Place Identity Dwelling: New Considerations in Volume Housebuilding
Seminar 1: Context, Values & Ideals
'Defining shared values and the role of design in volume housebuilding'
Friday 12th December 2014 9:30am – 4:00pm
Venue: The St Mungo Museum of Religious Art and Life 2 Castle Street Glasgow G4 0RH
11:10 The Social & Demographic Dimensions of Housing - Prof. Roderick Lawrence, Question and
Answer Session
Q: Going back to your slide about ‘key values’; where do you put age value in that? There is a very
satisfying aspect of our cities, when they get old, we tend to like them.
RL: You are talking about the age of the building?
Q: Yes, building buildings that will last.
RL: I would put that more in the aesthetic and symbolic values and it is something which you can
identify with age but it is more than age yet age is an important point. What we find is that length of
residence of people is a crucial determinant in residential satisfaction so the longer you live in a house,
the more attached you become to it and the more difficult it is to move. So the symbolic value
becomes an important factor.
Q: I was also talking about the age of the fabric, the neighbourhoods and cities gain value simply
because they are 100 years old.
Q: You said 3x3 room is more adaptable than 4x2.5 room. Where does that come from?
RL: There is a lot of research on that. For example you find in Sweden as well as Switzerland, there is
a lot of concern about not just the size of the room but the shape of the room and how it would
influence the capacity to furnish that room in different ways or even change the use of the room over
time.
Q: It seems a lot of parameters such as where you put the door, how things are organised, where the
fenestration is located are massive influence on how adaptable the space is. Going back to previous
question, the older the cities are, the more we love them. I wonder if this is something to do with the
fact that they managed to accommodate so much over a long time. In the Edinburgh New Town, for
the past 200 years, there have been houses, clubs, galleries and pubs. The basic configurations of
architecture have been well proportioned rooms and volumes which actually allowed adaptable use.
It is interesting because it comes to the point; often the older buildings are more adaptable.
Nowadays, there is a drive towards a more market specific understanding and a more market specific
product. Maybe we should just abandon that approach and say let’s just produce generic space and
good volume… I know some of the Dutch examples, they are selling by volume; generic space.
Dick van Gameren: But that is not very successful.
Q: I understand it is not very successful but often that is to do with where it is.
DG: Maybe that’s the answer anyway. If a house is in a place that you like, you are more willing to
invest in changing and adapting it to your needs. I think it is not only the flexibility of the construction
itself or space.
Q: Putting residents and people in the centre of design process is not what happened historically which
created the new towns and the most valued and adaptable houses in Glasgow. There were other
factors. What happened in 19th Century? Why are we still using, adapting and indeed selling and
buying Georgian houses at highest rates? What’s the lesson from that?
RL: It comes back to their values. I cannot make a generic answer to that without looking at different
cases and analysing the multiple values in those particular cases. So I think we need some field work
rather than trying to give some generic answer.
Q: It was not the same user involvement in the design process in 18th and 19th century and yet that
housing developments such as the Georgian New Town and Glasgow’s Victorian tenements are
incredibly adaptable and amongst the most valuable properties in houses in the country. I am just
trying to put these lessons in context of 21st century world where the user and resident seem to be
the centre of everything. Where does this fit into the picture?
Q: There is a problem in getting users to make significant contributions. The house co-operatives are
trying to get people to say what they want from their homes but the only thing they were able to
decide on was where they wanted to put sockets and their car ports. They were not sufficiently
familiar with what the issues were.
RL: You raised a fundamental point. Have people got the competence to talk about the kind of housing
they need? We had a very interesting period in Switzerland where I was running a simulation
laboratory where we brought people into this large space and simulated housing units which were
adaptable. If they felt that living room needed to be bigger and kitchen slightly smaller, we could do
these on site. But people are not trained. I mean architecture is not high priority. Floor plans are a
foreign language to people and that’s why we didn’t use small models. We used large models and had
people in the rooms pulling and pushing furniture. For a housing unit it takes a weekend. That’s not a
lot of investment when you think about the housing unit cost and the impacts that it will have on a
resident’s life over a longer period of time. There are means of getting around this. You raised a very
important point about co-operative housing. If you look at the data and statistics from Scandinavian
countries, it is the fastest growing housing sector. We are not talking about public and private; we are
talking about a third sector. In this third sector, there is the whole question about involving people in
the design and construction process. I wonder, in Scotland, whether this third sector could a possibility
for 21st century.
13:00 'Standards and Ideals in Dutch Social Design 1914 - 2014' - Prof. Dick van Gameren, Question
and Answer Session
Q: It is great to see architects having control over housing. I mean you can go through many cycles
and be reactive and say let’s do some new things. The clearer the rules are, the better the
architecture. I think it is interesting that you ended with a project which is amalgamating all these
issues and types, given by the constraints of saying we are not actually building in suburbs and how
can we control new housing development in the city. I think that lack of typological variations is
something we suffer in here in terms of suburban sprawl. Are you anti-sprawl, anti-suburb?
DG: That’s a radical statement. As long as you are able to build in the city, I think this is indeed a better
option. We think that open space is scarce thing in Netherlands. Why would we use that open space
if there are other options? You build in the city, in these neighbourhoods with certain qualities. There
are places in the city with low density and by building there you breathe new life in these parts of the
city. Population increases; shops and schools open. It also prevents you from eating up that open
space.
Q: Who is looking after the green space you showed in the slides?
DG: The city, the municipality. People are very afraid of open public spaces. It can create problems.
You need to have the money to invest in maintenance of these areas. I said they are collective so they
are public spaces but people who live there feel connected to the space and they start taking
ownership of it. They see it as their own garden but everyone can come in to it. I think it is very
important that the houses are very connected to the open space.
Q: You despair the quality of volume built. Most of the precedents you showed are about re-densifying
the inner city. I am more interested in lessons learned and values to be secured in the ‘Phoenix
Operation’ in terms of ruling out the new suburbia. Was it a success or failure?
DG: Probably somewhere in-between. I think maybe it is not the problem of the Phoenix but problem
of all these large scale projects in the last 50-60 years. It is building too much of the same thing at the
same time. That was the problem of Phoenix. It is very monotonous. People are afraid of the
ghettoization of the Phoenix areas.
Q: How do you bring the market towards the aspiration and quality? I believe, if we could achieve half
of what Phoenix Operation achieved we would be delighted. But it is that sort of disjoint between the
market and the product. Why can’t we use common platforms? You said there was a common
platform in terms of 6 meter but the quality and values in housing for me is how architects take that
common platform and rearrange and change volumes and stacking and etc. In the end it is a house
where you sleep, eat and do other things but the quality and value comes in how you take those basic
platforms and arrange it.
DG: To add one more thing, if you are talking whether Phoenix areas were successful or not, they are
not all the same. You always have to be careful what is the quality and identity of the neighbourhood
you want to make. I mean in these inner city areas you could say because you are building in the city,
that’s a quality within itself that has to be recognised. But when we look at suburban areas sometimes
they neither have urban nor suburban quality. If everything is still too dense and it is just endless cities
with small front and back gardens, then it is nothing. It is not just using that land that’s already there
but making attractive landscapes. It is not just parcelling of plots for small identical houses. After 1020 years they become out of date and nobody wants to live there anymore. And you keep on looking
for new places to live in. You always need to think about what is the specific quality that you can
achieve. I think specification and what’s the specific quality that we can achieve is often missing.
14:53 Home Improvements – Prof. Fiona McLachlan, Question and Answer Session
Q: Do developers specify the actual space that is provided? I find that is often ignored.
A: Yes, it is there but if it is marketed through lifestyle it is through the words so it is more descriptive
but not so much actual information on space.
Q: So the factual comparison is not very easy.
A: Yes and the idea of ‘whole-life’ housing is not welcomed by the developers as they want you to buy
another house, preferably one of theirs.
Q: More than 70% of the people looking for a new home would not even consider looking at a brand
new house. The reason for that is because most of the population is not turned on by the idea of new
developments and they do not like what is on offer. I do not know whether you agree with that or
whether it is a common theme?
A: I was very interested in what was said this morning. The home improvements that were on parking
that we did in Kent had a huge data set from the developers and there were overwhelming statistics
about the owners loving their brand new houses. But then again, this morning we learned that
psychologically people will not criticise their houses. But they absolutely hated the parking. Yet this
needs further investigation.
Q: Developers are very clever in terms of marketing lifestyle, maybe that’s something that we as
architects need to improve on as marketing is quite a skill. Maybe there is a transdisciplinary exchange
project for both sides in terms of clever marketing?
A: I think the business model comes into use. Some years ago the architecture school introduced a
business section and the key thing I remember about the speaker that architects are always trained
to talk about features - not benefits. So house-builders market anything that is about the benefits to
you and your lifestyle. Whereas we (architects) tend to say there is a window there that leads to
that….. We always talk in features.
15:37 Housing Values: Building the links to Research & Practice, Dr Ombretta Romice Question and
Answer Session
Q: We now can see all this data; we have predictive tools and models about how things will change.
Society, over the past 150 years, has probably been through more change than it is going to over the
next 150 years. Yet all these traditional house types managed to accommodate that urban flow from
the city. Suburban developments over the past 100 years were able to accommodate all that change.
How do you see all this new information, predictive tools and models change the typologies?
A: I do not know if they are meant to be predictive. For me, they are additional information. On one
hand, it is dangerous to keep adding new information; I think what we are learning is that not all the
information is relevant. But a lot of what is available has to be cross-referenced. And it is in the
moment when you start cross-referencing that you discover that some information is more valuable,
usable and has more lasting potential. On the other hand, I think the development of the urban
observatories, which are now a big deal, the capacity of studying trends and cross-referencing
geographic, social and economic information into physical form is very essential.
If you look at what is happening in China, they are saying that over the next 18 years, they have to
build the same amount of urban infrastructure the USA has today. Therefore, these tools become
fundamental. What we have to be careful about is the fact that urbanisation is happening at a very
fast pace and big scale that we do not have the luxury of making the same mistakes that we did in the
past. We have to use the information as best as we can. I think Roderick (Lawrence) is very right when
saying that it is about transdisciplinary: putting competences in the disciplines together to use the
best ‘knowledges’.
15:56 Discussion - Prioritising ideas
Table I: (LAND)
1. Land and spaces in-between: how land use is responding to what’s happening in the UK in
terms of land reform?
2. New models: Finding new ways of approaching the development of land and creating new
models.
3. Landscaping: making landscaped spaces which are beautiful to be in.
Table II: (PROCESS)
1. Value of relationships: relationship between the designers, developer and policy makers.
2. The importance of iteration (taking something and making it better through a structured
process): housing problem can be made better not only through incremental improvements
but also through iteration of scenarios. Different concepts can be tested effectively by
looking at alternative scenarios.
3. Wholism: The importance of masterplanning and how parts such as density, different age
groups and different classes relate back to the whole (masterplan).
Table III: (HISTORY)
1. Linking commercial value with learning from history: Learning from history being that
adaptability, popularity and longevity of certain belongings.
2. Developers broadening their spectrum of values: Tenures and terraces were enduring
housing models that were developer led without architects. Moreover, the best housing
projects were in very strong urban context with already established rules as opposed to
Greenfield and suburban development.
3. The importance of authority of the city: The ‘gatekeeper’ of the city is important in terms of
commissions, encouragements and building permissions.
16:05 Next Steps: Suggested Further Enquiry:
 How land is owned and developed and how this is changing in the UK
 Alternative funding & procurement models in Europe – eg Collective custom build
 Role of state in embodying collective value to the building control process
 Better education possibilities for developers & builders, for example: CPD opportunities
 ‘adaptable standardisation’ - spatial & typological variation within standardised modern
construction – European examples
 How we measure value
We will be in touch soon about our next event in early Spring