Over the last 20 years, the real estate bubble in London has been cause for so much detriment because speculation has made housing unaffordable and has priced out a whole generation of Londoners from property ownership; yet, in principle at least, the silver lining for architects should have been more freedom to design and to question stale typological dogmas. Property in London has become so sought after that people would have bought it irrespective of the specifics of its architectural design. Evidently, buildings designed by architects still commanded a premium but, in theory, people chose to buy property based on availability and finances, not personal taste. This should have been a chance for architects to reclaim the discourse and the canon of taste. It was an opportunity for architects to question the orthodoxy, reconfigure the typology and refresh residential design, knowing that whatever architects did will not have an adverse impact on developer profitability.
The housing market is buoyant in the United Kingdom but you won’t find many singing the praises of domestic design. In fact, it is well known that British housing standards are parsimonious vis-a-vis their European counterparts but what about the design of these spaces? What are the dogmas of domestic design that have become so immutable that they have relegated architectural design to selecting templates off a catalogue? I talk here mainly of multi-unit developments and collective housing.
Materials: Most domestic architecture is clad in brick, render and aluminium (anodised and polyester-powder coated). So many residential buildings are clad brickwork to signify domesticity or so do agents advise and planners ordain. Brick as masonry construction works in compression but the ubiquitous use of brick as rainscreen means that slipform brick can cantilever, levitate and perform geometric acrobatics which is unsettling. I repeat that this is not a criticism of brick as a material but rather a tirade against the architect not having the choice of when and how to use it. The interiors tell of a similar, woeful story where most spaces have been smothered in a tsunami of white plasterboard and neutral colours in a very tenuous and dubious interpretation of Scandinavian chic, but this is gradually changing with many new schemes feting exposed concrete, brickwork and steelwork.
Layouts: Agents love open-plan layouts. They never seem to get enough of them. It is seen as some sort of spatial trompe l’oeil to create a sense of vast space; however, there is a time and place for an open-plan layout and it should be a conscious design decision rather than the default. What this pandemic has perhaps shown as people were confined to their homes that dwelling all day in the same space, no matter how expansive it is, has taken its toll. Domesticity is a discipline and a culture based on a series of quotidian daily activities that may be disparate at times and may overlap at others. Shouldn’t the home reflect this? If one thinks of Manderley, the estate in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, the servants inform the narrator, the new Mrs. De Winter. that there is a morning room and an afternoon room for her to use. Whilst most people do not live in stately homes, most people do lead lives predicated on a constellation of activities: sleeping, working, cooking, dressing, washing, eating, unwinding, focusing, socialising. Each new home should be the architect’s prerogative to choreograph spaces around these activities and test out where these activities overlap and where they need to be separated. Does every resident ask for an open-plan kitchen, occupying a wall or shoved in a corner like an errant child?
Spatial Hierarchies: I find it disquieting that in so many contemporary flats, visitors have to pass the bedroom before reaching the living space. These designs lack hierarchy and clear delineation between private and public. The spaces seem to be oblivious to how humans behave and interact. I remember that, as a child and teenager, I was thankful to my parents’ flat layout that allowed my sisters and me to go to our bedrooms and use the kitchen without being seen by my parents’ guests when they were hosting and I was not in the mood to say ‘hello’; furthermore, when one thinks of home, it is a curated paradigm of how one represents oneself to the world through space. Such curation entails control of what to display and what to hide. A bedroom is akin to an inner sanctuary for some that they may leave guarded, without the intrusion of the visitor. It sometimes seems to me that since British homes were historically arranged vertically over many floors, the transition to lateral apartments has not been as effortless or successful as French homes for example with a pedigree in lateral spaces.
As for bathrooms accessed through kitchens, I will not dignify this by writing about it.
Challenging the dogmas of domestic design is not an impossible task. These dogmas are presented as timeless and inherent when actually, they are invented and quite recent, similar to what Eric Hobsbawm argues about traditions. There was a time not so long ago when architects were given free rein to do what they do best: The Barbican estate is one of the finest examples of intelligent multi-user housing. Chamberlin, Powell and Bon have been very successful in both customisation and standardisation. The Barbican apartments have been designed according to location and occupier density but within each of those themes, there are quite a few permutations. The Barbican apartments are truly designed to their site and programme rather than being facsimiles of every other flat from Barking to Ealing.
These dogmas have persisted because agents aver that this is what people want. This is a specious argument since most people have bought whatever they could afford, and these were the typologies offered to them. A vibrant housing market should have meant that people would have been receptive to new ideas. If architects assumed their natural role and engaged in manufacturing taste, architects could have offered people what people themselves did not realise they wanted in the first place. I wonder if any architectural practice has invested in researching domesticity and domestic trends in Britain and comparable countries. Domesticity is a socio-spatial science that architects are equipped to decode, interpret and employ in the property sector. In fact, I know that domesticity has been probed extensively at the Architectural Association when I was a student, and I ended up writing my own MA dissertation on it. But has this tome of knowledge been used in practice since housing affects so many people and is one of the chief drivers of the contemporary British economy? This is an area of intelligence that architects could monetise: Knowledge is perhaps the most valuable commodity in a service-based economy.
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