Extras Kevin's Column: Architecture

Date Published:

19/06/2008

In the bid to construct the required zero carbon, affordable and super-efficient homes by 2016, I think we’re forgetting one teensy-weensy little thing. In what has to be the most ludicrously expensive housing market in Europe if not the world, it’s important to remember how all good architecture adds to places by enriching our environment, not by ticking boxes and conforming to a series of policy requirements. Good architecture has individuality and soul, man.

What makes buildings and places exciting is diversity; the mix of textures, grain and richness that human beings revel in. The unfortunate implication for the social engineer is that diversity means inequality. A Renault Twingo isn’t a Freelander isn’t a Datsun Cherry. If it were we’d all be driving around in a four-wheel drive cherry-flavoured Twingo. If you champion diversity, you champion all the crazy extremes that human beings are capable of, as well as competent and mediocre efforts in the middle ground. Hence the Vauxhall Astra.

Similarly, houses should not all be glass-walled, white cubes, nor should they all be built out of recycled lager cans and concrete made from disposable nappies. As with cars, there is room for the pioneering stuff from the likes of McLaren or Koenigsegg. There is always room for the exemplary, the innovative and the experimental.

I use these words carefully because they have a specific relationship to each other. Think of excellence as a pyramid divided into five strata. Near the bottom is the average, everyday, the mediocre. Beneath that lies sub-standard, cramped housing – crap that even the average Victorian builder would have been ashamed of.

Above mediocre lies a layer of exemplary projects: houses and schemes that offer a decent architectural experience. We’re not talking Pritzker-Prize winning stuff, just well-built, well-insulated and sustainable homes. You may have difficulty understanding the type of building I’m talking about here, and that’s sadly because you won’t have seen many. But there are exemplary projects out there, like the work that Urban Splash or First Base do. Or that Peabody or Rowntree Trusts do. Or that many housing associations do. We feature them.

Above mediocre lies a layer of exemplary projects: houses and schemes that offer a decent architectural experience. We’re not talking Pritzker-Prize winning stuff, just well-built, well-insulated and sustainable homes. You may have difficulty understanding the type of building I’m talking about here, and that’s sadly because you won’t have seen many. But there are exemplary projects out there, like the work that Urban Splash or First Base do. Or that Peabody or Rowntree Trusts do. Or that many housing associations do. We feature them.

An even smaller stratum comprises a tiny number of vanguard buildings and developments that are innovative. Innovative means that they take existing proven technologies and ideas and put them together in a commercial way. Think of the BedZed scheme in Beddington, south London, or the European Passivhaus model that I’ve written about – there are now 4,000 of those, which hardly makes them experimental.

And then, at the hand-rubbing dizzying pinnacle of our triangle, sit the experimenta. Houses built from poo or old railway carriages, extreme student projects and also those jaw-dropping real homes, built as one-offs in which owners, usually at their own expense bless them, devise and coerce technology and ideas into one project.

Experimental projects are essential. The rest of the triangle feeds off the crackling brilliance of edgy invention. Sustainable development would not be possible on a large scale if there were no straw bale houses, no cob construction and no Super Adobe Earthships. And don’t mistake me: I’m not calling for a ban on Vauxhall Astras. I don’t want to get rid of the mediocre, because excellence can only thrive when it has mediocrity to fight against. What’s unacceptable is the bottom layer of the triangle.

Drive around Britain – in an Astra, a Koenigsegg or a Twingo, I don’t mind – and you’re not navigating your way through a sea of mediocrity in which islands of excellence sparkle benignly around you. It’s worse. Our town centres, out-of-town shopping centres and our new housing estates are increasingly just miles of crap, the lowest common denominator, creating an environment in which the humble mediocre is seen as somehow exemplary. That has got to change.

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