Posts Tagged Planning policy
Saturday interview: Fiona Reynolds, National Trust director general
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 28, 2011
National Trust chief Fiona Reynolds believes planning law is the biggest test yet of the government's claim to be green, and is leading the backlash against the plans
I sit in the beer garden of a Cotswold pub – long before it opens – on a perfect autumn morning. Strands of spiders' silk, untethered from their webs, float through the air, visible only for a second when they catch a glint of sunlight. The leaves on the trees look golden in this light, and the fields stretch out in front as far as you can see. Could there be anywhere more beautiful than right here, right now? Count yourself lucky, you think, for England's green and pleasant land. And for its planning laws.
"I know we're sitting in a very privileged part of the countryside now, in terms of landscape," says Dame Fiona Reynolds, director general of the National Trust, as she sits down on a picnic bench and tries to get her collie-spaniel cross Lucy to sit too, "but this has all been protected through good planning and the moment you let good planning go, it's lost for ever." Reynolds doesn't have the look of a victorious warrior returning from battle – she is far too measured for that – but she could be allowed a small, self-satisfied smile at the firestorm the National Trust helped inflict on the government's National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) consultation. Reynolds took the step – for the first time in her 11 years at the National Trust – of writing to all four million members and asking them to support its campaign against the consultation that could be the biggest change to planning regulation in several decades. Most potentially devastating, the Trust warned, was prioritising economic growth over longterm protection of the countryside when it came to planning decisions. Their petition was signed by more than 200,000 people and David Cameron stepped in and wrote to the National Trust, pledging to protect the "beautiful British landscape." The consultation closed last week, and the months of waiting have begun. "We've just got to hope the government is really listening. I'm passionate about protecting the countryside, and the need to get it right. If you get it wrong what you lose, you lose for ever."
She says she was "hugely impressed" by the response of the National Trust's members. "I think it's one of those things about our nation – and we're a very urban society now – but we do love the countryside, it's something that seems to be part of our character and our sense of what England is. I think people were shocked, particularly that a Conservative-led government should appear not to be passionate about the countryside. It just felt wrong."
The coalition is "so preoccupied with growth and of course we have every sympathy with that, but it's about what kind of growth, what kind of economy, and in a way the recession has given us a chance to think about the quality of what we do. We have 330,000 houses with planning permission that aren't being built because there is no money for mortgages, so the problems in a way are elsewhere. But given that we have a chance to build really well and intelligently – in a way a recession is a time to think positively about that. That's the disappointing thing: they felt they had to press the old 'growth at any cost' button."
The National Trust isn't a campaigning organisation, she says, and isn't about to become one, despite occasional forays onto the battlefield – it objected to the expansion of Stansted airport, for example, and against the government's proposed forests sell-off.
"[Campaigning] is dependent on the issue," she says. "I would not expect us to be doing it all the time. If we became rentaquote, that wouldn't be right. We reserve our voice for something that is really important, absolutely at the heart of our core purpose and touches what we stand for and where we make a difference. This felt like the single most important issue in the time I have been here. I think we should campaign on issues that are central to what we do and I suspect it would be rare, but when we make a contribution it matters. I think this is what this has shown." It is a "caricature", says Reynolds, that the National Trust is against all development. "We recognise we need housing, schools, the physical buildings where these things happen. Our big question is how we do it."
The National Trust is the biggest private landowner and biggest NGO, with an estimated one in 10 voters a member. Reynolds is head of a huge powerbase. Does this make her the most powerful woman in Britain? She laughs. "I wouldn't say that. I'm the luckiest woman in Britain because I have the best job in the country."
Are politicians frightened of her? "I don't know about frightened. I think they are listening, and that's absolutely right. I think the National Trust stepping up on this issue really made them think, and that's a good thing. They did the wrong thing with it by giving it this economic slant. I hope that our intervention will get us to a proper balance between social, environment and economic objectives. They're listening," she adds, "but we're not there yet. We don't know the outcome."
David Cameron's promise that his would be the greenest government ever is met by a small laugh. "I've yet to see it, put it that way. You can only judge a government by what it does. This is a big test and they haven't failed it yet because it was only a draft consultation, but it has to change significantly to deliver what the country needs."
When Reynolds was a child, growing up in Alston in Cumbria, her parents would take her to National Trust properties. She became a member of the organisation while she was still at Cambridge, where she did an MPhil in land economy. "I never thought I would end up running it, but I've always been intrigued by the National Trust. I love the sense of purpose. I love an organisation that has a long view back, but also a long view forward. We say to people we are going to look after places for ever for everyone, and I believe we will."
At 53, Reynolds has been in the job since 2001. "Now I'm suddenly feeling quite old," she says. "It's a bit of a shock, really. When I started, my children were small and now they're growing up." Her husband, a teacher, "did the stay at home bit. I couldn't have done this job as somebody who was also trying to be the number one carer, so I was very lucky that he was willing to do that, because it is very, very hard to be a mother and have a big job, to pursue a career. I know lots of people who found that impossible."
It's perhaps the main reason, she says, why there are so few women at her level. Does she think it is getting easier? "I wouldn't say it's getting easier, but it's becoming more acceptable to have unconventional arrangements at home. But I don't think it's that much better for women. It's that age-old tension – even if you're not physically responsible for the children, you're emotionally thinking 'should I be there?' or 'I'm missing that sports day – again.'"
Reynolds worked at the Council for National Parks, then the Council to Protect Rural England, before spending two years as director of the women's unit at the cabinet office under Tony Blair. When she got the job as director general of the National Trust, she was accused of being one of "Tony's cronies", though she insists she was not on social terms with the then-prime minister. But still, her appointment was controversial. "I was the youngest director general and the first woman, and it would have been surprising if people hadn't gone 'hmm'. But I hope my track record spoke for itself, and now my track record from being there for 11 years – we've done some great things."
Membership – and income – has swelled under her directorship, and the organisation is steadily modernising. She acknowledges "nobody will ever agree with everything the Trust does, I learned that early on. It's not an organisation that in the detail of what we do we can please everybody, and it's impossible to try." For instance, the Trust was accused of "dumbing down" (and "Disney-fying") for its recent efforts to, as Reynolds puts it, "bring houses to life" by dressing guides up and recreating scenes in rooms. "I'm completely unrepentant, because I think our job is to make history appealing and accessible to a new generation who haven't all learned history in school. Provided you are telling the truth and there's an integrity, so you're not simplifying or glossing over difficult stories in order to make something sound nice, I don't think it's dumbing down at all."
But isn't "glossing over difficult stories" what the National Trust became expert at doing? It is only in recent years, for instance, that the National Trust has acknowledged how many of its properties were built on fortunes from slavery. "I think we recognise that we didn't always tell all the stories," she says, adding that it is changing. "If you go to properties now you will see much more about where the fortune came from that built the house, some of the slavery issues. We are prepared to tell the more difficult stories as well."
I've always felt too nose-up-against-the-window in most National Trust houses I've been to, and an unease at the worship of its original aristocratic owners a visit seemed to demand.
"I'm not sure it's worshipping," says Reynolds. "I think it's curiosity. People are really intrigued by it. If you go to the back-to-backs [former slum housing in Birmingham acquired by the National Trust], people are just as enthralled by them. There, for a lot of people, you could think, 'that might well have been me', whereas in a great stately home, you think, 'actually I would probably have been the scullery maid'."
The family membership has swelled, Reynolds points out, which makes the demographic younger. There is still much room for improvement, though. I suspect low-income families are still a rarity – quite aside from the entry prices, it can be impossible to get to many properties on public transport – and Reynolds admits there are few ethnic minority members. "I freely recognise that, and we've been working with properties that are either located in urban areas, or close to large areas of different populations. For example, Wightwick Manor in the west Midlands is surrounded by a huge Sikh and Afro-Caribbean community, and they have been working specifically on how to involve their local community."
Providing people with access to nature still underpins the Trust's original purpose. "We're very concerned about [people decreasing contact with nature]," says Reynolds. "One of our founders, Octavia Hill, said something like 'the need of air, the sight of sky and all things growing seem human needs common to all'. She was saying it's as important to have access to beauty, and the ability to get out into the countryside – that's as important as the roof over your head and something to eat. Which comes back to the planning issue. I've got shelves of books at home about the early-20th-century and the conservation movement beginning, and through the 20s and 30s the Trust was very involved in establishing our planning system. It just felt right that we should be there now defending it."
Our time runs out and Reynolds has to go. My last glimpse of her is in silhouette as she strides across open fields, her dog racing off in front towards the sun.
Urbanized: a documentary about city design that comes in the nick of time
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 25, 2011
As the global population teeters on 7 billion, Gary Hustwit's film portrays the world's exploding number of city dwellers as the solution rather than the problem
A series of familiar images unfolds on the screen: a wall of glass towers, a Brazilian favela, the Shibuya pedestrian crossing in Tokyo. Visual shorthand for a crowded planet, they are accompanied by an equally familiar sequence of statistics: half of humanity – or 3.5 billion people – now live in cities, and urbanisation is so rampant that by 2050 this figure is projected to be 75%. So begins Urbanized, a new film about the challenge that cities pose in the 21st century, which had its London debut this weekend, playing to a packed house at the London School of Economics. It is directed by Gary Hustwit, who made the cult hit Helvetica in 2007 (an unlikely film about a Swiss typeface) before taking on the much broader topic of industrial design in 2009's Objectified. With Urbanized, he zooms out even further to complete his trilogy, a cinematic story about design moving from the micro to the macro.
With each leap in scale, Hustwit risks pointing his camera at a topic so big he ends up saying nothing at all. Yet Urbanized is a brave and timely movie that manages to strike almost exactly the right tone. For a sense of the scale of the urban problem, simply look at Mumbai, a city of 12 million people that is set to be the world's biggest by 2050. Already, 60% of its population lives in slums with such poor sanitation that there is only one toilet seat for every 600 people. The municipality is reluctant to build toilets for fear that it will encourage more migrants to come. "As if people come to shit," retorts the activist Sheela Patel in the movie. Quite. Most people come to work. Cities are basins of opportunity, and their citizens drive national economies. It is peculiar, then, how poorly cities reward their citizens for that contribution.
The film takes a clear line on what makes a city habitable. Why is Brasilia, for all its drama, inhospitable? Because it was designed with a bird's-eye view that left the poor mugs on the ground hiking across town beside a highway. The movie illustrates the catastrophe of designing cities for cars rather than people with the battle between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses – the saintly advocate of Greenwich Village's street life and the panto-villain masterplanner who scarred New York with his highways. These days the Big Apple is starting to atone for Moses's sins with public spaces such as the High Line. This new elevated promenade doesn't make up for the growing inequality that is turning Manhattan into an island for the rich, but it is a noble case of the city giving something back to its citizens.
Even more impressive is the way the former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa, changed the dynamic of the Colombian capital by creating a network of cycle lanes and a public bus service. In a city known for its crippling traffic, it is now the poorest – those without cars – who move the fastest. As Peñalosa points out, showboating on a mountain bike as he overtakes a car squishing through the mud: this is democracy in action. Only by prioritising pedestrians have cities rediscovered their vibrant centres. In the 1980s, by contrast, cities were hollowing out as the middle classes fled to the suburbs. Here the camera pans the suburban sprawl of Phoenix, all identical houses and driveways, as land use attorney Grady Gammage epitomises the selfishness of the American dream with the words "I like the way I live". Nowhere has that dream gone more wrong than in Detroit. The most powerful scene in the movie is an eerie train ride through the deserted city, now depopulated thanks to its dying car industry.
There we have the full spectrum of the problem: some cities are bursting at the seams while others are becoming ghost towns. Who has the answer? Is it Norman Foster with his Masdar eco-city in Abu Dhabi? Is it Rem Koolhaas with his behemoth of a headquarters for Chinese state television in Beijing? To its credit, the film is unequivocal that architects – especially starchitects – are not the solution. What happened when Brad Pitt rallied a group of well-meaning architect friends to help rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina? The city got an odd assortment of houses that look like they were parachuted in from Malibu sitting amid a sea of devastation. Not all that effective.
If there is a new orthodoxy in urban design, it is citizen participation. And Urbanized revels in this so-called "bottom up" approach. It depicts several cases of community engagement, from an energy measurement scheme in Brighton to a new pedestrian area in the South African township of Khayelitsha. It devotes a good chunk of time to the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, whose system of half-houses that residents complete themselves is often cited as a paragon of "participatory design". The idea is that citizens, not god-like architects and planners, are the solution to the urban question. And Hustwit knows just how effective people power can be: his movie was partly paid for through the crowd-funding site Kickstarter.
This aspect of the movie is very much in tune with the zeitgeist. 2011 is the year of people power after all, the year when across the world, from Tahrir Square to the streets of Santiago to Wall Street, citizens have been making themselves heard. Indeed, there are several protests featured in the film. The message is undoubtedly a positive one, and the focus on small-scale, tangible solutions is at pains to be uplifting. The only caveat is that at times this borders on the naive. Watching people plant community gardens in the abandoned lots of Detroit, or plaster New Orleans with stickers that let citizens have their say, creates a cosy feel-good factor, but the problem is scale. On one hand, favelas and shanty towns are emblematic of the tremendous capacity of people to look after themselves. But no amount of self-organisation is going to introduce running water and sewage to the favelas. That kind of infrastructure requires politicians, not just residents.
Perhaps that's where a film such as Urbanized can be useful. Undoubtedly there are limits to what can be said about cities in a one-and-a-half-hour documentary – for instance, maybe this notion that 75% of us will live in cities by 2050 is bogus, and that as the global economy falters so will urbanisation. But this is not the purview of films like Urbanized. Whatever the drawbacks of a mass medium when it comes to nuance, it is redeemed by its ability to reach a mass audience. The more people who see this movie the better. And the more politicians who see it – and are persuaded to look beyond the vested interests in front of them – the more powerful a tool Urbanized will be.
New homes must be fit for purpose, says leading architect
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 4, 2011
The new president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Angela Brady, wants to start a conversation on building better new homes
For Angela Brady, good design is a watchword. That means communicating its benefits on television, radio, at workshops for children, on public platforms and, in her new role, to the country at large.
The new president of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) has a Channel 4 series featuring architecture in six European cities behind her. Right now, her passion is the lamentable design of much of the new housing in England. She does not mince words, labelling buildings passing for detached homes as "Noddy boxes". It is a criticism she heard time and again during this year's party conference fringe meetings which outlined Riba's Case for Space campaign, a drive to persuade house-builders to raise their game as new homes become significantly smaller.
Those Riba events, titled Leaving Legoland, attracted several hundred at the three party conferences. "The strong criticism that came from the audience was: 'We're sick of these volume housebuilders, the Noddy box houses in cul-de-sacs all around the country. We have to drive to improve them. They're not built sustainably. They're tiny, cramped.' And they've got a fair point," says Brady.
"People will say housebuilders have got a monopoly because they've got the land. We're saying there hasn't really been an analysis of how we live, what spaces we need, since 1961. So we're starting the conversation. Let's ask what people want."
That is what Riba is proposing with a Future Homes Commission, comprising experts from a variety of fields. With the average new home in England 8% below the recommended minimum size (which can equate to a bedroom) the institute wants to find out what consumers want and need, then make recommendations to house builders and developers.
When I mention that architecture seems to be an afterthought in many new houses, Brady interjects: "If at all." It's a serious point because, she says, many homes are simply constructed off-the-shelf from manuals; even the once ubiquitous term "architect designed" has been ditched. She thinks it is symptomatic of a "let's get something cheap, cheerful and quick".
But Brady's criticisms go further than house design; she thinks the layout and planning of new estates leaves much to be desired. She spent a year on a working group organised by the former Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment – an organisation, she laments, needlessly scrapped by the government – looking at the country's post-war new towns. "There was some fantastic planning then," she enthuses. "Just compare that with suburban sprawl, ribbon development, these sort of executive cul-de-sacs you've got to drive to and you can't even buy a bottle of milk on the corner."
Better models
Brady adds: "We need to really re-examine the way we live and play, and we need to seek better models for the next 20 years. We've got huge constraints, if you look at the pressure on the environment, and I believe we are the custodians of [that]. People are relying on architects, planners, to come up with the right answers – how to make the green deal, make homes more zero carbon. As architects, we've got so much to offer. Governments ignore that at their peril."
Brady studied architecture in her native Dublin and sought early inspiration in her career with work spells in Denmark, and Toronto, before landing in London. In 1987, she set up an architecture practice with her husband Robin Mallalleu.
Brady is the second female president of Riba and has a record of activism in the organisation. She was a leading light in Architects for Change, promoting the progression of women alongside black and minority ethnic groups. "You can inspire children who would never think of going into architecture that it's a worthwhile career," she says.
In the contest for president, Brady believes that her activism proved the trump card. "One of the reasons I got voted in was because I was the only person pushing diversity in our profession. We're only 18% women and I'd love it if we could push it to 40%." Therein lies a dilemma because women, she says, constitute 37% of students in the country's 44 schools of architecture . Brady says it's not hard to discover why so many women subsequently leave. "They are the main child carers; take a year out, and it's quite hard to get in again."
Another passion is de-mystifying architecture – "taking it to the people" and involving them in the process. She believes the profession needs to broaden its appeal, and evangelise. "This is what's missing, how are we architects going to help deliver the 'localist' agenda of the government?" she enthuses. "That means helping people make local plans, when there isn't the revenue there in the support structure. Communicating with neighbourhood groups, helping them draw up local plans, it's a long-term strategy that we want."
Proper consideration
Why, she asks, plonk houses miles from anywhere without the services to support families? "We want to make sure there is some infrastructure in place before people come and put housing down, to know that housing has been given proper consideration, is going to fit in, and it's not going to be yet more ribbon development."
And why, she wonders, build exclusive estates and properties for one privileged sector of society while housing others in separate enclaves? "If we look to Denmark and Holland, for example, they live as a community coming together without an 'us and them', the rich and the poor. It's much more social," she explains.
Brady is enthralled by the "rich mix" of the capital's culture even after over two decades in London. She is appalled that plans for a cap of £26,000 on the amount of benefits one family can claim a year from 2013 will undermine that mix, driving the lower paid out of the capital. "People have a right to live in the communities where they were born," she says.
That aside, she insists that the compelling case for many more houses should not mean poor design. "We've got a huge housing crisis, a shortage of 250,000 units a year. And there should be more opportunity for better housing. We need to build more sustainably, to cut carbon, it's a matter of convincing the contractors to build for the long-term."
No easy task. She has two years as president to make her mark.
Curriculum vitae
Age 54.
Status Married, two teenage children.
Lives Finsbury Park, north London.
Education Holy Child school, Killiney, County Dublin; Dublin School of Architecture.
Career 1987–present: director, Brady Mallalieu Architects; 1983-86: architecture graduate in London; 1982-83: trainee architect, architectural practice in Toronto; 1981-82: scholarship to study co-housing in Denmark.
Public life 2011: elected Riba president for two-year term; 2010: joins Riba trust board; 2000: founder, Architects for Change group within Riba, campaigning for greater representation for women and ethnic minorities.
Interests Painting, designing glassware.
From the archive, 15 September 1962: American-style shopping centres?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 15, 2011
Originally published in the Guardian on 15 September 1962
No one who has visited the United States since the war can fail to be impressed by the shopping centres developed there during the last 15 years. The Co-operative Wholesale Society recently sent out a mission to investigate the discount houses, the latest phenomenon in the field of retailing: but its report attached greater importance and permanent significance to the shopping centres.
These should not be confused with the so-called shopping centres of Coventry and Birmingham, or with the one on which building has recently begun in London at the Elephant and Castle. They are really examples of piece-meal urban redevelopment whereas American shopping centres are planned suburban. They are new creations carved literally from soil, located from five to 15 miles from the downtown business district. The American shopping centre sets out to overcome the problem of traffic congestion and car parking; the English centres to which I have referred add to this problem. The American centres count their car park spaces by the thousand. Bergen Mall, New Jersey, which I visited in 1959, has room for 8,400 cars. Mr Cotton's city centre shopping and office development in Birmingham has none.
The building of American shopping centres has preceded or at least accompanied the development of the suburbs to which people have fled at a rapid rate since the war. This contrasts with Wythenshawe where, although small neighbourhood shopping centres were built at the same time as the houses, the principal shopping centre and the civic centre itself are still not completed nearly ten years after the greater part of the housing development has been finished.
America is still a land of open spaces while ours is a tight little island. We are rightly jealous of encroaching on our green belts and there is nowhere near the large industrial centres of population where we can afford to give up acres of land for car parks.
The redevelopment of our urban centres is the most urgent of our problems. The private developer has his part to play but he must conform to an over-all plan. Compulsory purchase powers should be used where necessary to enable comprehensive development of the central commercial district. Parking facilities should not be provided within this confined and expensive area but on the fringe of it with public transport connecting multi-storey car parks with the commercial centre. The twilight residential areas between the town centre and the "posh" suburbs must not be abandoned but be given new life.
RIBA condemns ‘shameful shoe box homes’ now built in Britain
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on September 14, 2011
Architects' report claims new three-bedroom houses are being constructed 8% smaller than guidelines advise
The Royal Institute of British Architects has criticised the "shoe box" sized homes now being built in Britain. Ahead of its inquiry into housing needs, RIBA claims that many of the new homes being constructed are too small for the number of people expected to live in them.
The institute says the average new three-bedroom house is 8% smaller than the recently adopted standard for homes in London, with floor space of 88 sq metres (947 sq ft). That is 8 sq metres short of the recommended space, the equivalent of a single bedroom.
One-bedroom properties, at an average of 46 sq metres, are 4 sq metres short of the recommended size, it adds in its recent report The Case for Space.
RIBA suggests that potential buyers are being short-changed and fobbed off with "shameful shoe box homes".
The London Housing Design Guide, adopted in the past year or so, lays down, among other features, minimum space standards for new properties, based on factors such as the average quantity of furnishings as well as number of occupants.
The RIBA inquiry, to be conducted by Sir John Banham, a former director-general of the CBI and former chair of the Tarmac group, is expected to report by next summer and will feed into the government's proposals to alter planning rules. The inquiry will seek the views of architects, builders, planners and purchasers.
Banham said: ""There are some fundamental issues that need to be addressed to ensure we have more of the right kind of affordable homes in villages, towns and cities … new thinking and financing approaches will be needed."
Anna Scott-Marshall, RIBA's head of policy, said that the organisation's Future Homes Commission would address issues such as housing costs, building quality, design and layout, including factors such as the amount of light in a property.
"We need to look into affordability and the mechanisms that need to be in place to enable people to buy," she said.
London riots: lessons for urban policy
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on August 15, 2011
At architecture journal bdonline, Wouter Vanstiphout's piece about the planning and related political implications of the riots begins in urban France:
In November 2005 French President Jacques Chirac welcomed back normality, after weeks of riots in the French banlieues. Instead of 1,000 to 1,500 vehicles being burnt every night, it went back to 163, and then kept to the normal 50 to 150. Every night of the year dozens of cars are being set on fire in the French banlieues and this had been going on for years on end.
What is normality to a French banlieue? It can mean that in the morning the elderly, women and children – and sometimes architects and historians looking for modernist housing projects from the sixties – can freely roam between the slabs and blocks, shop, play and look around.
After that the unemployed young men appear from their bedrooms and take up their positions near the entrances of the apartment blocks and on street corners. The elderly, women and children scuttle back home and the tourists leave altogether. The young men whistle and sign to each other, taunt and threaten the belated visitors and the semi-militarised police that buzz by in vans.
In many French banlieues, day turns into night around noon. Once, in one of these places, we approached a group of heavily armed policemen to ask for directions on the central square of a French housing estate.
They looked around nervously and said we shouldn't stand still for too long, because one of the gangs could start throwing rocks. They then said that we should really really be back in the historic city centre within the hour; it was 3pm. They themselves would be out of there at dusk, at the latest. This was between riots, this was normality.
I know of nowhere in London that matches that description, but can we rule such scenarios out of the capital's future? The comparison is inexact: "banlieue" means the urban outskirts, not the inner city areas where our riots began and mostly occurred. However, some fear that the effect of the government's housing and other benefit reforms will be to foster banlieue-type concentrations of social marginalisation in London's poorer suburbs, making the capital's current situation even worse.
Vanstiphout continues:
In many ways, the [French] riots were "just" spectacular worsenings of a chronic condition, extrapolations on a permanent crisis lived by millions, but neglected by tens of millions. Something became visible for a moment, and then disappeared again, as a bad dream. Behind the scenes however a mechanism is in place that contains the badness, that keeps it from spilling over again, while making it inevitable that it will...the banlieues and their inhabitants have been effectively abandoned...
One person did well out of it, though: Nicolas Sarkozy, who as a minister of the interior fanned the flames by going on television, standing shoulder to shoulder with the riot police and calling the rioters scum (racaille) who would be wiped away; then rode the wave of popular fear all the way to the presidency, from where he invited a battalion of international architects to give back France its glory, by designing futures of the French capital, "Le Grand Paris"....
Right now it has become very difficult to think of an urban politics, let alone an urban planning or design approach that would be able to take on the underlying problems of riots like the ones in the UK in a serious way.
I do not think that the reason is that politics and planning have realised their limitations to shape society. I think that the reason is that urban politics and hence planning and urban design are too often treating the city with ulterior motives, instead of actually working for the city itself. The city has become a tool to achieve goals, political, cultural, economic or even environmental [my emphasis].
Treating the city in this way means that we are constantly passing judgment on what the city should be, and who should be there, and what they should be doing, instead of trying to understand what the city actually is, who really lives there and what they are doing. This produces a dangerous process of idealisation, denying whole areas, whole groups, their place in the urban community, because they do not fit the picture.
Something there for politicians of all persuasions to reflect on. And there's more:
It is much too soon to say anything about the relationship between the gentrification of Brixton or the coming of the Olympics to London, and the current explosion of violent alienation. But if we imagine another kind of urban politics, one that does not take into account a marketable image of the city, but the reality of the entire community, it would probably have entirely different priorities.
The first would be to work against the ever sharpening inequality of London, making it one of the unfairest cities in Europe, in poverty levels, education, crime and other indicators.
But then the reality of urban riots is that they have always turned out to be the opposite of a learning experience for a city. Riots have nearly always resulted in politicians simplifying the problem even more, and citizens looking away even further.
After a riot, your average city will become more afraid, more authoritarian, more segregated, more exclusive and less tolerant. That is the real tragedy of the post-war western urban riot, first it shocks and terrifies us, then for a moment it makes us see flashes of the kind of city we should be working towards, which then fades away into the darkness. Back to normal.
A "normal" that is unacceptable.
Wouter Vanstiphout is a partner at Crimson Architectural Historians in Rotterdam and professor of Design & Politics at the Technical University Delft. He is currently researching the relationship between urban riots and urban planning. I'm very grateful to @amarkodio for bringing Vanstiphout's article to my attention.
The shape of Britain to come … as designed by Prince Charles
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on June 25, 2011
Westminster's Chelsea Barracks planning decision is the latest in a series of victories for the heritage school of HRH. And there are signs that his views are falling on friendly ears in government
Not so long ago it seemed that Prince Charles, architecture guru and scourge of modernists, was safely shut up in his box. He seemed finally to have listened to shadowy advisers telling him that it would be inappropriate to get involved in public wrangles. The public and political mood had shifted in favour of the new. Contemporary buildings – the Gherkin, for example – were popular. The Prince's old adversary Lord (Richard) Rogers had the ear first of Tony Blair and then of Ken Livingstone, and some version of his theories influenced the planning system.
Furious letters would still spew from the prince's desk, urging developers to sack architects he did not like, or ministers to save an old building that he did, but these were private, and often ignored. The days when he could have multi-million pound developments ripped up and redesigned were seemingly consigned to the era of Wham! and Brideshead Revisited.
Now, however, he is enjoying his greatest influence in two decades. Last week Westminster city council approved prince-backed plans for redeveloping Chelsea Barracks in London, two years after his intervention led to a previous plan, by Rogers, being abandoned. The classicist architects the prince favours are quietly busy producing new country houses for the rich, "urban extensions" to country towns, and rural and suburban housing developments. The government is paying the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment to advise local groups on planning their neighbourhoods. The government's localism bill, currently winding through parliament, is supposed to empower villages and small communities to draw up their own development plans. If it works as intended, the future built environment of Britain, outside the big cities, could be prince-flavoured.
The first version of the architectural prince was launched in 1984 when, invited to mouth platitudes to a dinner celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, he shocked his hosts by denouncing them. He famously called a proposed extension to the National Gallery a "monstrous carbuncle", though its architects Ahrends Burton and Koralek were then up-and-coming and, as it happened, noted for their skill with building in historic settings such as Keble College, Oxford. The prince's words dealt them a blow from which they never fully recovered. In further speeches he attacked other projects, and jumpy developers would then install architects, regardless of their ability or experience, blessed by the prince for their use of a classical style.
These architects would not always last the distance, being themselves replaced in due course by practices better able to deliver commercial projects. Often the effect of the Prince's actions was to delay development by many years, while developers worked the planning system to get the most they could out of the site. At Paternoster Square, next to St Paul's Cathedral, he had objected to an initial scheme partly on the grounds that it was too big and greedy. What was eventually built, much later, had a classical look but was even bigger. At London Bridge City, next to Tower Bridge, a prince-friendly, mock-Venetian proposal transmogrified into Norman Foster-designed grey glass blocks around what is now City Hall.
With the National Gallery, however, and some other sites, he got his way, while the mere thought of him could drive developers into a pre-emptive cringe, dressing up their blocks in columns and pediments in case they attracted his displeasure. Not that they were unhappy to do this – the prince captured a common mood, in the Thatcher years, of yearning for past glories and returning to supposedly traditional values. Architects, meanwhile, were still widely reviled for their actual and alleged failures in the 1960s, so their complaints at the prince's highhandedness got short shrift from the press. They objected that his actions were an abuse of his position, that he was ignorant and petulant, and that, while he was only too happy to launch attacks on others, he resolutely refused to engage in any kind of debate himself. But these objections did not get very far.
The prince had an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum, a book, a TV programme. He founded an architecture school based on the premise that there was an untapped hunger for learning architecture in the traditional way, and in 1994 he launched a magazine, Perspectives, promoting his views. In 1988 he commissioned the visionary urban theorist Leon Krier to produce a plan for developing Poundbury, an area of land outside Dorchester, Dorset, belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall. Krier had famously declared ,"I am an architect, therefore I do not build", meaning that the modern world was too benighted to produce good architecture. The prince managed to persuade him otherwise.
There were separate strands to his philosophy, not wholly intertwining. One was populist, arguing that most people liked old-looking buildings, so experts should not impose modernism against their wishes. Another was nostalgic, with a preference for English classical architecture of about 300 years ago. Another was mystical, arguing that there are deep harmonies in the universe which are reflected in the sort of buildings he liked.
Perspectives did not thrill the masses, and closed. Nor did students flock to the architecture school, which was restructured as the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, with a reduced emphasis on education. Meanwhile the prince's architectural court was subject to intrigues that would have delighted the Borgias. Fashion changed, architects became less hated, and a few more people than embittered professionals began to see that there was something wrong with the prince using his fame and status to intervene in debates which he possibly did not understand. Apart from Poundbury, the prince's influence seemed to shrink to the area around Buckingham Palace, where one of his pet architects, John Simpson, rebuilt the Queen's Gallery, and another, Liam O'Connor, designed the Commonwealth Memorial Gates as a reduced-scale version of Lutyens's monuments in New Delhi.
But Poundbury was his lifeline, and his biggest success. Here he was doing what he wanted with his own land rather than meddling in the affairs of others. Although Poundbury got the look – it is a medley of Georgian, Dorset cottage and pointy, Gothicky bits – it also embodied principles which went beyond his stylistic taste, and which were not so different from those of adversaries like Richard Rogers. It mixes uses, putting offices and workshops in among houses, rather than in separate zones. It mixes affordable housing with market housing, such that it is hard to tell the difference. It is built at higher density than typical suburbs, so that it consumes less land and encourages neighbourliness. It promotes pedestrian movement over driving.
Buyers liked it. It achieved above-average values, and properties appreciated. Its periphery is now a whirr of construction, as more and more homes are built to meet the demand to live there. Personally, it makes my flesh creep, with its winsome, confected quality, and with its paranoid insistence on conjuring a bygone world that never existed, which illusion is painfully punctured by the appearance of modern steel frames in the half-built buildings. As even one of the Prince's allies says: "You can't claim it is traditionally Dorset by any stretch of the imagination."
But I wouldn't live in Dorchester anyway, and I can see that it works, and that it is much better than the average housebuilders' wares. I can even see some charm in the winding lanes, now softened by well-established planting.
Similar ideas were applied on other Duchy of Cornwall properties, in places like Shepton Mallet and Midsomer Norton in Somerset. Meanwhile the foundation, repurposed as an advisory, thinktank sort of body, made itself more credible. Its chief executive, Hank Dittmar, was formerly a leading light of the American New Urbanism movement, which has been pumping out walkable, compact residential developments for some time. Its most famous work is Seaside, the holiday town in Florida where The Truman Show was shot. Under Labour the foundation talked the government-approved talk of sustainability, regeneration and public participation. It developed something called Enquiry by Design, where local residents and experts come together in workshops before plans for new development are completed: the idea is that local knowledge and wishes are incorporated into the final designs. The foundation won the attention of John Prescott, and advised on the planning of Upton, an extension of Northampton, on Poundbury-esque principles. Now, in Sunderland, Ayrshire, Swansea, Burnley and elsewhere, there are foundation-led plans in various stages of completion. The foundation has even been hired by the developers First Base, usually known for their use of contemporary design, to advise on a classical-looking development in a conservation area in Highbury, north London.
It has published a book called Tradition and Sustainability, and is building a prototype, called the Natural House, which aims to demonstrate that energy efficiency does not require modern-looking gadgets but can be achieved with something that looks like an approximation of an 1840s villa. The foundation has gone international, with projects in China, the Galapagos, and Haiti, the latter a plan in the heart of Port au Prince, which looks wildly optimistic in its serene orderliness.
The foundation apart, architects from the princely fold are doing well. Robert Adam, of Adam Architecture, has long been the most business-like of traditionalist architects and, having designed some projects for the Duchy of Cornwall, is now masterplanning an extension to Dover with a whopping 5,750 homes, and residential developments in Waterlooville and Aldershot. He also has a nice line in huge, brand new country houses, which he says reflects the fact that "London is a global city". His clients are "Russians, Indians, Middle Eastern: they want the English dream but they want to be able to do what they like with their house, which they can't do if it's old". Adam recently lost a planning inquiry into his enormous £20m Athlone House proposal in Hampstead, but has plenty more opportunities of a similar kind.
At Chelsea Barracks the prince had written a personal letter to the ruler of Qatar, as his family's property company Qatari Diar were owners of the site, urging him to abandon Richard Rogers's plans. His "heart sank" at the sight of what he called "a gigantic experiment with the very soul of our capital city". He punted an alternative scheme by Quinlan Terry, the doyen of modern classicists, and his son Francis. Ultimately the Terrys did not get the job, but Rogers was fired and a collaboration of Squire and Partners, Dixon Jones and the landscape architect Kim Wilkie, produced designs which aim to reproduce the virtues of Georgian and Victorian terraces and squares. This was a turning point, a moment of regime change. Lord Rogers's project would, if built, have been the fulfilment of years of campaigning and building influence with the likes of Ken Livingstone in order to realise his vision of the city. Its dumping, supported by Tories like the deputy mayor Kit Malthouse, marked the end of that particular era.
The Chelsea Barracks Action Group, made up of local residents, were vociferous opponents of the Rogers scheme, and were delighted with the prince's actions. Now, however, they are disappointed that a change of style has not changed the fact that the proposed housing blocks are up to 100 feet high. "They will be regarded in history as the beginning of the end of our gracious English city," says the chair of the group, Georgine Thorburn, using prince-like language. She also says that the Qataris have "duped" the council. Alas for the group, unless Boris Johnson can be persuaded to intervene, her words come too late. In the latest version of prince-ism, the pragmatists have won over the mystics and true believers, which means that, as the prince himself inclines to the latter camp, his own input is diluted. His recent contribution to the mystic cause, a book called Harmony, failed to set the world on fire. Quinlan Terry, always the purest of the classicists, is doing perfectly well with country houses, buildings for Downing College, Cambridge, and occasional commercial work, but he is not shaping whole towns.
The Prince's Foundation, according to Elliot Lipton of developers First Base, "is very flexible. It has no preconceptions, which isn't what you might expect if you listened to their leader. They're very good at understanding real world trade-offs."
The foundation gets into bed with developers such as Wimpey in Westoe, South Shields, with the result that they achieve an arguably better version of usual Wimpey fare, rather than a radical alternative. Upton, the extension to Northampton, as Hank Dittmar acknowledges, is a partly compromised version of the original intentions. By being more pragmatic, the foundation gets less distinctive: plenty of others have put forward energy-efficient houses, and public consultation, and walkable, high-density communities. These ideas are "sort of the norm, mainstream", says Robert Adam. Works outside the princely sphere, like the Greenwich Millennium Village, and the Accordia development in Cambridge, put them into practice.
What remains distinctive is the look, the preference for a randomised variety of traditional styles, with Georgian and Country Cottage foremost among them. This is a source of strength, as a lot of people like this – according to Robert Adam, 70% prefer old-looking buildings to new. The competition, in the form of volume housebuilders' standard product, is largely poor. In combination, these factors are effective when it comes to reducing outrage at controversial plans, which, with continuous pressure of development in town and country, will continue to appear. Poundbury itself is the expansion of Dorchester into green fields, and many locals still object to it on those grounds. The Dover expansion, as Adam recognises, met strong opposition on the grounds of its size. The switch of styles got Chelsea Barracks through the planning system, to Georgine Thorburn's dismay.
Under the localism bill, communities and villages will have the power to draw up their own plans for development, in ways that benefit them. There is scepticism as to whether this will really happen, but if it does, communities will face the central problem of rural planning: how to reconcile the pressures for new development, the high values that housing can yield, the need for affordable new homes, and the preservation of villages. The models offered by the Prince's Foundation, with a combination of public consultation, and a style that tries to disguise that change has happened, will be attractive. Even if localised planning does not work, the palliative effect of traditionalist design will still be in demand.
I have long believed that the prince should keep his mouth shut rather than use his inherited status to give weight to views greater than his wisdom alone would merit. He should not change policies, lives and careers with the force of his name. Sometimes he might be right, sometimes wrong, but that is not the point. In 2009 the RIBA, ever masochists, invited him back for their 175th birthday. Sitting through his talk I felt growing rage at his tendentious nonsense – the demonstrably untrue statement that modernist architects were nature-haters, for example – and at the fact that no one was allowed to challenge him directly. He sallies forth to attack others then immediately takes shelter behind the dignity of his position. I also find depressing the idea that a modern house can be no better than a half-convincing photocopy of an old one, or that, as we live in a time when large windows are easy to achieve, we should build small, mean ones, as in Poundbury, just because they look old.
Yet he is entitled to do what he likes, within the constraints applied to any landowner, with his own property, and he and his associates have come up with ways of building new rural developments that have a certain logic. The range of alternative models is not abundant, and architects and developers who would do better should study the reasons for the appeal of the prince's way. As things stand, Poundbury is a glimpse of the future.
The Shard: A symbol of towering ambition
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 30, 2011
It's the dream of a former rag-trade baron, designed by Renzo Piano and financed by Qatar. And the Shard, even in its incomplete state, is already dominating London's skyline
It's a punt, a hustle, a gambit, a try-on. It is a trophy of punk urbanism, dressed by a Pritzker-winning architect. It owes its life to a motley band that includes a socialist mayor, Qatari royalty and a developer once treated as a bit of a joke. At one time, it looked like a fantasy or a stunt but, now rising fast next to London Bridge station, the Shard is undeniably there. It is the tallest building in Britain, even in its far-from-finished state. It is fast becoming London's, and the country's, most conspicuous monument.
Its progenitor is Irvine Sellar, who first made his name as a baron of boutiques in the 1960s rag trade, before moving into property and going spectacularly bust in the early 90s. When, in 2000, he revealed the tower that would become the Shard, he was better known for developing business units in Warrington and Portsmouth and he had limited experience of buildings over three storeys. The big, established property companies doubted almost everything about him: his expertise, his backing, even whether his luxuriant hair was really all his own.
His site was a cramped piece of space next to London Bridge station, then occupied by a brownish, 1970s structure, the 24-storey Southwark Towers. The location was a poor relation of the City, just across the Thames, but it was one favoured by the London Plan, drawn up under the then mayor Ken Livingstone. This encouraged tall buildings on sites next to large interchanges, on the grounds that it would concentrate people as close as possible to public transport.
The London Plan also said that tall buildings should be well designed, whatever that might mean. Sellar brought in Renzo Piano, the suave Genovese architect who designed the Pompidou Centre with Richard Rogers, and, more recently, the New York Times Tower. Piano had a reputation for refinement and craftsmanship and an aura of fame. He replaced the project's less glamorous first architects, Broadway Malyan, although they were retained to assist with the project.
Piano declared that his design was inspired by old pictures of church spires and ships' masts on the river. It would, he said, "have a nice light presence". At the bottom it would "melt with the City" and at the top it would "come to almost nothing". "Towers belong to our imagination," he said, "and if a new one can fit with the dream of people it will be a success." He said it would be a "shard of crystal", with angled planes in a special kind of glass, that would catch the changing light.
Unusually, it would not just be a stack of office floors, but a "vertical village", including a hotel, public viewing deck and luxury apartments near the top, with a "radiator" at the very pinnacle which would catch cooling breezes as part of the project's effort to be sustainable. The tower's height was to be 310 metres.
The Shard got planning permission from the London Borough of Southwark, but then had to survive a public inquiry, which examined whether it interfered unacceptably with views of St Paul's Cathedral from Hampstead Heath. It was decided it did not. John Prescott, then the minister in charge of planning, declared that he was "satisfied that the proposed tower is of the highest architectural quality".
Ken Livingstone was also an enthusiastic supporter, keen to set a precedent for the many towers he wanted built in London, and he promised that Transport for London would move its offices there, in a bid to make the project more viable. Even so, it seemed unlikely that such an expensive and complex work could be built, especially when the financial wind changed. Many expected Sellar to sell the site and pocket the profit that came with getting planning permission.
It was saved by the Qataris who, as part of a strategy of acquiring glamorous London developments, bought an 80% stake in 2008. And now it is appearing, with that quality of unarguable but implausible fact that often accompanies skyscrapers. The offices, flats, hotel and viewing gallery will all be there. Its glass currently looks more prosaic than the magical stuff Piano promised and the tower doesn't look quite as light and melting as he suggested, or as shimmery as the computer images showed, although final judgment should be reserved until the whole form is there. The main thing Piano has brought, that firms like Broadway Malyan have not, is single-mindedness, consistency and confidence. This building doesn't dither.
It does indeed dwarf St Paul's when seen from Parliament Hill, especially when captured with a telephoto lens, but whether it is a stab in the heart of London's scenery is debatable. I don't favour the random desecration of views, but this one was already more haphazard and compromised than most. If you peer at the distant dome with the big spike behind it, it's uncomfortable, but not to a degree that should be outlawed. Many of the heath's strollers, snoggers and dogwalkers will not give a second glance to this architectural knifing dimly visible through the haze.
What the Shard does do is change the sense of scale in the whole centre of the City. It's as if a zoom-out button has been pressed, making hefty works like Tate Modern and Tower Bridge look a bit smaller. This is not the first time such a shift has happened: Inigo Jones's Banqueting House, which now looks petite, once dwarfed its neighbours and buildings such as St Pancras station and Harrods led previous jumps in scale. The Shard happens to be the biggest yet. It is a visitation from a hyperverse where different dimensions apply and also different orders of money. In this, the Shard resembles One Hyde Park, another creation of the coalition of Livingstone's politics, Qatari finance and eminent hi-tech architects.
It is a symbol, but of what? Not of an ideal or a heroic event, obviously, but not exactly of the inexorable march of economics, either. It is not a pure expression of land values or of profit-and-loss calculations. It's more eccentric than that, something that popped through a gap in London's wonky, many-layered planning system, where opinion and discussion counts for more than clear rules, and where many years and hundreds of thousands of pounds are spent deliberating arbitrary questions of taste. It is the crystallisation of a series of deals, involving players from Cricklewood, Hull, Southwark, the Gulf and Italy.
If anyone had sat down to plan the most sensible distribution of towers in London, they would not have come up with the Shard, standing alone on a crowded site in a location that is still a bit rackety, with little apparent relation to the things around it. But no one plans London like this and it's unlikely to happen any time soon. Meanwhile, the startling, part-graceful, part-clunky, impressive, slightly nutty Shard is a true monument to the city that made it.
Spice up the suburbs with the help of the localism bill | Jonathan Glancey
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 7, 2010
Dull cul-de-sacs may benefit from local people making planning decisions. But such power requires education too
In 1986, Bill Heine, a local radio presenter, stuck a giant fibreglass shark through the roof of his 19th-century terraced house in Headington, Oxfordshire. Designed by the artist John Buckley, the 25ft sculpture caused as much fuss locally as the great white shark in Jaws had done in cinemas around the world a decade earlier. The local authority wanted it removed – to a swimming pool. But residents – although there was a lively debate – came to like the audacity of the shark at No 2 New High Street, and became its champions. The issue was taken up at government level. Finally, in 1992, the Tory government decreed that "any system of local [planning] control must make some small space for the dynamic, the unexpected, the downright quirky." The shark had been reprieved. Local residents had won the day.
Bill Heine still lives in the house and the shark, getting a bit long in its several rows of teeth, has since been restored. I wonder what might happen to such houses and streets up and down the country now that the government has announced that homeowners in England and Wales will be able to build extensions, extra storeys and conservatories without the need for traditional planning permission?
Will we see a school of shark roofs in Oxfordshire? Might someone in Yorkshire want to add an extension in the guise of a giant batter pudding? Will there be attics shaped like bottles of Newcastle Brown in Washington New Town? Could entire suburbs end up looking like scenes from Dr Seuss drawings, or from images drawn from Noddy, Mon Oncle, Mad Max or In the Night Garden? Why not? It might be fun.
Many of our new suburbs and cul-de-sac estates are so relentlessly dull that a bit of cheering up is surely in order. Why shouldn't your neighbour have a fibreglass shark crashing through his roof; why can't the people over the fence build an extension in the guise of a miniature Taj Mahal? If Frank Gehry can get away with the gloriously outrageous forms of the Bilbao Guggenheim, why shouldn't Mr and Mrs Jones at No 94 erect a pint-sized replica of Norman Foster's Gherkin as a granny annexe in their patch of garden?
Inevitably, there are also drawbacks to allowing local people to decide on local planning issues. The question of heritage is an obvious one, although there is no reason to doubt that conservation areas will stay just that, and that in the future it will be just as difficult to add a new chimney pot to your Grade II*-listed house as to win permission to stick a stainless steel killer whale through the thatched roof of your venerable timber-framed cottage. No, the real problems might come when neighbours have axes to grind with one another. Or, when the local consensus is to ensure that absolutely no development whatsoever gets the green light.
Call me an optimist, but I have a feeling that if people find ways of sitting around together and talking intelligently through local planning proposals, something good might come out of this latest government initiative. Planning matters do require mature discussion, so perhaps this is one sensible way of getting people together to work through local initiatives and, yes, to play a part in a wider society, to think of others' needs and desires as well as their own.
My concern is less that local communities lack the will to compromise over building matters, but that we lack the expertise to do so. We need to learn a lot more, collectively, about architecture, design, planning and conservation before we can be sure that we are talking sensibly, generously and imaginatively. If only these subjects, or areas of interest, were taught at school.
There is no question that our planning system needs to be overhauled. To make it work effectively, it would be good to have a new breed of small, purposeful local authority architect and planning offices replacing what we have at the moment. These offices could act as guides to local neighbourhoods ensuring local people were as well-informed as they might be before taking decisions that could have a major impact on their homes and where they live.
There is a long way to go before our planning system begins to work as well as it should, and a shift to local control must be accompanied by a commitment to raise the standards of architectural and planning debate at both national and local level. A few more sharks, or other shocks, along the way, though, will be just fine, so long that is, as your neighbours are happy to swim in the same artistic waters as you.
Response: Labelling new properties ‘Noddy boxes’ is simply unfair
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 19, 2011
We have to build the homes the country needs, at prices our customers can afford
The recent interview with Angela Brady, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, (Sense of space, Society, 5 October) made me wonder whether Riba has lost touch with the realities of housing delivery in a desperate attempt to chase headlines.
Brady labels "buildings passing for detached homes as 'Noddy boxes'". The article states: "It is a criticism she heard time and again during this year's party conference fringe meetings which outlined Riba's Case for Space campaign, a drive to persuade house-builders to raise their game as new homes become significantly smaller."
Representatives of the Home Builders Federation didn't hear this phrase used at the conferences, but we did hear how Riba's Future Homes Commission will "find out what consumers want and make recommendations to house builders"– it seems that Riba didn't ask customers these questions before they criticised the way new homes are currently built.
That contrasts with house builders who, in difficult economic circumstances, actually have to build and sell the homes the country needs. Our members are constantly talking to their customers and building the homes that they want at prices they can afford – if they didn't they would soon go out of business.
Our latest survey showed that 84% of new home buyers are satisfied or very satisfied with their new home, with 86% saying they would recommend their builder to a friend. The people who matter, those who buy and live in the homes – rather than those commenting on the industry – are happy. And if house builders, who are in stiff competition with each other, could easily build bigger houses that customers would prefer, why don't they?
Land supply is the key. For decades the planning system has not delivered enough land for the number of homes our population needs.
As Brady says, there is a compelling argument for new homes: "We've got a huge housing crisis, a shortage of 250,000 units a year. And there should be more opportunity for better housing." If indeed she does recognise this, she would be well advised to focus Riba's efforts on supporting us as we push for a robust planning system that will deliver the land for that to happen.
Land supply, viability, the burden of regulation, local authority design and sustainability demands – these are the issues that matter.
In private, Riba staff have constantly assured us that they want to work constructively with our industry. Unfortunately their continued insistence on using provocative statements about "Noddy boxes" is deeply discouraging.
Home builders, who all work with architects on the frontline, are struggling to cope with the economic malaise and credit drought, a battle over the new planning system and hefty environmental regulation. Riba must engage in the real issues – then we'll be happy to work with the Future Homes Commission.
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