Shapes of hope
Friday Apr 25 2008 19:35 A century ago the world looked towards London as a beacon of enlightened housing. The combination of an arts and crafts architecture that saw the home as the heart of culture and society, a progressive London County Council concerned with building decent homes for the working classes and a moment in which a generation of radical and serious architects was at work produced a rich and influential seam of domestic design. A century before that exquisitely restrained city terraces had developed a formal but flexible language of urban form that has rarely been bettered. And between those two peaks the Victorians built the endless rows of inventive and robust terraces that still form the backbone of the city's property market. But, in the past century, not much that is admirable, influential or important has happened. No one has looked to London recently to provide a paradigm for modern housing. Yet property prices are absurdly high and, even beneath the threatening clouds of a slump, demand remains strong. Perhaps London is so good in other ways that it doesn't need innovation in housing - but that is no excuse. A new exhibition at New London Architecture is studying recent developments and looking at the big issues that face the city's housing: density, mixed use, design, affordability, public realm and so on. But its particular angle involves building sustainably into the centre of a heavily developed city. Growing faster than any other European city and with an estimated 700,000 new inhabitants forecast to arrive over the next 15 years, this exhibition looks not just at the grand masterplans but also at what has become known as "densification". Compared with Paris or New York, London is, although it might be surprising, a sparsely populated place. Far greater densities have been achieved elsewhere through the big apartment blocks ubiquitous from Barcelona to Berlin. Among the trendiest of concepts in contemporary planning is "densification", an ugly but useful word that describes the trick of housing more people on the same ground area - without creating slums. The schemes exhibited here are smart, innovative and ingenious and begin to challenge the awful predominance of the mass-housebuilders' off-the-shelf executive home, which has become a housing equivalent of chain-store corporatisation, of cloned high streets. A water tower converted by SUSD Architects for the designer Tom Dixon produced an enigmatic and hugely spacious residence at the shabby end of a chic district. Extending nine storeys into the air, it blends the industrial aesthetic of the original tower with a 1970s concrete brutalism (Ernö Goldfinger's Trellick Tower lurks nearby) and is a fine and rather funny intervention into the landscape of stuccoed terraces. Noho Square, by Make and developers Candy & Candy, and Printworks, by Glen Howells Architects, cover the other end of the scale - major mixed-use interventions into already dense urban fabric, the first on the site of the former Middlesex Hospital in Fitzrovia, the latter in a former railway coal-store building in Elephant and Castle, south London. Both schemes attempt to create sustainable urban communities. They do this not just by providing mixed-use accommodation (a blend of shops, workspaces, offices and apartments) but by ensuring a mix of social and private housing. The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused. Two schemes also deserve a closer look for their impressive greenness. Attempting to achieve rigorous eco standards devised in Germany, 5th Studio's development at Fairfield Road, Bow, east London, derives most of its heating from the warmth generated by domestic appliances, from cookers to computers, and keeping it all with very high insulation. A design by Duggan Morris Architects in Barmeston Road, Catford, south London, re-uses an existing building and a former yard in a sophisticated and dense piece of infill that nevertheless manages to maintain a significant element of landscaped space. If the even smaller interventions, the houses springing up in the city's suddenly valuable cracks and crevices, seem to be missing from the exhibition, they appear in a rich programme of events and talks by architects to accompany it over the weekend of May 17 and 18. Architects are often at their most experimental and most innovative when working for themselves and so their own houses can become showcases for what others wouldn't allow them to do, before they see it for themselves. Sarah Featherstone will talk about her superb east London house, a poetic, inventive and extremely elegant piece of urban infill in a harsh piece of fast-changing city, while Luke Tozer (of Pitman Tozer Architects) will speak about his extraordinarily slender and deceptively simple house on the other side of the city. Marcus Lee of Flacq Architects will explain his timber-framed Hackney house, a fast-tracked construction that was erected in only three months and looks towards the California Case Study houses of the postwar period for its light, airy, clarity. Other sessions will embrace green issues and, inevitably (this is London after all) value. The consensus of construction in London that stretched from Georgian terraces to council tower blocks has collapsed. There is no prescribed way of building any more, no pattern book, no overarching theory. While London has undoubtedly lost its way in housing since the huge rebuilding programmes of the postwar era, the ad hoc, occasionally eccentric, occasionally intensely inventive spate of interventions has begun to throw up some fascinating buildings. This show eschews the star names whose work appears so often in architecture picture books but it does feature small rays of hope. London, more than most other established western capitals, has a history of piecemeal development, an allergy to grand schemes and its theatrical set pieces have always left gaping gaps between them. What this show begins to do is to examine how the intelligent plugging of those gaps can not only hugely intensify activity in the streets but also squeeze more juice from a city that has still failed to reach its potential. That some of the schemes here are a little bland, that some seem to be using green credentials as a substitute for clarity and that there is virtually nothing here which matches the intelligence and embeddedness of the most sophisticated work in Basel, Porto or Sao Paolo, should not detract. It shows a healthy re-examination of the city, a move away from the ubiquitous and tedious icon and a sustainable pattern of growth within the city's own boundaries. | 
