Come Collaborate With Me

Come Collaborate With Me!

Housing+ M.Arch. Studio 8, School of Architecture, The University of Sheffield, 2008-2009. Edited by Cristina Cerulli, Tatjana Schneider and Adam Towle.


Published by PAR Shefeld ISBN 978-0-9556669-2-6

Come Collaborate With Me!Housing+M.Arch. Studio 8, School of Architecture, The University of Shefeld, 2008-2009.

With written contributions from: Ben Asbury Leanna Boxill Cristina Cerulli Adam Dainow Sarah Green Anna Holder Tomas Kangro James Kenyon Osamu Masaki David Rozwadowski Aditi Saxena Tatjana Schneider Peter Sofoluke Adam Towle

9 Introduction

29 Calendar

37 Conversations

57 Essays

99 Housing+ Timeline

111 Images

143 Colophon

INTRODUCTION

Laid out in front of us is a landscape of contemporary housing. In the middle distance there is the memory of the Kelvin Flats, a huge 1960s housing development of deck-access housing based on the pattern of the seminal Park Hill housing. These projects were built in Shefelds heyday when it had the condence to dream of new futures and when the Architectural Review devoted an entire issue to its pioneering architecture. Park Hill has just about clung on and is now Europes largest listed building, but the Kelvin Flats were demolished just thirty years after their completion. Opposite us, more 1960s housing has just been pulled down and is being replaced by eight storeys of student housing. These are designed down to very minimum and very specic standards; we watch as prefabricated bathroom units are hoisted up and clamped into place, closely spaced along the length, a long length, of corridors. [...] Rumour has it that elsewhere in the city student housing built two years ago is still half empty, and the owners in despair about what to do with it. In front of us more 1960s housing, this time in tower blocks that have recently been overclad at great expense, bringing the insulation standards up to contemporary expectations. Cowering under the tower blocks is a new development of semi-detached developer housing, ddly little cavity-wall buildings with load-bearing internal partitions and pitched roofs stuffed full with timber trusses [...]. 1

EXPLORING COLLECTIVE PRODUCTION IN THE CONTEXT OF A DESIGN STUDIO LOOKING HOLISTICALLY AT HOUSINGWhat Now? The current economic crisis exposed the fragility of a social and affordable housing supply largely dependent, through Section 106, on private developers: lack of opportunities for high-margin protable developments has meant a decline in the affordable housing provision. Critiques of the growth-based capitalist economic system are not new. [] With regards to housing, there is a very interesting emerging landscape made of cooperatives, co-housing schemes, mutual ownership schemes, user developed housing. [] All these initiatives have the potential to deliver housing that is decoupled from the logic of capitalist growth, no longer a commodity, but simply a place to live, in a society that is more equal and just. These housing models, however, are not substitutes for public housing provision: they can only complement it. Public provision of housing should be saved and safeguarded... Even in a cost cutting, shrinking, pure accounting logic, the social return on investment of a well functioning social housing system should make a convincing case for investing in its upkeep (if short-termism is put aside, that is). All attempts to unravel public housing should be seen as politics. 2Come Collaborate With Me!

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By Cristina Cerulli and Tatjana Schneider

The studio Against all warnings, we wanted to take on housing as a topic for an in depth exploration, which lasted from early November 2008 to early June 2009. The somewhat ambitious aim was to explore the issues and notions of housing collectively and collaboratively, not only with the studio but also with numerous external experts, with the ultimate aspiration to articulate a new paradigm for describing, understanding, and eventually changing the production of our built environment. As Leslie Kanes Weisman makes clear

people, young parents, people who live alone and so forth. Mutuality, multiplicity and collaboration in modes of production within the studio resulted in design proposals that were mutual, inclusive, collaboratively procured and produced and often included non-residential elements as condensers for further activities and provisions such as community self-build, cooperatives and co-housing, but also internet based fora and collective forms of production.

Housing is everywhere, and yet, it is also nowhere. It is everywhere around us, it surrounds us, in a physical sense as built substance, and conceptually through its presence in the national broadsheets, in local papers, in the news. At the same time, it is a marginal topic in architectural education and remains an extremely loaded topic; one only needs to raise topics such as Right to Buy, Defend Council Housing, Home, Land Banking, Space Standards, and so forth. This book is an account of and reection on a M.Arch. design studio about housing at the School of Architecture, at the University of Sheeld in 2008/09. It came about because we felt that housing needs, wants, desires as much as regulations, rules, laws was rarely challenged in the context of architectural education, that there was a paucity in the engagement with not just the design, but the wider societal and economic context of housing. Whilst architecture students might design a house for a specic client or might design a town house or a series of houses in their rst few years of education, they hardly ever engage, are encouraged to engage or at least supported in a pursuit to understand the politics of the production of housing. Why does housing look like the way it looks? What are the dierent ways of operation and organization? What is the role of public housing in an increasingly privatised world of development?

[] you cant transform the behaviour and identity of those who are being educated without the personal transformation that can only come from placing academic knowledge within the powerful framework of personally meaningful experience. 3The decision to operate in such a way had a number of reasons, but one derived from our understanding of housing as a collective as well as political act, one that can not be understood solely through the design of plans, but one that is inextricably linked with everything else that surrounds it: management, economics and planning as well as social use in its widest sense, both on a micro and a macro scale. The studio explored and researched the overall theme of social housing from a number of disciplinary perspectives as well as from the point of view of residents, designers, neighbours, young and old

Collective Production

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The pedagogical setting Collaboration between sta and students as well as inter-disciplinary inquiries within and across academia is still not the norm in architectural education, a eld that has remained largely unbothered by radical educational reforms. We took the rather uncommon decision to develop the topic for the design studio together and go into this studio as equal partners, indicating that architecture as practice, discipline and profession is a shared enterprise. Moreover, we set up the studio as a loose partnership between ourselves, our students and a number of people in other academic departments and universities as well as outside the university, in an eort to condensate, generate and propagate knowledge around the production of housing. In this spirit, we envisaged the setting of the studio as a research process that is open source as well as open ended and where every student would be an active member of the research group where the methods, aims and objectives of this collective production would be identied by the group. In this teaching approach, students became active agents rather than re-active subjects. It communicates, in Paolo Freires sense, a problem-posing way of education, in which the students developed their own power to perceive critically. It is a process that highlights the world not as a static reality but as something in process and transformation.4 The framework for the studio was contrived to encourage a collaborative way

of exploring, doing and proposing: besides our regular group meetings we organized an early eld trip (when all fteen of us shared a two bedroom at in a council estate in the East End of London) to look at more recent housing developments such as Peter Barbers Donnybrook or the Coin Street community build programme, but also the now almost demolished Heygate estate or the Sanford housing cooperative and the Barbican; we had seminars and workshops on issues around the then very current burst of the housing bubble as well as on planning issues both in London and Sheeld; we watched lms from Ken Loachs Cathy Come Home to Mathieu Kassovitzs La Haine and Bka and Louise Lemones Koolhaas Houselife; we also regularly had collective meals, food fuddles5, and organised exchanges and collaborations with other design studios. From the beginning, this framework was explicitly open to negotiation and suggestion and after a while was taken on by the students who took charge of inviting people relevant to their own project, teamed up with their peers within the M.Arch. course, and organised workshops and seminars amongst themselves. The evolving collaboration amongst academics, students, researchers, residents, policy makers and others developed into a rich and varied setting for the students project proposals which were equally collective and collaborative in spirit. The physical collaboration was helped by a few virtual tools, most importantly a Ning site6, which became the hub for discussions and conversations between members of the studio and anyone outside they

engaged with, two of which are featured in this book (page 37). The Ning site was supported and complemented by a wiki site7, which held more nished versions of the initial research on case studies and also broader theoretical concepts. This digital collaboration tried and tested within the group, later became the driver and method for one of the design proposals. Snapshots of the collaborative processes and initiatives originated in the studio are captured in the weekly newsletter that the studio published throughout the year, to keep everyone in the loop on both their own projects as well as other issues raised in the group or external discussions.

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The book This book is to some extent a fairly accidental collection, but positively and deliberately, of the materials and people we worked with over this year and the issues raised, both internally and externally. The book is not a show and tell: it is not about the individual design projects that resulted from these collaborative investigations but is an account of some of the ways in which we worked collectively. It can be read as a map of engagement that is interwoven with reections on process or as a roadmap towards a dierent idea of what architectural education could entail. Come Collaborate With Me! is a collective production, a reection developed and matured from a position outside the space and time of the design studio, and for most, outside the University altogether. Supported by the Centre for Inquirybased Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences (CILASS) at the University of Sheeld, this book is an attempt to reect on an experience that scaolded students towards interdependent self-directed inquiry and research, but also facilitated an interdisciplinary and multi-perspective inquiry into the production of housing.1. 2007), 3-4. 2. Cristina Cerulli, Public Housing, Replay and Fast Forward via Play, in Estate, ed. Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Johansson (London: Myrtle Press, 2010), 129-132. 3. Leslie Kanes Weisman, Cristina Cerulli, and Florian Kossak, Educator, Activist, Politician, ed. Cristina Cerulli and Florian Kossak, Field: Agency and the Praxis of Activism 3 (2009), 10. 4. See: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till,

Flexible Housing (London: Architectural Press,

York: Continuum Books, 2000), 83. The book was initially published by Herder and Herder in1970. 5. In local Shefeld dialect: a party where all participants bring food and drink these have become increasingly popular at the school in recent years. 6. Ning is a social networking and communication platform; it was freely available throughout the duration of the Studio but since then it turned into a subscription service and the content of our site is no longer available. 7. com. Available at http://housingplus.wikidot.

Collective Production

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Craig Age 0, 11 years

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Adam Dainow Age 3, 5 years

Childhood Homes

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Ben Age 0, 8 years

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Aditi Age 2, 4 years

Childhood Homes

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Peter Age 0, 8 years

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Tatjana Age 0, 18 years

Childhood Homes

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Kieran Age 3, 24 years

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Sarah Age 0, 23 years

Childhood Homes

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Cristina Age 0, 8 years

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Tomas Age 2, 7 years

Childhood Homes

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Leanna Age unknown, 1 year

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Adam Towle Age 4, 20 years

Childhood Homes

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James Age 3, 2 years

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David Age 0, 5 years

Childhood Homes

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CALENDAR

13

11November 19, 2008 London: Donnybrook Estate, Broadwater Farm Estate, Childhood Homes November 20, 2008 London: Coin Street, Dominic Church at CABE, Heygate Estate with Mel Davis, Proctor and Matthews, Sanford Coop

November 13, 2008 Studio Begins - research themes introduced

November 17, 2008, 8pm Film screening: Cathy Come Home by Ken Loach

November 21, 2008 London: Sheppard Robson, Barbican with David Rosenberg, Walter Segal Self Build, Alexandra Road

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24 11November 24, 2008 Newsletter 01 published

05 12December 5, 2008 Manifesto meeting Individual Housing+ manifestos published

09 12December 9, 2009, 6pm Seminar with Andrew Clark on Intergeneration Interactions in Social Spaces

01 12December 01, 2008 Newsletter 02 published

December 8, 2008, 8pm Film screening: Koolhaas Houselife by Ila Bka and Louise Lemone

December 11, 2008, mid-day Sheeld housing walking tour with Nishat Awan

Calender

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December 19, 2008, 12pm End of term presentation and discussion with peers

January 12, 2009, 8pm Film screening: La Haine by Mathieu Kassovitz

24 12December 24, 2008 Newsletter 03 published January 8, 2009, 12:15pm Impromptu lm screening: Voices of Cohousing - Building Small Villages in the City by Matthieu Lietaert

January 14, 2009, 7:15am Visit to Eldonian Community Based Housing Association

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January 29, 2009, 10am Seminar with Paul Hodgson on The Economics of Social Housing.

February 12, 2009, 11:30am Duncan Bowie - all day workshop / seminar on housing policy, inclusion, regeneration, investment, and social housing February 5, 2009, 9:30am Model-making workshop

30 01January 30, 2009 Newsletter 04 published February 10, 2009, 11:15am Presentation by David Rodgers Executive Director of theCooperative Development Society

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February 13 (Friday), 2009 Newsletter 05 published

Calender

19 02February 19, 2009, 9:30am Workshop/Swapshop

13

03

March 13, 2009 M.Arch. peer reviews

March 9, 2009, 10am Seminar with Amanda Baxter from the Aordable Housing Strategy Team from Sheeld City Council

February 24, 2009, 10:30am A talk followed by tutorials/workshop with Stephen Hill and Indy Johar

18 03March 18, 2009, 2pm Seminar with Supitcha Tovivich on Experiences from Thailand- Housing for the Urban Poor

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31 15

03 04

March 31, 2009 Presentation by John Gillespie - National Development Director, Community Self Build Organisation

06 05May 06, 2009, 2:00pm Buildosite Workshop - Have we reached the tipping point for the main-streaming of ositeconstruction solutions?

14 05May 14, 2009 Project discussion with Judy Torrington and Dan Usiskin

April 15, 2009 Musical Newsletter published

07 05May 06, 2009, 9:30am Permaculture presentation with Andy Golding - chief executive of the National Permaculture Society June 19, 2009 Summer Degree and M.Arch. Exhibition Opening, Crookesmoor BuildingCalender

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CONVERSATIONS

A CONVERSATION Abetween Peter Sofoluke, Anna Holder, Adam Towle, Kieran Walker, and Sarah Green on the Ning

COME COLLABORATE WITH ME! Posted by Peter on January 7, 2009 at 11:40am

Ive been reading a bit of the book Wikinomics1 over Christmas which is very insightful into principles of Web 2.0 and how the web has developed beyond a publishing medium to a collaborative medium. The users become producers of information or consumers of information become the producers a term author Don Tapscott calls Prosumers. Wikinomics (wiki + economics) equates to the economics of collaboration. In the book Don Tapscott uses the example of Goldcorp a gold mining company in hardship as the inhouse geologists could not locate gold. After hearing about Linux the CEO of Goldcorp decided to launch a competition online with a price of $500000 to whoever could tell him where he could

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nd gold. He received 77 replies from all over the world from a variety of elds using techniques his company was not familiar with. As a result the company increased their gold output exponentially and his $90m company is now worth over $9bn. Rather than operating under the closed corporate system the CEO opened the companys IP for the world to scrutinize as a result the world was able to help his company progress. How can this apply to housing? Rather than attempting to deploy an architect knows best response to housing issues or think globally, act locally, why not open the studio to the world? For example Im pretty interested in tackling issues relating to housing stock and the exibility of this stock in a multitude of levels. Could it be successful practice to dene a site or area and then built a website that encourages existing tenants and others to collaboratively innovate proposals/solutions? Basically, is collaborative economics (wikinomics) the way forward in tackling housing issues? I thought Id begin by testing it out on our Ning (which is a somewhat closed group) to see how this develops your responses are encouraged.

What about getting councils to indicate all the land or disused housing stock they own, perhaps using Googlemaps, and then inviting dierent architects, companies, tenants, owners, residents to collaborate on proposals via a portal site and potential meet-up design sessions? Would it work like the Goldcorp competition, with prize money? Could it be a more collaborative version of Europan? Or allow more variety of scales; i.e. a residents group with a sound proposal to squat in, and do up, an existing disused block in a short timescale could win the money to do it? Maybe look at (and critique?) some of the recent attempts to use Web 2.0 for social issues http://www.xmystreet.com/, http://www.mysociety.org/, http://www. sicamp.org/?page_id=155

Reply by Anna on January 7, 2009 at 1:08pm

I got that book for Christmas too. Could it be successful practice to dene a site or area and then built a website that encourages existing tenants and others to collaboratively innovate proposals/ solutions.

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participation, encouraging people from a variety of elds to participate so probably setting up a website or portal may not achieve my desired results without some sort of incentive for potential participants. For example no-one else could participate in this forum despite there being shared interest. If I was to oer some money it would inevitably generate more responses so maybe sourcing and tapping into some sort of web currency could be a possible way forward for organisations that dont have the nancial capabilities to draw in the crme de la crme. Hmmmmmm. Im still not entirely sure myself so Im open to more collaborative input.

Reply by Peter on January 7, 2009 at 2:56pm

Hi Anna I really like the idea of creating an online directory of disused housing stock... a sort of a catalogue of all housing related problems in Sheeld, similar to the Fix My Street example.

In terms of what happens with such a directory: Im very wary of issues surrounding design by committee so maybe collaborative design proposals may be a step too far appearing lacklustre in an attempt to incorporate the desires of all. However, the collaborative side may be best exploited as a means of information/ skills/ideas gathering which designers can then process and carry forward and the best proposal is implemented. These proposals could come from anywhere for example as you suggested, residents with a strategy for a disused apartment block. Also you raised an interesting point regarding prize money which I did start to think about. In the case of Goldcorp the money was essentially an incentive for

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Reply by Adam on January 7, 2009 at 3:42pm

Reply by Kieran on January 7, 2009 at 5:20pm

Interestingly, following Annas Googlemaps suggestion, one of the biggest setbacks in the UK housing market could be argued to be the articial constraints placed on land (Greenbelt, Browneld etc.). A radical experiment might be to test some of the most preserved and protected laws of the UK planning system: the Government relinquishes large area of unused land for housing, ination in the housing market is reduced, developers compete on quality and customisability, rather than simply per square metre. For a very cogent review of housing economics, if you havnt already, Id recommend you read Alastairs dissertation: The Prot Function2. It might be good for you to read up on gift culture and exchange culture, one of the ideas closely linked to encouraging collaboration within the open source software movement. Try reading: Homesteading the Noosphere by Eric Raymond (http://www.catb.org/~esr/ writings/homesteading/homesteading/). An essay from the book The Cathedral and Bazaar3. This has been one of my bibles since third year.

The idea of identifying used/misused/ disused land within our cities (and beyond) is really interesting, and is a concept Im hoping to explore throughout the rest of the year. It is often via planning restrictions, and the protection of existing conditions, that the decision whether land can be used for one thing or another is determined. So while the identication of land would be a major step, the removing of restrictions on it (as Adam highlights which may up to this point have prevented the utilisation of that land) would be necessary for fostering exciting, innovative ideas. Combining, rather than separating functions should be better encouraged, and the issue of temporality should be better explored to better utilise space or buildings earmarked for redevelopment/demolition.

In this country, the architect knows best approach, (or rather, the developer knows best approach) seems to be the only one known in housebuilding. Culturally, I would suggest that we lack the knowledge to build for ourselves houses are xed products of our consumer society those that want/can do for themselves are often restricted by regulations and bureaucracy. So, the problem of aordable housing is not only related to economic factors but to the fact that we have to have our houses built for us, in designated pockets of pre-approved land. And even if land was suddenly made available this would not instantly erase the issue of aordability, as it would take years to utilise it all, inevitably dictating that quantity rather than quality would still take precedent. Facilitating opportunity for people to do for themselves could force mega house-builders to readdress quality and innovation... Ive rambled a bit here and moved away from your initial thoughts Peter, but I do tend to agree that design by committee has its limits. Furthermore, I think opening up the design of a specic piece of land globally could be problematic, though I agree that calling for specialist advice on that scale could be successful; mainly because it would facilitate fact-based answers to designated problems that would already have arisen at the local scale.

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Reply by Sarah on January 7, 2009 at 9:50pm

instead members are encouraged to list as many qualities as possible. For example, an architecture student who has a air for photography would note this on their prole. Employers or clients also register with the site and then search for a student who possesses the capacity to full a task or job that they are advertising. For example, a jewellery designer might wish to hire the architecture student with photography skills to take images of her work; the student is then paid by the client and gains points which are displayed on their prole, denoting their reliability/quality of job completion etc. Perhaps this kind of skills shop could be employed in the creation of the design proposal where the applicants for the job could be moderated and then selected accordingly by their skills/prole/portfolio/ experience. In this way, many individuals students and otherwise could be brought in to collaborate on the scheme. Of course we would need to consider currency and commodities, and not just of the monetary kind. Time, in this instance, may be one of the most costly commodities for those involved. This kind of project may require voluntary or inkind contributions to begin with, or some kind of sponsorship... but again, perhaps payment would not always be in money perhaps skills and knowledge become the currency, transferred as the project gains momentum?

Peter, this is fascinating... Ive just reserved the book (its in the library), hats o to whoever got there before me though! So what were promoting here is a Wikitecture of sorts... the very essence of collaboration means that this idea will continue to grow and become multifaceted. Here is another facet to add: the concept of stockpiling skills, knowledge, land, tools (in every sense of the word) and so on got me thinking about StudentGems. com. In case people arent familiar with it, its a site where students are presented with the opportunity to create a prole of themselves and their skills, a little bit like a CV but with digital exibility. The skills a student might list would not need to be limited to what they learnt at Uni;


Regarding the articial constraints topic: before removal of such statutes it should be considered why they were initially implemented. In the case of Greenbelts, it was to contain urban sprawl. Although sprawl is contained, an ever growing number of people still desire to live in urban environments. The Green Belt Act does nothing to limit migration to cities, so by addressing geographical expansion without demographic growth we have seen a reduction in average unit sizes. Yet demand is still high therefore prices rise regardless of space standards reductions.

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I feel releasing the green belt would achieve space standards growth but so will the footprint of cities exponentially, and London may become like LA. Lets face it, doesnt everyone wants to live in streetaccessed, low rise housing? In many European countries, quality is a major factor in the production of housing even with social housing. This may be in part because renting from the state is not stigmatized as it is here (we can thank Thatcher for selling o the best social housing stock through Right-to-Buy for that). Yes, in Alastairs dissertation he talks about the shift in architectural production from public to private, this is because the government is, and has been, relinquishing scal responsibility of formally nationalized institutions: the building blocks of the welfare state, Housing, Healthcare etc. In a at little country between Belgium and Germany they have implemented a strategy that is essentially the reversal of our Greenbelt method, placing major cities in a ring known as the Randstad (ring city) around a protected natural reserve known as the Groene Hart (green heart). The ring makes it easy to travel between cities as you simply travel in a loop (like the M25), but also the ring is barely developed thus allowing for future growth this picks up specically on the Greenbelt but would probably be dierent for Browneld sites and other restricted developments. What about Listed Building Consent, what if this was abolished? Anyway,

thanks for those links Adam, are there any particular subchapters in Homesteading the Noosphere that you would isolate or is it all pretty useful? Kieran Ive picked out a couple of bits of interest from your section: [...] the problem of aordable housing is not only related to economic factors but to the fact that we have to have our houses built for us, in designated pockets of preapproved land. Very interesting. Through a collaborative model one could begin to share skills which sort of links to what Sarahs highlighting. [...] I think opening up the design of a specic piece of land globally could be problematic, though I agree that calling for specialist advice on that scale could be successful; mainly because it would facilitate fact-based answers to designated problems that would already have arisen at the local scale. I dont think this is necessarily the case. Although sites are unique, social issues are global so for example the solution to Sheelds growing number of concealed households may come from Hong Kong where they have tackled the same issue. Sarah, regarding your comment: [...] perhaps skills and knowledge become the currency, transferred as the project gains momentum? Theres a strategy already in operation called a Timebank were people give an hour of their time helping in their

community this could range from helping an elderly person with their shopping to removing grati. For every hour you give youre entitled to take an hour from someone else who participates in the scheme. However, this operates on similar principles to a charity and Im attempting to conceive a business strategy, in the business world money still talks (despite the poorly performing sterling). Thats how I feel we would get people to participate who have innovative ideas but no incentive to invest their time. At the end of the day, the reason the Goldcorp example was so successful was because a cash incentive was oered. Having said that, I like the sound of this: Perhaps this kind of skills shop could be employed in the creation of the design proposal where the applicants for the job could be moderated and then selected accordingly by their skills/prole/ portfolio/experience. In this way, many individuals students and otherwise could be brought in to collaborate on the scheme. So basically my interpretation of this (correct me if Im wrong) is that skills are archived on a website, sort of like an ever-present CV and from that one can select and create a design team to conceive a proposal suited to a particular problem? Therefore this collaborative model could work on two levels, rstly by identifying problematic regions, then gathering ideas for possible solutions before selecting the most suited team to implement a proposal or let proposals come in.

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of the property market and its relationships with the wider economy and the state regulatory system would be interesting to talk to... Ive only heard him lecture on the standard UK system, but maybe if you explained the potential scenario you are developing he might have some useful insights...? Another person to talk to in Planning might be Dr Jamie Gough he researches in the area of the political economy of cities; also knows a lot about squatting, alternative approaches to property labour market etc... Could be interesting! In terms of removing all legislation on land I personally am very anti this! In the UK the immediate precedents are Thatchers Enterprise Zones of the 1980s. Based on the idea that if you

Reply by Anna on January 8, 2009 at 10:24am

remove/reduce planning restrictions, the market will provide, and you can get urban development, job creation etc. in previously economically depressed areas. In reality you end up with wealthy ghettos like Canary Wharf, totally monocultural/ monofunctional and completely socially disconnected to the surrounding urban fabric. I think what is called for is something more subtle, a more creative use of legislation; seeing planning and zoning not at restrictions but as rules of the game, that can be pushed, played with, etc.. Anyway, I think its a really interesting area to be looking at...

This is a topic that is interesting/relevant to quite a few people it seems. Perhaps we should try to set up a seminar where we can discuss it and get some input from other experts? Potentially someone like John Henneberry in the Planning department, who specialises in the structure and behaviour

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This could be quite useful, we had a studio discussion today about all the upcoming talks scheduled so could be good to integrate this into one of those. Revisiting a point made earlier about using a web-based housing directory, I was pointed in the direction of this website by Tom Rooksby who wrote his dissertation on open source theory in architectural practice. http://www.precare.org/Website/Precare/ Main.php?lang=En&Menu=1&... Precare is a mediator between property owners of temporary vacant property and artists or social initiatives in need of workspace. According to the website Precare has been operating in fourteen buildings for six years providing over 100 initiatives and artists with workspace. Its success has led to the creation of branches in London, Barcelona and Milan.


1.

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams,

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio, 2006).2. Alastair D. Parvin, The Prot Function: Navigating Architectures Bottom Line (M.Arch. Dissertation, University of Shefeld, 2008). 3. Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and The Bazaar (Sebastopol: OReilly, 1999).

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A CONVERSATION Abetween Ben Asbury, James Kenyon, Kieran Walker, Peter Sofoluke, Aditi Saxena, Leanna Boxhill, Sarah Green, Craig Western, David Rozwadowski, James Kenyon, and Tom Kirby on the Ning

THE SOCIAL CONDENSER IS A VALUABLE CONCEPT. Posted by Tatjana on December 4, 2008 at 4:50pm

Reply by Ben on December 4, 2008 at 5:36pm

I think the idea that places we design can be inclusive or exclusive is an important one to consider. In my opinion, for a well functioning society ideally all members should be able to participate. Spaces that are accessible to all and enable interaction for a cross-section of society (through shared use/occupation/activity/negotiation of space), social condensers reduce the likelihood of exclusivity and people being left at the edge of society. In the context of housing, addressing these issues could lead to places where people have stronger ties to each other, feel safer and enjoy living.

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Reply by James on December 6, 2008 at 4:32pm

everyones needs, in reality no-ones needs are accommodated. Even ignoring the diculty in designing a space that everyone would use (and want to use), the idea that a space can magically generate crossdemographic communication is ideological, if not naive. There is no reason why two people from dierent backgrounds having found themselves in the same space should decide to communicate with one another. I am not suggesting that a space designed for use by multiple user types is not a good idea (I think it is) but real consideration still needs to be given towards exactly who will use a space, how they will use it and what their needs are. Specicity in this sense should not be replaced by a desire for inclusiveness. As designers we should not be scared of exclusion. Exclusion of certain people from certain spaces is necessary in society, so long as not all spaces exclude certain people. Exclusion does not push people to the edge of society, so long as other options exist. We should acknowledge the fact that each and every one of us is dierent and that this dierence breeds dierent needs.

Reply by Kieran on December 6, 2008 at 5:12pm

The Social Condenser According to Wikipedia the intention of the social condenser is to create socially equitable spaces. Intentional overlap and intersection of programmes creates zones of collision, zones that create the environment where there is potential to allow for otherwise disperse social communities to interact1. But how can a space be designed for otherwise disperse social communities to interact? The concept of a social condenser is dangerous, not least in the context of a School of Architecture. Designing a space that is t for all, inclusive, is great in theory, but there is a risk that in trying to accommodate

I think a lot of that is very true James. As post-war high rise housing developments have exemplied, providing space for all without any real understanding of how it can be used led only to vandalisation and misuse of often neglected space. As our discussions during the tutorial exemplied it is the programmatic planning of space that often make these condensers successful. These programs or stimulus can be pre planned or arranged, like events in a park. In this case attendees would have a shared interest in the event and would therefore be more likely to interact with each other. I suppose our role as architects therefore is to keep the planning of space as programmatically exible as possible, creating opportunites or nodes for interaction. We can only provide the physical framework, facilitate and encourage relationships, but at the end of the day it is our own personalities, and our individual perception of these places that dictate the level of interaction.

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programme. To give an example high society social clubs intentionally exclude people that are not of such a background even if they have a strong interest in the high society lifestyle. Whereas golf clubs (one aspect of high society living) are welcoming of all so long as one shares an interest in the sport (and can pay the fee, but thats a business formality), although it excludes all non-golfers one has the choice to join which is not the case with high society social clubs. Yes, as people we do have our dierences and we should accept that people of similar interests/lifestyles do want to congregate but in doing should we advocate the emergence of a closed social groups, some may refer to them as Gated Communities that are intolerant of new inuences?

Reply by Peter on December 6, 2008 at 7:06pm

Pretty much the majority of my thoughts on social condensers are in line with the latter two responses. I feel social condensers are not the product of physical design considerations as Kieran highlighted, rather it is the interchangeable programme of a specied area that initiates social collisions as opposed to the architecture per se. Touching on a comment by James, I quote: Exclusion of certain people from certain spaces is necessary in society... Exclusive spaces are dierent from specied spaces. Exclusive spaces are designed with the intention to exclude/reject whereas specied spaces have the intention to dene programme, anyone is welcome so long as they show an interest in the set

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Reply by Aditi on December 7, 2008 at 11:40am

I think the concept of a social condenser is valuable, however, to make it fully successful is quite a challenge. From my understanding of a social condenser, you might see the street as one, where anyone and everyone has the right to be there. However, simply being a social condenser does not mean that condensing will occur. Following on from Kierans point, I think a condenser has to work hard to ensure that it denes the way in which it may be used. A space requires stimuli in order for it to be used eectively. In the context of housing, using the examples of open spaces in mass housing estates, they were often unused and abused simply because there was no clear role for them. If we take the example of a playground within a housing estate, it can be seen as a kind of social condenser where parents of all status and standing bring their children to play with other children whose parents may be of a dierent standing. Through the stimulus of a playground these people can come together and, perhaps with the common interest of their children, start a conversation and thus social condensing to an extent has occured. If a social condenser is able to break down the social barriers in this way in society, then it is a key concept in the success of neighbourhoods.

Reply by Leanna on December 7, 2008 at 3:33pm

be positive or negative, or whether nothing will happen at all. I do believe that for a social condenser to be successful, a degree of direct contact with other people is necessary. This idea of exclusivity as Ben and James have mentioned is rather problematic, but I generally agree with James when he mentions that we should acknowledge that everyone is an individual with dierent needs. Not all spaces will be appropriate for everyone in the community at one time, and thats OK.

I understand a social condenser to be a space which can allow social interaction to occur. I also tend to think of it as a positive term. Not all interactions are civil, but at least there is a dialogue. To enable this dialogue to happen, there needs to be some shared interest whether it be politics or the weather, or a band, or work. Some reason for social condensing to happen. I think that spaces can be designed to facilitate this, though it cannot be accurately predicted what interactions will happen, whether these interactions would

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Reply by Sarah on December 8, 2008 at 12:25am

of architectural history. In its most widely acknowledged historical guise: the Narkomn Communal House in Moscow2, built 1928-30 the social condenser was an experiment. Through programmatic and volumetric manipulation, inhabitants of the House were ushered towards an almost completely communal way of living which left only sleeping and washing areas as private spaces. As the Narkomn development was essentially an isolated architectural endeavour, and this way of living was not ideal for many people, the concept gradually fell out of favour. The building fell into disrepair after being passed from one landlord to the next, and eventually became regarded as the remnants of a social

experiment, although still inhabited in part. Despite this, the building is revered as an important landmark for its contribution towards Russian social history. The value of the social condenser in its historical context is evident here in the lessons that it taught society about the nature of the traditional family unit. The building proered a utopian and feminist way of living which acted to push families out of their traditional day-to-day living patterns. This could be said to challenge the nature of a family dynamic which had been established over centuries. The political upheaval that occurred when Stalin came to power also meant that the scheme was looked upon unfavorably and

The social condenser is indeed a valuable concept. Its value can be determined in a number of ways perhaps most markedly as a contribution to and inuential element

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a part conversion of additional ats was ordered to aid the housing shortage in the 1930s, altering the buildings programmatic qualities. Whilst the Narkomn social condenser may have worked well in bringing inhabitants together (in addition to communal cooking/eating facilities, a gym and library were also incorporated), it would seem that in order for character and solidarity to be established, a family needs space to be a family as well as space for interaction with others. In modern applications, the successful attributes of the social condenser are often identiable. These could be consolidated as a space which encourages social interaction whilst at the same time providing a benecial amenity for a community. In this form, the social condenser presents a valuable and current incarnation. In our present society, the social condenser provides a space that oers occupants the opportunity of social interaction to varying degrees. The value of such a space is represented by the extent to which the occupants take advantage of potential interactions and congregations, and what the occupants experience as a result of these social collisions. In short, the social condenser is a valuable concept because it provides a community, architecturally, with a controlled unpredictability - a space within which a propensity for unprecedented events dwells. This propensity equates to dynamism, and dynamism is what maintains a lively and exciting community.

who attended, sorry fth years) their multipurpose facility tried to cater for all, and claimed excellent credentials for sports facilities, conference facilities and so on. But the space was so lost and confused it was barely suitable as a storage room. So to lead on from this, exibility is key, but it must satisfy at least one element of a brief. Could a gathering of interconnected social condensers with fewer individual uses respectably prove more sustainable or could this lead to conict? Unfortunately with our class-driven society there will always be segregation where there is a price to be paid or an element of consumerism. Due to the fact that people buy what they can aord and tend to follow the trends of their peers. So it could be a fair argument to say that a social condenser should be a not-for-prot venture or space.

Reply by Craig on December 8, 2008 at 9:40am

During my 5th year, the nal project was driven by the idea of a social condenser, and from my understanding the whole idea was to draw people from all demographics, all age groups and backgrounds etc. The obvious problem arising from this is that to design for all on an inclusive basis means you have to cater for a broad variety of scenarios both present and future. A design could become so vague in trying to cater for all that in reality it actually ends up serving no purpose at all. If we take the Panda people example (for those

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Reply by David on December 8, 2008 at 10:19am

Yes! The exclusive/specic dilemma is a can of worms - if something is specic, it has an element of exclusiveness, whether you have to pay to use it or not. Two examples, are they specic and exclusive? Discuss.

Devonshire Green skatepark is free to use for all, but it is specic in its use skating/bmxing/blading - and therefore excludes people who dont participate in those activities from the main arena whilst those activities are taking place but you can just sit and watch. So is that non-exclusive? It is not exactly inclusive as you are not necessarily welcomed with open arms as it is used by a subculture you might not belong to; but plenty of skaters are exhibitionists and would welcome spectators. You can also run around and climb the whole thing when no one is there, or just sit down. So is this specic space exclusive? Is the huge area of football pitches in Hackney Marshes exclusive as well as

specic? I dont know it that well, but I imagine it similar to the skatepark in that it can be used by others when the main activity is not occurring. Does anyone know (Mr. Sofoluke?) if I could walk a dog, y a kite, play frisbee or have a barbeque on all that nice at grass, or is it protected by rules or the territorial surveillance of its users whilst not in use? The point is, vaguely, that places intended for specic uses are not necessarily exclusive, as long as you respect the intended use/users. Ramble over...

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Reply by James on December 8, 2008 at 11:10am

Ben and I had a discussion about whether the problems experienced in certain housing estates (such as ytipping) would still occur if the estates were inhabited by dierent people. We concluded they would not. Why is this? Culture is one obvious reason, but could another be peoples perceived position in society?

Ben suggested the concept of people (quote) being left at the edge of society and this started me to think about society as a zone which has a centre, a periphery and an edge. Do dierent people really inhabit dierent areas of this zone? I think they do and so heres a quick sketch that explores what peoples perceived position in society might be. [Note: I appreciate this is generalisation in the extreme, subjective and ignores other roles people may have, but it is nevertheless still useful for the point I want to make]. Interaction within subgroups, such as between teachers, occur anyway and in this sense a social condenser has little value. A social condenser may have more value if it can facilitate interaction between

dierent subgroups, but it seems the most important role of a social condenser would be to instigate interaction between those inside and outside of society. In this sense, perhaps the sole role of a social condenser should be to bridge the gap between those included and excluded in society. By feeling part of society, people will develop a sense of belonging (or whatever you whatever you want to call it) and responsibility for their actions, for example disposing of their rubbish correctly instead of ytipping.

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Reply by Tom on December 8, 2008 at 11:36am

The concept of a social condenser can only exist as an idea, never in physical reality. Consider the triangle; a triangle has never been drawn; no pen has zero thickness, no line is ever straight, and no point is ever exact. If, as OMA dene, a social condenser is a place where unprecedented events occur we must consider the possibility of an unprecedented event. In a planned or designed environment, how can any event be unprecedented? And how can any terrain be vacant? A bus stop can facilitate social interaction, yet no one could argue that an encounter here is chance, every aspect of the event denes a subset: the time people are travelling (e.g. commuters); the place people live (e.g. Mancunians); the existence of a public transport system (e.g. a developed country); and the location of this system within a country that does not allow free movement of immigrants (e.g. United Kingdom). These subsets infer that this bus stop interaction, or indeed any event, cannot be unprecedented or free to occur. Plato theorised that perfect forms, such as a triangle, tree or man, exist as an extramental blueprint or Form; what we can observe or perceive is just a representation of fundamental Triangle-ness, Tree-ness or Man-ness, for example. This can be applied to social condensers; no example presented can actually be a social condenser (where unprecedented events occur) but with varying delity a manifestation of Socialcondenser-ness.

Programmatic layering upon vacant terrain to encourage dynamic coexistence of activities and to generate through their interference, unprecedented events. 3During our tutorials we have failed to agree on examples of social condensers (the Deep, bus stops, Alton Towers, Narkomn Communal House) and yet in the discussions above the concept of a social condenser has been accepted and it has been agreed that social condensation is benecial. But how can we consent to this whilst we cannot nd an actual social condenser?

As social condensers cannot be aspatial or atemporal, they cannot exist in reality, yet by representing this quality or theory we can encourage social condensation. If we agree social condensation is a benecial activity, we must also agree that the social condenser is a valuable concept.

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Reply by Kieran on December 9, 2008 at 11:45am

look at Marx suggests, the individual is not an isolated being but should be conceived as a social multiplicity, not one, but one as part of a whole, and it is necessary to consider the individual given their social relations - the human essence. Do we lose our human essence therefore if we have no social networks, no society? Well if it is our choice, that is surely an exercising of human instinct. We are all part of one society or another unless we choose not to be, but this very move is not likely to be unique or at all easy... and unless we are a unique example, we will always be part of a category of people, and therefore, by denition, a society itself. [Cambridge Dictionaries online denes society as: a large group of people who live together in an organized way, making decisions about how to do things and sharing the work that needs to be done. All the people in a country, or in several similar countries, can be referred to as a society] Apologies in advance if that sounds like a load of codswallop!

Being on the edge of society, or excluded as your diagram shows James, is as you say, a completely subjective view, because the three groups you have identied as being outside of society are in fact as involved as anyone else. In fact, we probably have more immigrant doctors and refuse collectors than you can shake a stick at, plus most students do practical training as doctors and teachers before being ocially labelled as such (I realise you were generalising). I suppose you would rst have to dene what we understand as society in order to decide whether a group can be excluded from it. On a very basic, pragmatic sort of level, I would suggest that any party or person aected by the politics which governs them is part of larger society. In

which case there are always going to be groups or people who feel marginalised by certain policies, or by the majority to whom policy is often directed. Of course this is looking at it from a large scale political (democratic) point of view. 99% of communist China, the majority, probably also feels hugely marginalised! A society ungoverned/ruled by politics can of course still be a society - in which case we can identify any social network of people as being a society, whether governed or not, 50 people strong or 5,000,000 people strong. So perhaps if we are isolated as an individual without a network, or group to interact with or belong to, we nd ourselves outside of that social circle you drew. Indeed as Rozs

1. Wikipedia. Social Condenser. http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_condenser. 2. The Narkomn House 1928-1930, Moisei Ginzburg. http://narkomn.ru. 3. Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, Social Condenser (1982), Content, Ed. Rem Koolhaas and Brendan McGetrick (Taschen, 2004), 73.

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ESSAYS

THE ROLE OF PUBLIC SPACE, WORKING WITH FUTURE GENERATIONSAt the start of the studio James and I explored the topic of overlapping and intersecting space. This got us thinking about ownership of space, how it is used by people, and the factors that affect this use.

By Ben Asbury

Choosing a few housing estates in Sheeld we spoke to a number of people living on each to gain very personal insights about the same environments. We spent time looking at and mapping the dierent perceptions. This revealed contrasting opinions of the housing and dierent uses of the communal spaces. For me this process highlighted how underused our communal spaces often are, and that they are in many cases not the inclusive, unifying places they are intended to be. By listening to these residents during my research I was faced with the importance of these issues. These people sharing

their feelings about their homes and the estates upon which they lived, made clear the importance of housing and the responsibility of getting it right. Public spaces were often the point of much discussion; for example, as a place for fathers and sons to play football, but also a place where gangs would cause trouble. When these spaces work well they have a big impact on peoples lives just as they do when they arent working well, causing tensions between neighbours or concern and worry. As a studio we researched many areas of housing and had many visiting speakers,

but we also watched relevant lms as a group. Cathy Come Home1 and La Haine2 were two that emphasised the importance of housing, particularly for those who have little choice about where they live or no supportive network of people around them. I became interested in housing for those in greatest need; particularly those most dependent on state-assisted housing or provided dwellings. For many of the residents I spoke to, the public space on the estates where they lived was not working. That is, they were not happy with it or how it was being used. As a consequence residents withdrew from

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these spaces to their homes, and became spectators through netted windows. They no longer met or gathered in these spaces and came to know fewer of the residents. Our public spaces are most often where we meet new people or our less immediate neighbours for the rst time and as such public spaces play an important role in the creation of community3. Social connectedness can have a great impact on our feelings of well-being and our satisfaction with the environment in which we live4. For the sake of everyone, but especially for those who have less choice about where they live, our public spaces need to be considered communal spaces, spaces for gathering and interacting, they need to function and serve the needs of the people who live around them. For this reason our living environment needs to be conducive and encouraging of communal participation and interaction. It should be made easy to form networks with individuals and organisations in the places we live. In the design of our housing a signicant emphasis should be put on the design of the external spaces and in provision of amenities and support organisations, and setting up of community facilities, not purely on the individual dwellings. This returns me to the original exploration into perceptions of the ownership of space. By creating communal space through collaboration with residents, a sense of ownership is fostered meaning they are more likely to use and be happy with it5. This is also true for individuals homes; if they can be involved in their

design, higher levels of satisfaction can be achieved and so more chance of longer occupancies. A consequence of this is more stable populations and a greater chance of a community developing. Thousands of new homes need to be built in the United Kingdom every year to meet demand, this is a perfect opportunity to involve the people who are to be housed in their design. Collaborating with people from the start is a way of providing homes that people are more likely to be happy with, furthermore engaging future residents as a group helps to form networks before they even move in.

1. See Cathy Come Home, The Wednesday Play, Director: Ken Loach Writers: Jeremy Sandford (story), Ken Loach (screenplay) (Television Series, 1966). 2. See La Haine, Director: Mathieu Kassovitz (Film, 1995). 3. Roger S. Ahlbrandt Jr.,

Neighborhoods, People, and Community (PlenumPress, 1984), 192. 4. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (Simon & Schuster, 2000), 326. 5. Herbert Girardet, The Gaia Atlas of Cities New Directions For Sustainable living (Gaia Books Ltd, 1996), 118.

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STITCHING A COMMUNITY TOGETHERCollaboration was a central theme of the studio from the beginning. Inevitably, this methodology permeated into the project. This essay reects on the process of collaboration within the studio and within housing.

By Leanna Boxill

Collaborating Studio The initial activities of the studio involved a group investigation of housing developments in London, continuing with an analysis of legislation and housing history. Contrary to traditional structures in education, where research is usually an individual pursuit, there was an expectation that a joint exploration of such a large eld as housing could yield a greater range of ndings and could also help foster both group themes and individual interests to form the foundation for the studio. Schools of architecture have a tendency to become distanced from other elds due

to the development of a certain type of studio culture, an exclusive culture in which popular designs and ideals are recycled without being thoroughly questioned. The architecture designed by the students is rarely examined by those outside the architectural circle. Historically, it is the individual designer who is prioritised within schools. Group working, which is necessary in practice, is undervalued as Sara explained:

concerned with developing individual star architects. This model is proved to be contradictory to successful professional practice in which teamwork and collaboration are fundamental. 1To combat this tradition, guest speakers were invited with variety of expertise. They provided alternative views on housing and were encouraged to comment on studio members projects. It was the input from one of these speakers which led me to look at cooperatives as a means of procuring land and creating homes which could be aordable.

the traditional studio is a hothouse environment, isolated from outside inuence and collaboration, and

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Collaborative Management The design project brief therefore was to create aordable housing with a mixed tenure to allow economic and cultural diversity. The design had to address the issues regarding the isolation of the site from its surroundings by creating connections with the residential community. The housing would be cooperatively managed with 40% of housing being aordable and 60% being cooperative. The aim was to provide aordable housing available to those on the council waiting list by adding to the depleting council housing stock. The cooperative housing would be managed by the residents themselves rather than an external body, and the level of rent would be dependent on the amount of income of each household so that the denition of aordability is relative. The reasoning behind the creation of a cooperative was to generate communal responsibility for the running and maintenance of the buildings and the communal areas. Cooperative projects could allow the opportunity to create aordable sustainable communities because the residents have an investment in preserving the places they inhabit. It would consist of a collection of people who have agreed to a set of joint goals, which would help to create a strong, supportive network with a community hub providing the centre for activity. Cooperative housing in Britain is usually viewed as idealistic and as something only certain groups of people participate in, despite many examples on

the continent. There are dierent types of cooperatives which require dierent levels of participation. What was proposed was a kind of cooperative light where the residents would be expected to take care of maintenance and attend meetings to discuss the day-to-day running of the housing and facilities on the site, but would not required to participate in daily group meals and activities as is the case with some cooperative schemes.

Collaborative Housing Design There is a need to reconsider the nature of the home and the process of house design through the use of collaboration. Le Corbusier believed there should be a revision of values, a revision of the constituent elements of the house because the traditional house has not been altered to incorporate the changing times. As he writes in Towards a New Architecture,

men live in old houses and they have not yet thought of building houses adapted to themselves...Religions have established themselves on dogmas, the dogmas do not change; but civilisations change and religions tumble into dust. 2He suggested that mass production may be a solution but this could lead to overly repetitious and homogenised built environment. An alternative suggestion could involve collaboration with potential users using true participation, rather than other tokenistic methods, to discover a new architecture of housing.

A dierent building style could develop through collaborative design. As in Lucian Krolls Social Centre in Meme, my project would allow residents to have a choice of many dierent facades with visual cohesiveness made possible by a united material palette. User choice invokes a sense of ownership of the space which is continued inside the dwelling, where rooms can be used for a variety of dierent choices allowing autonomy when arranging their home and a display of their individuality. But this could be taken much further. The diversity in Britain suggests that standard anonymous housing is not meeting the demands of the residents and it is architecture which is restricting their home-making abilities. Home is a notion, and it reects our attitudes, values, and beliefs about ourselves3 and therefore can reect our cultural identities when given the opportunity. Through collaboration with the user, a new varied aesthetic could be achieved which could change the general perception of the architect as detached from the user, intent on their own goals and could allow the architecture of dwelling to evolve unique aesthetics.

1. Rachael Sara, The Pink Book, in Writings in Architectural Education: EAAE

Transaction on architectural education No 15, ed.E. Harper (Copenhagen: EAAE, 2002), 121. 2. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (London: Architectural Press, 1946), 12-18. 3. Irene Cieraad, ed., At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 144.

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DESIGNING IN COLLABORATIONWhen a commercial giant and a housing register can nd a compromise that is mutually benecial.

By Adam Dainow

Its easy to look back on a Masters project with feelings of nostalgia, tender memories of self-assured ideas. Nevertheless the complex ideas we delicately create for years at university are destined to end their premature lives with a few nods and pokes from swarms of confused parents at degree shows across the country. The nale of two years of Masters exploration is put to rest in a dark portfolio, then into retirement usually a parents garage, behind a set of golf clubs, never to be seen again. Its easy to think well that was then, now we are in the real world, lets do real architecture; the architecture

of brick details, DPMs and window compositions, spending every hour doing anything legally possible to keep the client happy. This is supposedly the architecture of the real word. But this is not what we thought it would be. We thought seven years ago that it was our turn to make a dierence, to make things better. Why does this all change so quickly? Housing+ was an experiment; a collaboration of ideas and people. Ideas were often fantastical, utopian solutions but the studio worked hard to make sure

they were all based around real issues: facts, markets, people, costs, time and needs, real housing issues faced by thousands across the UK. We worked hard for these ideas to be based around possibilities of them actually being able to be realised. So why are they not? When you graduate, your condence in your ideas can be ripped out of you. Your dreams now seem impossible, you are dwarfed by the prospect of how to make your past ideas into reality. At university you are in a bubble, the world is full of problems to be solved, your ideas are valid and everything is feasible. Once nished

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reality kicks in, the rent and bills have to be paid, you forget the last seven years of training, your collaborative open-minded guise fades away. Your life is divided into two halves. Things you did at university and your career after. My project was based around the fact that last year there was a shortage of 160,000 homes in England. If the government and developers arent building them then who will? It is no good to design 160,000 houses; this does not solve the problem, nobody has the consequence to build them. I wanted to take a step back to see if you could set up collaboration between certain parties to make these much-needed homes. I wanted to see if big business such as Tesco could help solve the problem. Tesco is the countrys most powerful retailer and is also among Britains most powerful real estate companies, its portfolio is conservatively valued at 14.2bn. Tesco has also assembled a land bank of more than 185 supermarket development sites across the country, which could create more than 4.5million square foot of new supermarket space. It is more protable to buy large swathes of land and do nothing with it than to allow a rival supermarket to build on it. There is no point complaining about this this is how multinationals behave prot will always come rst. So I decided to embrace this and create a realistic scenario to benet from this. I invented a viable scenario: with developers not building due to the downturn in the economy, Sheeld Council looked at a strategy for big

business to help them provide the homes the city needed. Sheeld council set up new legalisation on large sites that had been land-banked in the region. This involved telling Tesco they needed to provide 150 aordable family houses on the ve hectare site if they were to gain planning permission, or they must sell the land. The project was based around collaboration: could the architect act as the match-maker, someone to see the bigger picture, develop new benecially mutual relationships? If Tesco were not to secure planning permission under the new council legislation they would have to sell the land. This would most likely be to a rival supermarket. This could damage their leading market share, losing market share could hit prots drastically and in turn their shareholders. Can you design collaboration to force new relationships? Collaboration often happens by accident, from one party approaching another for self benet. Who sees the bigger picture? An architects whole education is essentially looking at problems and piecing dierent parts together to try and solve them. Sometimes a building is created, sometimes not. I designed a sustainable solution to provide aordable family housing on the landbanked site and a commercially viable sustainable food operation for Tesco. By analyzing the Tesco Strategy published in their annual report, the project predicted a new type of store Tesco would design, based solely on eciency and improving prots. To do this the store would have

to be more sustainable to reduce costs. The store acted as a distribution centre for Sheeld for online orders people had ordered in their homes. Rising fuel costs and the increase in internet shopping would make this type of building more and more likely. Would Tesco phase out all human contact with customers if it were possible? I believe they would. I designed what is technically a large brick shed on a fteen meter grid. At rst Tesco would not take on the whole building as it is too big, the idea being that some smaller units would be rented out for local food producers for Tesco to deliver online. This collaboration essentially makes more prot for Tesco, as they do not have to pay for transport costs to the store of these food items; it is also helps to create a more sustainable local food network for local producers and jobs. The Tesco was designed with housing on its roof to produce 150 aordable family housing units. This is very rare for such a scheme to be able to happen. Usually market value housing needs to be sold to enable aordable housing to be achieved. However, due to the Tesco being built rst they take on costs of land remuneration, foundations, site preparation and infrastructure. By setting up collaboration between a housing association and Tesco, Tesco would give the roof of the structure to the housing association for free. This vastly reduces the cost to the housing association. Rather than just tick boxes of SDS, Secure by Design and Lifetime Homes, my design looks beyond the prescribed notions of accessibility

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and examines how exible space can be designed in homes to make them more socially sustainable and exible. But why should Tesco give their roof away? With increasing pressure on big businesses to be more sustainable and increases in prices of landll, they could work in tandem to solve one anothers problems. Packaging could be burned in a combined heat and power generator to provide free power for the Tesco and housing. All wastage food could be oered to the housing above. The end result is collaboration between business, local council, a housing association and local people. A mutually benecial relationship for all. Perhaps even solving the housing crisis in Britain. But that seems such a bold statement to say at the present, now that I work in the real world of architecture, architecture of designing homes to make people wealthy. I recently read an article in the news on the subject of Tesco developing a very large supermarket and housing scheme. The project was declined planning permission due to the very poor quality of design and lack of sustainability. This is very close to the issues I tried to tackle. The university ideas may have crossed into the real world. Tesco have invested millions already into the land, consultation and lobbying to try and gain planning for this project. Maybe this is an opportunity to put forward my ideas to Tesco of how they could collaborate and do it dierently? Perhaps this is where we are all going wrong. When we leave university and

the security of our studios, it is not likely that somebody is going to present us a job to manifest our ideas into an illustrious building. There are opportunities out there, but we may just have to take a punt and try a little harder to get them. Cut out the middle man, the architectural practice and go straight to the problem. Maybe I will take out my portfolio from behind my dads old golf clubs and send it to Tesco.

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INTERVIEWS AND OUTCOMESThe Joint Construction of Memories.

By Sarah Green

From the very beginning of the project, there were clear intentions that the outcome would not be a singular gesture, but in fact a collective one with the term collective being interpreted both physically and metaphorically. The very subject of the project a housing scheme provided indications to this eect. The proposals to be formulated would be housing as a collective group of dwellings, not one house alone or a number of unrelated living units. The inception of these design constructs in the formative stages of the scheme served to determine the manner in which design work would be eected, along with a focus

towards a proposal which was to have collaboration at its core. The impact of collaboration could be felt even in the initial research stages of the design, even before any sketch proposals had been drafted. It was an intention to chart all contact made with the individuals who collaborated in some way with the scheme, to whatever great or small extent. These collaborators ranged from peers to visiting lecturers, to experts of particular elds, to interviewees. Each was responsible for conveying a particular piece of information that turned out to have an impact on the design, or cause

the research to take a new turn or take on greater precedent than another line of enquiry. Cumulatively, the input of the collaborators as a whole had a considerable impact on the design, causing key decisions to be made, such as those regarding tenure, structural systems and community cohesion. However, when taking stock of the design process as a whole, it becomes apparent that the greatest impact made by these collaborative processes could be felt at the time the brief for each dwelling was established and placed into the masterplan. The brief for each house within the terraces

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was driven by initial consultation and then an interview with its future resident. Each brief was drawn up to represent each prospective residents requirements and aspirations for patterns and modes of living. Model clients or future residents were asked to elaborate on their current housing situation and how this met and failed to meet their requirements, whilst considering future circumstances and any changes pertaining to such conditions. By involving factual snapshots of current living patterns from a range of individuals with diering domestic set-ups, the eventual scheme served to oer a very real and viable proposal for housing that addresses the needs of the demographic for whom it was designed. Due to the spatial exibility of the design of the scheme, the needs of an even wider audience could be accommodated who may adapt the dwellings to their own requirements. In this context, design collaboration with a group of very dierent users produced an outcome that may not have been quite so viable if formulated from a subjective point of view. Initial concept work suggested a preference for terraced housing; with the brief for each house being the outcome of the interview conducted with each future resident. Each contribution, assembled alongside the next, standing collectively as a whole in the form of a row of terraces gives rise to a beautifully poetic and poignant metaphor for a joint construction of memories. The interviewees knew of each other in most cases, but did not collaborate amongst themselves. The design of the housing scheme was the culmination of the

collaborative eorts of the interviewees and other participants. The outcome would not have been dierent without the interviews and the way in which they coloured it. In addition to asking each resident for a reective critique of their current housing requirements, each was also asked for a spatial memory involving a dwelling occupied in the past. These memories turned into pictorial playing cards depicting each residents contributions. These collectively formed a brieng tool which would be used to re-design each unit in the event of re-occupation (new residents would use the tool to select design features that most appealed to them). In contrast to each individual brief for the terraces, enforced immediately to produce a visible outcome, the memory game brieng tool is a projected construct, intended to encourage adaptations at a future date. In eect, the brieng tool is also a joint construction of memories, and when used as part of the design process, actually reinforces the collaborative component of the design. The housing scheme was designed to have community at its heart; the residents collaborate as neighbours in their occupation of the houses and in their use of the surrounding amenities. It is appropriate, then, that each new occupant draws on the collaborations of the recent past (the memory game brieng tool and the responses from the interviewees that informed the design of the current units) and the distant past (the design of the terraced house), in order to take up residency in the scheme and make their

own impact on the spaces within. The richness of potential design outcomes throughout the life of the scheme becomes apparent here, and it is certain that without the inclusion of opportunities for collaboration, such design outcomes would be nowhere near as dynamic. Such is the multifaceted, unpredictable, excitable promise of collaboration.

Interviews and Outcomes

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DRAWING LESSONS FROM HOUSING+Considering the architects role and ways of working.

By Anna Holder

A different view We stand very close. Uncomfortably close. Many of us in a room that was designed to accommodate few. We listen to the end of a story, a story of decanting, of boardingup, of keeping-the-squatters-out, shuttingdown, demolishing, starting afresh. A story of eciency, timing, phasing; the following-through of plans to demolish a 1970s neo-brutalist social housing complex is recounted as a seemingly emotionless closing act. In the next room, audible through the insubstantial internal walls, a woman is

bundling the last of her familys possessions into black plastic bags and clearing away the traces of their inhabitation. As we tour the at, I feel increasingly out of place. Cartoon-character stickers cling stubbornly to the door of a tiny bedroom. This is not a view of housing architects usually see.1 Coming face-to-face with a failed housing estate where the physical structure of blocks of ats was being erased to address problems at least equally economic, social and political was an important foundation point for the Housing+ studio. We began our investigation of housing architecture with an understanding that

it would be about more than form or building technology, and that we would also have to address our role as designers as entangled with a whole range of other factors inuencing the production of the built environment.

Hindsight Mid twentieth century high-rise housing was constructed to address pressing housing shortages following the destruction of many urban residential areas in the Second World War. Tower blocks

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were espoused for their supposed ability to provide more dwellings than low-rise housing. Following the breakdown, both social and material, of many estates of this type the period of development has come to be seen as a social experiment that failed. The initiation and delivery of highrise housing was a grand project of central and local government, involving dierent professions, from environmental health, planning and architecture, working with humane intent. That so many qualied and well-meaning actors could collude to produce social housing later widely judged as short-sighted, inappropriate and false economy has been explained by commentators as a product of alignment of many vested interests in seeing new housing forms realised:

Looking beyond An important element of the Housing+ studio was its engagement with how housing projects are delivered with the dierent forms of governance and procurement, and also how this might relate to or build on other infrastructures and sectors in the built environment. Students looked critically at housing policies and regulations, not just using them as a framework to design within, but questioning and proposing alternatives, and drawing inspiration from other ways of working. Mass collaboration, of the type employed by some web developers and espoused by proponents of wiki knowledge-sharing provided the studio with an alternative vision of working together. The strengths of this mode of practice are the ability to tackle large and seemingly intractable problems, providing they are well-framed and suit an iterative or testing and rening mode of development, and also the ease with which web based tools allow knowledge to be communicated. Without directly employing mass collaboration techniques, drawing lessons from projects such as Wikipedia can prove important to architects thinking critically about their approach to knowledge creation and dissemination of outputs. It demonstrates the wealth of knowledge held by a wide range of people and the valuable outputs which come from freely sharing it, an important lesson to the construction industry and building professions, with

their knowledge silos and careful guarding of boundaries of expertise. Several of the projects in Housing+ built on knowledge gained from consulting potential housing users, through interviews and co-design activities or through tapping into existing online community networks. The projects produced by the participants in the Housing+ studio were important as much for their experimentation with ways of working which prompted students to ask questions about those they might communicate and work with in producing the built environment, about how they produce knowledge and for whom.

The many different agents including both central and local government (each for its own reasons desperate to clear the slums) [] environmental health professionals zealous in their public health mission, town planners anxious to renew obsolete urban areas [] and architects impatient to create Modern architecture. 2Reecting on the mistakes of mass housing provision in the past, emphasises the importance of questioning not just the design of housing, but how it is provided, who is involved and what their intentions are. There is a value in looking outside of our own profession, interrogating our own intentions and motivations and those of others, and not accepting as given the views and knowledge of those other professionals we work alongside.

1. Notes from the Housing+ eldtrip, on visiting the to the soon-to-be demolished Heygate estate, South East London. 2. Alison Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture: The History of a Social Experiment (London: Routledge, 2001), 105.

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BUILDING TOGETHERA collection of interesting and perhaps worrying observations.

By Tomas Kangro

I have chosen to use this essay to reect on some of the lessons I learnt through our studio research and compare these with some of the lessons I am currently learning through my professional experience. Having now spent a year in practice since completing RIBA Part II, working exclusively on urban housing projects, I feel I am now in a better position to discuss the topic of building together than I was a year ago. This essay has also been punctuated with extracts of notes I have kept over the last year in work.

Good Relationships = Good Housing I believe the design of successful housing to be one of the most important roles that an architect can have, yet the architect cannot achieve this goal in isolation. The process of procuring housing is, and should be, a collaborative eort; and that necessitates a positive working relationship with every member of the project team. University is where I have most commonly experienced the rewards of working as a team and the Housing+ studio was an example of this.

While it may seem obvious to comment that a good working relationship constitutes good work, in my four years working within the construction profession such relationships have been surprisingly rare. I have often experienced a mounting tension within teams as a project progresses. Similarly, a signicant proportion of my RIBA Part 3 material addresses these very problems.

The contractor sent an e-mail saying our outstanding fees were being withheld as they had found out that the constructed disabled inhabitant units would not meet

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local authority requirements. It took the project architect the best part of a day to compile all the evidence we had (e-mails, meeting minutes and drawings) that on numerous occasions we had warned the contractor not to build the units before signing the designs off with the local authority and they had chosen to ignore our advice. The contractor ended up paying our fees.March 2010

be excellent communicators, able to clearly express themselves and interpret from others in order to understand and work towards the common goals of a project team.

It is important to be as helpful as possible when dealing with contractors and consultants we do not want to be known for messing people around, prioritise situations as they occur and deal with them efcientlyAdvice from a company director, November 2009

for a resident it might mean aordable, comfortable and cosy, and for an architect it could mean technologically progressive, formally beautiful, contextually app

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