I was at a talk in Daunt Books given by Mark Swenarton on his new book, Cook's Camden: The Making of Modern Housing. It was at the beginning of the year, dark and cold. I had a pesky cough but decided I had enough throat sweets and water to keep me from making a scene during the talk. It was an interesting talk, and one of the things that stuck with me the most is that there was no definitive answer.
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| Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash |
Mark Swenarton spoke of the ideals that the late Neave Brown had when planning social housing for the newly formed Camden Council. Every home would have access from street level so that its occupants felt tethered to their community. There would be a small front yard where the children could play and be watched over by their parents from the living room balcony above. Families were planned for and life was encouraged.
However, these were just plans and life is full of variables. The concrete structures of the Alexandra Estate were built with the real lives of its future tenants in mind. Like the architects of Kensal House in the 30s, these ideas and ideals were mixed in with the concrete that formed these homes. But, as Mark Swenarton reminded us, there are variables that an architect can't plan for.
A tick list is not enough to guarantee happiness. Perhaps the flat is nice but it's too far from where your mum lives. Or maybe you have a hobby that takes up more space than normal.
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| Photo by James Stamler on Unsplash |
Say, for example, my husband has a collection of guitars, a drum kit and stacks of amps that have names unknown to me. These objects take up a lot of space. It's unusual to have these large objects, and so architects wouldn't plan for this in social housing. They plan for the norm, and a personal music department isn't the norm. It'd be tricky to fit this collection of strings and skins into a normal home, but that doesn't mean that the building is a bad one. It just wouldn't work for us.
There are other variables that architects can plan for, such as reducing the crime rate. This can be trial and error with experimental new forms of housing, but it is something so important that it can determine a successful development from an unsuccessful development. These are factors that are so important to the lives of all residents that the failure of these endeavours really can mark a building as a failure.
It doesn't matter what the residents choose to furnish their homes with or what they do as a hobby. It is not a question of taste. The failures in the building have contributed to a breakdown of the social fabric of the inhabitants and therefore that building is a failure. There isn't always a lack of care in the planning that causes these problems. It is sometimes the nature of experimentation, however experimentation with physical buildings and creating new types of societies is tricky, to say the least.
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| Photo by Joshua K. Jackson on Unsplash |
For example, take the case of the Robin Hood Estate. This was dreamt of as a 'streets in the sky', years of sociological thought in the making. There has been a lot of disagreement but ultimately Historic England have decided that it didn't work. As a contemporary film from a Battersea Estate shows, people were stuck. Even if the estate wasn't working they were living there now, often away from their families and en masse with lots of strangers.
Now the Robin Hood Estate is being knocked down, suffering from years of chronic lack of investment and deemed not worthy of being listed. You can see a section of it in the Venice Biennale this year, and the V&A Museum purchased two fragments, which perhaps they'll display in one of their new sites.
Architecture isn't just about aesthetics. It's not just about finding places to put your things. It doesn't solely boil down to the facilities that are in your building or your proximity to the tube. It's about the many things that make up the fabric of your life and enable the ideals of the kind of society that you wish to belong to.