Disneyland, or a place to call home?
Napsbury Park, St Albans - early 21st century “executive” homes (Cooper, 2010)
“85% of Britons live in suburban houses (Barker, 2009), and nearly all of us have done or will do so at some point in our lives. Yet suburbia is largely ignored by architects, especially those “headline” architects who work at the profession’s bleeding edge. The majority of suburbs are designed by technicians and draftsmen directly employed by housebuilders, or by architects whose priority is to satisfy their paying clients rather than shift the paradigm of mass housing. It is capitalist principles which drive housing design for the majority within contemporary England. As a result, today’s suburbia sprawls across the countryside as testament to the constant pitched battle between the desire to retain green belt and countryside land and the need for more housing. The design of these houses is low on the ladder of priorities and consequently, much of England looks the same. Of course, every housebuilder will offer a Georgian portico’d version here, and a half-timbered version there, but analysis of the plans will show that the houses are near identical, their variations a result of their need to fit within an efficient site layout. The housebuilders have done their research and they know that houses designed like this sell – but do they sell because they are what’s desired, or do they sell because they are the only thing available?”
That was the introduction I wrote to a piece I wrote about modern suburbia back in 2010. Since then I’ve been a “draftsman employed by housebuilders” and an “architect whose priority is to satisfy paying clients” but despite my shifting perspective, most of what I wrote remains the same. Our country still faces a massive housing shortage, a complicated and unusual land economy, sky-rocketing construction costs, and an essentially entirely private housebuilding industry.
Most of the schemes that are put before the planners these days are still for houses that are designed to look like they were built in older eras. 10 or 15 years ago, the fashion was for Georgian-style details, with porticos and uPVC sash-like windows. Today the fashion trends more towards the “arts and crafts” style - I use the inverted commas and the word style because the arts and crafts movement was the very antheses of a style, and to design something which resembles it is very much in contradiction of it’s ethos. Whatever you think of this “pastiche” design, it is hard to deny their success - the houses sell off plan in their thousands, and mainstream housebuilders in general will always prefer to bring forward this sort of design than “risk” anything contemporary.
At Hope Architects, our clients are often volume housebuilders, and we are producing schemes for them using standardised architecture which they roll out to a variety of different sites in many locations. This can be viewed as a restriction on producing quality architecture, but it can also be viewed as an opportunity to focus on the "spaces between the houses". Volume housebuilders tend to produce buildings which architects are cynical about, and very often the focus is on reproducing product which they have experience of selling - this is what leads to the creation of these pretend "arts and crafts" suburbs. We are lucky with many of our schemes, in that we have clients who are prepared to build different houses, with a more thoughtful aesthetic and more experimental internal layouts. However, we do not believe that "pastiche" architecture is necessarily the enemy of good urban design and it is still entirely possible to create quality places for people to build a home and a family life.
Woodford Garden Village - a recent “garden city” style design in the “arts and crafts” style (Cooper, 2022)
What are we to conclude from the predominance of referential design in this country’s housebuilding? Is the British house-buying public unique in it’s desire for an old-fashioned-looking house? Why does the market apparently resist contemporary architecture in its houses when it embraces it in other consumer markets like cars and electronics? Why are city centre apartment schemes so typically modern in their appearance, yet suburban neighbourhoods default to traditional forms? Does this suburban approach hold us back from ideas such as cycle-commuting, pedestrian-led environments and stop us questioning typical ways of living our day-to-day lives?
This situation is certainly at the core of why architects are, I believe, reluctant to engage with housebuilders and the volume housing industry. Housebuilders, rightly or wrongly, are often committed to this style of architecture and no self-respecting practice wants to put it’s name to this sort of pastiche. Instead the profession has a tendency to adopt an ivory tower approach, with periodic statements and reports criticising modern housebuilding from Portland Place and other seats of architectural learning and power. When I engage with the architectural community, I find I am well received until I explain that I work with volume builders, at which point there is typically a profound change in attitude - I'm clearly a sell-out!
Well, perhaps I am. However, I firmly believe that whether the profession likes it or not, the national housebuilders are going to build houses, and lots of them. My view is that we should engage with this and seek to improve the output, however incrementally. A small improvement in any area - street scene, garden amenity, internal layout - can have a profound impact on the quality of life of the people who live in these homes for many years to come, and that is surely something to strive for and be proud of.
CITU, Leeds - an urban micro-neighbourhood built using off-site manufacturing techniques (Gregory, 2022)
References
Barker, P (2009). The Freedoms of Suburbia. London: Frances Lincoln