Housing and the Form of the Future City
Bruce Irwin, Dinah Bornat
Unit trip: Granada, Spain. Project site Vauxhall, London.
London is not building enough housing to meet existing or future
requirements. Yet around 70% of London’s built form was constructed (even if
not currently occupied) as housing. Housing is our most pressing current
architectural need and the design, form and shape of housing our most powerful
and direct tool for determining the shape of our future communities.
Constraints on the design of urban housing are keenly felt and seemingly
binding: cultural preferences for ‘houses’ rather than ‘housing’; green-space
objectives; technological, spatial and financial constraints on the extension of
transit systems; political inheritances that constrain or prohibit the power of
local councils to directly achieve housing goals; models of housing finance
that favour investors over occupants while producing strangely unliveable
housing stock.
Unit D is exploring this territory. We are focusing our work on
the no-man’s land behind (from the river) the rail viaduct between Waterloo and
Vauxhall. This area offers opportunities to address some of the transit issues
(it is Zone 1, with rail, tube, cycle links), and some of the spatial issues
(un-dense for Zone 1), while provoking, perhaps, a direct reaction contrary to
the current dominant model of housing construction. The area also provokes an
examination of the difficulties and possibilities in urban housing- working in
a community with both a day and a night economy, and sitting adjacent to a
major infrastructural figure- the viaduct.
Working on ‘in-fill’ and on un-built sites, Unit D will propose
housing as we think it might be: hopeful, playful, generous, urban, and
lasting.
