and bloggers and more recently using it as a tool for dispatching the lyrics of one of my favourite bands one line at a time. Others, like Andy Stanford-Clark from IBM, have found ways to use it for recording more than just bon mots and satirical one liners. By plugging it into all the activities around the house Andy has found a way to make his home twitter. A live feed of building information as devices switch on, doors open and phones ring.
Mapping is an important part of information modelling; the data is most useful when tied accurately to location. However, mapping can be a prohibitive field as commercial restrictions can often make extensive availaibility and re-use of map information costly. Open Street Map allows us to avoid this problem by providing up to date maps that are completely free to use and adapt. The wikipedia of mapping, Open Street Map is by the people and for the people, created by volunteers with GPS devices all over the world. Its open source nature allows us to look at ways of combining the info with other tools such as phonecam sites like moblog.co.uk or flickr.com. Marking the position of a photo – an option increasingly done automatically by some phone models – allows us to track the latest events and activities in a neighbourhood visually. This has been succesfully developed, alongside other services such as planning alerts and transport links, by Tom Chance and Thomas Wood and their interactive map of Sutton.
Tools like these will turn platforms like YouCanPlan into a virtual environment augmented by reality. By allowing the model to plug into other information modelling systems the buildings will convey live information about the current state of a house or street or neighbourhood. The data shown in the model will help local authorties record and assess public information, and the residents will be able to keep in touch with the activities of friends and family and show landlords and local authorities what the most pressing issues are right now. The recording and public display of energy information for a household introduces the possibility of encouraged energy saving through competition. Who has saved the most money in the street this week? Who has created the most carbon?
The successful reduction of carbon emissions in the built environment to meet the targets of 2050 is entirely dependent on an improvement in performance informed by regular post-occupancy monitoring. BIM can continue to play a vital role in this process beyond the completion of the construction and there are powerful social media tools available to help make it happen. A creative approach to the field and an open mind to the power of open data formats will help the profession to share knowledge and avoid the usual debates about interoperability. We need to improve the communication between the designers and users throughout the life of the building, not just as we hand over the keys.
Trailers have long interested Morrish. He likes the simplicity of long, narrow, free-standing structures. Light and breezes come in from either side. If ceilings are pushed to 10 feet or higher, small rooms can feel much larger. And since most walls are exterior walls, the possibilities of adjacent gardens and indoor/outdoor spaces are many.
He had no quarrel, really, with the new urbanist movement. But stacking homes above retail shops along transit corridors can’t happen everywhere. Besides, there’s a “formula” to new urban design that doesn’t appeal to Morrish’s eclectic tastes.
And you thought I was kidding when I cited the caravan as fertile ground for housing ideas.
More from Morrish:
His new book, “Growing Urban Habitats, Seeking a New Housing Development Model,” will be out in June. It begins with a proposal to refashion an aging trailer park in Charlottesville, Va., and ends with a design that interlaces long, narrow structures that are affordable, sustainable and well-suited to the valley just below Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate.
“The project is fairly dense, but it doesn’t just stack units up into the air.”
Ok, point taken. I was exagerating for impact. Yet my drawing does rather neatly sum up the problem. Ask an architect about the opportunities for prefabricated housing and trailer park living and they’ll turn it into a building problem. A Rubik’s cube challenge of Lego-like simplicity.
As I said in the flickr comments for the image above, over at Axis we keep having conversations about housing models that get the balance right between independence and community/neighbourhood and we always end up at trailer parks. When those conversations turn into a live project we need to remember that this is a landscape problem, an infrastructure problem, a state vs. private, freehold/leasehold land ownership, territory problem. Not a building problem that’s solved with a crisp, cutaway axonometric.
The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession—a hive occupied by generations of bees. In America, the houses seem privately ours, even when we have not built them up, in pine two-by-fours and four-by-eight-foot sheets of plywood, from a poured-concrete foundation. Houses are, as Newland Archer sensed, our fate. The houses we build in our fiction need not conform to a floor plan—indeed, the reader’s capacity for visualizing spatial relations is feeble—but they must conform to a life plan, feeding the characters’ senses whenever these turn outward, confirming social place with their walls and accoutrements, echoing in authentic matter the spiritual pattern the author intends to trace. A house, having been willfully purchased and furnished, tells us more than a body, and its description is a foremost resource of the art of fiction. Every novelist becomes, to a degree, an architect—castles in air!—and a novel itself is, of course, a kind of dwelling, whose spaces open and constrict, foster display or concealment, and resonate from room to room.
John Updike on fictional houses. Found, about 5 links deep through twitter and web, here: Architectural Digest
