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“How
on earth did that get built?”
We ask ourselves that all too often
these days, gazing from train windows
on convenient sections through Britain’s
towns and cities. It’s the same
everywhere. Despite a supposed national
focus on design-quality, lazy, cramped
and frankly depressing new housing
is springing up apace. As aspiring
home-owners, we feel frustrated by
what the view offers us. As architects,
we can’t help feeling we could
do better. And when it comes to the
Thames Gateway, the grand projet of
the moment, it seems vital that we
do.
But where to start? The Williams report,
with its recognition of the nature
of the challenge, is one positive
step. A second is suggested by that
other train-view staple: all those
individual housing extensions and
one-off homes in back gardens and
backlands nationwide – often
the bread and butter of smaller, younger
architecture practices like our own.
Those small-scale projects should
be understood as the nation’s
housing R&D, just one part of
the offer that smaller, younger practices
can make to the housing debate. Test-beds
for both technological innovation
and accommodation of social and environmental
aspirations, these are ripe with possibilities
to be scaled up.
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Their
designers are keen to do just that.
Add to this a ‘why-not’
attitude – not yet brow-beaten
by delivery-pains, these practices will
inventively push for things that make
a difference, like dual aspect and more
cores per block – plus ambition
to build a reputation, fueling hard
work and the generation of ideas. Last
but not least, they offer experience
gained on major schemes in renowned
practices worldwide.
This is not to say that smaller practices
are ‘better’, or that we
are the Solution. We simply want to
play an appropriate role alongside larger
firms as part of a design-focused meritocracy.
Although AOC are fortunate ourselves
to have won housing work from enlightened
clients, it is easy to feel that the
odds are against this. Prolonged and
excessive procurement processes that
barely consider design-quality at qualification
stage, combined with a zero-tolerance
approach to risk (despite acknowledgement
that creative risk drives much-coveted
Innovation), makes it difficult both
for smaller firms to contribute, and,
more worryingly, for good homes to consistently
emerge.
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