Habitation: Reinventing Housing for the Urban Age

in every corner of our planet people are anchored by their homes it is the construction sector that creates these highly personal spaces environments that provide billions with the basic psychological needs of security comfort warmth and belonging environments that govern how people feel interact and develop environments that have the ability to shape our societies [Music] around the world the demand for homes is increasing as our population expands and now outstrips the rate at which we can construct these critical spaces are changing cultures are disrupting established home building conventions as cities are expanding faster and are now more densely occupied than at any time in human history [Music] so how can we overcome these challenges how do we create high quality homes that positively shape a global society and how can such an extreme context drive innovation from the architecture engineering and construction sectors the pressure is on now to deliver a lot of housing so the question we ask is how do you do that well at high density we have to be very careful we don't want to just get rid of whole swathe without appreciating the context or the history that's gone with it it's not about vanity or ego for us we're just trying to deliver things that people need in a more sustainable way that doesn't harm the planet people need to have a sense of identity over the place in which they live and I think there can be things that you can draw out from local context and that drive design and make a place unique when you design any burden you create an opportunity for the people in habitat to inhabit it in a good way in a way that improves the quality of their living or working and generally just lifts the spirit and in the sense of architecture should lift the spirit [Music] this is how the concept of housing is being reinvented for our truly urban age [Music] [Music] while many nations are currently experiencing challenges with housing the situation facing the UK is one of the most urgent in the developed world the UK housing market has come under increasing pressure over recent decades and the country is now in the midst of a housing crisis that is the rising demand for homes is not being met by sufficient levels of housing supply a number of factors have created the current situation on both the supply and demand sides of the equation firstly the UK population continues to steadily grow in size predominantly as a result of migration rising birth rates and falling mortality rates data from the UK's Office for National Statistics or ons shows that the country's population has expanded from thirty nine point eight million people in 1900 to almost 67 million people today furthermore the UK population will continue to rise and is expected to reach 72 million people by 2040 one such growth significantly increases the demand for homes compounding the challenge ons data also indicates that the average number of people living in a property has decreased significantly in recent decades principally as younger people choose to start families later in life and as the elderly population expands on the supply side the UK is currently not constructing enough new and affordable homes there are a variety of reasons for this ranging from funding and the availability of land to build on to the bureaucracy of the country's planning system a severe reduction in the number of small house builders since the 2008 financial crisis and insufficient numbers of skilled operatives entering the construction workforce this perfect storm of high demand and insufficient supply drives increased land and property values manifesting in a shortage of affordable housing for those on middle and low income or for those looking to get onto the housing ladder quite aside from these demographics the definition of affordable is becoming evermore stretched in cities and major urban areas the shortage of supply also impacts social housing shelter a charity that seeks to end homelessness and poor housing in England and Scotland estimates that 3 million new social homes need to be constructed in England alone over the next 20 years in parallel to its housing crisis an increasing proportion of the UK population are now choosing to live in cities this trend is currently being mirrored in countries around the world primarily as rural communities migrate into urban areas research by the United Nations projects that 60% of the global human population will be living in cities by 2030 in this context major urban areas are becoming something of the front line in the housing crises facing many nations this can be clearly witnessed in a number of UK cities including Birmingham Manchester and Glasgow however nowhere is the challenge more pronounced than in London the uk's capital and one of the largest urban areas in Europe while the relentless pressure to construct homes at a rapid rate here does results in some less than desirable schemes coming to fruition fuelling continued debate around housing standards planning regulations political representation social cohesion and inequality the intensity of the challenge is in fact breeding innovation from some of the city's foremost architects and developers from urban dentistry to embracing cross laminated timber these remarkable schemes master their highly demanding physical and economic contexts to create truly unique homes that challenge the established preconceptions around delivering sufficient levels of housing in one of the world's most densely occupied cities [Music] so what's gross scheme is a 100% affordable scheme for swamp it's a multistory CLT volumetric scheme that provides 65 from which needed homes in Tower Hamlets the modules will be fabricated in swarms factory out in Basildon and the scheme will be on-site later this year one of the reasons that Swann have looked towards off-site manufacture is they want to control their supply chain as a Housing Association they want to provide affordable homes and there's obviously a large market for that what they had with this scheme was an outline kind of concept design in a traditional way which they decided they wanted to construct him modular and so we kind of got them on board at that stage and wants that shift from a traditional kind of scheme to an off-site scheme it was on the table and that was on the basis of our I kind of CLT knowledge scheme what's gross specifically incorporates 158 modules 85 different types and which does sound like a lot and but actually the important thing to understand with off-site and monitor construction is that it's really about repeatable processes and customizable products and that efficiency in the process allows you to customize those modules in different way so that means for a traditional site that was kind of given to us and not developed in that way originally or not foreseen has been an off-site modular scheme from the outset we've been able to adapt the design to deliver that [Music] so typically when we talk about CLT we'll talk about large format solid timber panels the way in which they're engineered means that you get a lot of strength from a single panel and those panels like I said can be digitally fabricated and whatever size and shape you kind of need so it's got a lot of versatility in terms of its forms that it can generate it's modular construction those benefits are the same except you can realize them within a factory environment so instead of single panels being created and shipped to site we can build whole units other than on the back of a lorry and delivered so for urban sites and particularly in the London context where we have a massive housing shortage we can get the homes that we need much quicker and more cost-effectively on to more difficult sites people associate and home is with the kind of red brick stuff you you find out in the countryside more often than not and I think working in an environment there's more kind of willingness to innovate and willingness to try new materials I think for a lot of people they associate timber with kind of pure sustainability but for us although that's always a starting point and the ethos for the practice we really believe in the material and because of the way in which prefabrication offers so many of the benefits over traditional means of construction speed that production and trains on site reduction of waste ease of fabrication or which kind of helps it to me helps it to be a kind of 21st century material CLT is combustible it's not worth pretending it isn't and but what we do know about timber is it burns predictably so the best analogy we can say is if you imagine a log on a fire you know when you put it on there it will burn over time it burns slowly and it chars and it's that charring that protects the timber so we know that we understand that and we design for that so with our regard design some NGO reckon with the structural engineers on these jobs we usually allow for a certain amount of the timber to char within the kind of structural design and then we supplement that with plasterboard and other products in that way it's no different to the way in which you would protect a steel beam where it's kind of intimately coated and then finished with plasterboard similarly with concrete it's about coverage over the rebar so it's really just about an understanding of the material and how to use it and in that way it's no more dangerous we don't think than any other material seven dentistry is this idea of the in-between spaces so cities have often very iconic buildings or iconic spaces and the idea of urban dentistry is what happens in between and that can be a tool for slightly new narratives new types of design or new ways of thinking about space you can also bring that into this idea of housing to housing again has evolved we have lots of different areas of housing we do need to increase density also we need to improve housing so you can look at this idea of urban dentistry as carefully picking apart what's there or adding to what's there in that sort of surgical precision egg nests where this idea of dentistry comes from very precise and very careful maybe slightly scraping away the bits that don't work and putting in bits that it's the do work one of the projects that I think particularly caught the attention of people and was important to us was the slim house a old stable passage in South London between two buildings two point three meters wide which is narrower than air cheap carriage there's an existing very small existing house there and we essentially not print at all the way down partner front facade and built a two point three meter wide three storey three beds house but there what we were doing then yes it's slim but how can actually work these spaces to achieve the quality of space and the delight of architecture that you would get in other buildings and we use that project as our catalyst we have talked about this these types of spaces so these in-between spaces [Music] packing house is an old office building we took this concrete office block kept the superstructure and developed this housing the principle behind it was the same as with this urban dentistry concept a awkward site overlooking an existing building how could we achieve a high quality of living space bird also made economic sense to the developer of course but also to people buying so it's in Croydon it's slightly less expensive so we could deliver one bed units that people could genuinely afford it was built as a build to rent scheme and since then some of those that had been sold it came with this idea of bill to rent which is about I suppose it's about the same as a lot of housing but also a focus on how can we sort of created in central moments where people congregate at the star the plan for the building meant that there was some quite poorly conceived apartments that only received normal flights we use the slim house design to flip that we put all the circulation to the north side external circulation which again brings down the cost we also put the services there again easy access brings down the cost and ultimately we could produce these slim flats that were all double aspects and all of them faced south or Southwest people are expecting a certain solution which is a normal solution to that problem I'd love to see what we often tries to do is slightly twist that and say well what could we do we have done projects which are a blank field that's a totally different challenge but I think most of our work happens in this complex highly complex urban environment complex in terms of policy but complex in terms of is urban fabric what we try to achieve in terms the sustainability and the environment and all of those parameters together actually set up something where I think innovation really shines that challenge is really important but also not accepting the normal results you know from those challenges [Music] Bradford log West is a development in Hounslow in West London next to the ground Union Canal that reimagines an industrial wolf site and in total it'll deliver over 500 homes for a local need may were appointed to design phase 2 which is 157 homes including apartments townhouses a mix of one and two and three-bedroom homes for bedroom even to meet a range of needs in the area the project came about the client is a joint venture between muse and the canal and River trust it's a brownfield site that is has been identified for regeneration the broader moves the master planners connect Revit High Street and the canal and transfer station and generally make an underused area of Brantford they're more connected the pressure in London to deliver more housing is enormous and the focus is going to be on brownfield sites like this more and more I think those are realistic and rightful kind of resistance to develop the Greenbelt and actually a lot of our housing need can be delivered on repurposed sites and retaining some of the character in the architecture so actually developing site-specific responses so you're not getting kind of generic identikit housing but actually in a Brentford lock west we've developed an architecture that responds to the interesting wolf nature of a site references some of the old industrial forms the Sawtooth roof for example which you might see on old industrial buildings but here in our building creates lovely vaulted roofs on the top floor apartments which in turn bring light into the depth of a plan and as a way that we always develop our design responses to try and on earth and under the character and almost the DNA of a site so it allows us to develop a site-specific response though I suppose it's a mixture of responding to the industrial past and then trying to marry that with the human scale of a neighboring Conservation Area which is very much residential Georgian Park London so picking up cues in terms of garden walls gable ends of houses front gardens all these things that are enriched that part of the town so having a richer ground-floor experience and and streetscape and then having the backdrop of the larger buildings behind Branford offers us clues about how we think good outer-borough housing can be delivered a number of things that we try to innovate in the project were a new typology of residential block type villas are connected by townhouses the villa plan allows us to grow a lot of dual aspect apartments with generous outdoor space really kind of attractive well-lit generous internal spaces so although it's apartments in a borough that typically would kind of want townhouses perhaps or even semi-detached houses we've created a mix that we think lends itself well to borrowers that need high density they need to deliver numbers but at the same time delivering high proportion of family housing Brantford will be taking some of those ideas forward into our other schemes every project we do tries to reimagine how we might live today and how we can create homes fit for the 21st century for me seeing something that has been years in the making you know working on something from initial concept through to seeing it built it's really special and hearing good things and the fact that people want to live there and see it as a place they want to live is really important from reimagining the waterside to embracing off-site techniques and adapting existing structures these schemes prove that the challenges of this city's housing crisis can be overcome through innovation and that the urgency of the climate does not have to drive the delivery of knee-jerk reaction redevelopments that sacrifice quality and architecture in order to achieve speed the success of each of these schemes in such a densely occupied city offers lessons and guidance for those grappling with the need to deliver housing in major urban areas around the world and powerfully demonstrates the innovation creativity and ingenuity that is prevalent throughout our remarkable sector the world's most important industry that has the ability not just to build houses but to create homes for every human being on our planet [Music] you

Channel: The B1M

Views: 246,932

Rating: 4.8292842 out of 5

Keywords: B1M, TheB1M, Construction, architecture, engineering, The B1M, Fred Mills, housing, uk housing, london, london housing, clt, cross laminated timber, Graphisoft, the power of standards

Id: al0JvDqK49E

Length: 22min 11sec (1331 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/SeamusHeaneysGhost]

Really interesting, thanks. Partition material even on a small scale two bed apartment size give stunning results in tiny spaces

[u/electrons_are_brave]

Thanks for the link.