Days Decades

Hours

Months Years

HOME ECONOMICSFive new models for domestic life

British Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2016

THE HOUSE IS A MACHINE FOR CAPITAL ACCUMULATION

IN ALL STATISTICAL PROBABILITY YOU WILL NEVER OWN A HOME

IN ORDER TO FEEL ADEQUATE YOU CANNOT STOP CONSUMING

SHORT-TERM PROFIT TRUMPS LONG-TERM INVESTMENT

CLOSING THE FRONT DOORHAS BECOME A SYMBOLIC ACT

NOTHING EXISTS OUTSIDE THE SPHERE OF CAPITALISM

WITHOUT UNPAID DOMESTIC LABOUR THE FAMILY CEASES TO EXIST

THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE MORTGAGE

STANDARD ALGORITHMS PRODUCE STANDARDISED PEOPLE

THE SHARED HOME PROMOTESAGGRESSIVE ECONOMIC COMPETITION

IT IS MORE EXPENSIVETO BE POOR THAN RICH

ENDLESS ACTIVITY DISGUISES ITS OWN MEANINGLESSNESS

WE ARE ALWAYS CONNECTED YET FOREVER APART

YOUR IDENTITY IS THE SUM OF YOURACCESS TO INFORMATION

THE HOME IS A FACTORYFOR NEW CONSUMERS

FINANCIAL CRISISIS THE NEW NORMAL

Home Economics #1–16, 210×297mm, OK-RM and Matthieu Lavanchy, 2016

HOME ECONOMICSFive new models for domestic life

British Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2016

HOME ECONOMICS proposes new models for the front line of British architecture: the home.

HOME ECONOMICS is the science of household management. It intervenes directly in the architecture of the home, responding to changes in life and social norms through the design of the everyday.

HOME ECONOMICS asks urgent questions about the role of housing and domestic space in the material reality of familial life.

HOME ECONOMICS is a truly collaborative proposal challenging financial models, categories of ownership, forms of life, social and gender power relations.

HOME ECONOMICS understands that in housing there can be no metaphors.

Home Economics presents five new models for domestic life curated through five periods of time. These timescales!–!Hours, Days, Months, Years and Decades!–!correspond to how long each model is to be called ‘home’. The projects appear as full-scale 1:1 interiors in the British Pavilion, displaying architectural proposals as a direct spatial experience.

The front line for architecture in Britain today is not only a crisis of housing, but a crisis of how we live. Over the past decades our patterns of life have changed profoundly. These include new social power relations, family structures and gender roles, as well as the consequences of rising wealth inequality, mass migration and an ageing population. New technologies have displaced how, where, and when we work and play, while prompting questions about surveillance and privacy.

All these factors, and others, have put immense pressure on the British home. Each model in Home Economics is a proposition driven by the conditions imposed on domestic life by varying periods of occupancy. They each address different facets of how we live today!–!from whether we can prevent property speculation, to whether sharing can be a form of luxury rather than a compromise.

These models have been developed in an intensely pragmatic way, working with architects, developers, artists, photographers, writers, fashion designers, and financial institutions. It is the first exhibition on architecture to be curated through time spent in the home, and is dedicated to exploring alternatives to conventional domestic architecture.

Life is changing; we must design for it.

FOREWORDThe Spaces is proud to be the publisher of Home Economics, a book that asks us to reimagine our cities, and consider the spaces we inhabit in relation to the time spent there!–!rather than their socioeconomic status or proximity to an urban centre.

Exploring new ways to live and work is the driving impetus behind The Spaces, a digital publication that showcases those spaces around the world that are pushing boundaries!–!and the people who are changing how we live. Among these we would consider the talented trio of curators behind Home Economics.

We share a common vision: that life is changing, and we must design for it. As the curators state in their introduction, “new technologies have displaced how, where and when we work and play.” As a result, a brave new world of possibility for the frontline of British architecture has emerged, posing questions such as, “can sharing be a form of luxury rather than a compromise?”

This book, like the exhibition itself, is a truly collaborative work that engages with the world beyond architecture!–!including contributions by artists, fashion designers, photographers and critical writers!–! to inspire us to reconsider the spaces we spend time in, and our lives, anew.

Mark WadhwaFounder, The Spaces

PREFACEThis book is published alongside the

exhibition Home Economics, commissioned by the British Council for the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. In recent years we have treated the British Pavilion as an opportunity for research and for creating debate that might influence the future course of British architecture. Since 2012 the exhibition has been commissioned through an open competition, and in 2014 we created the Venice Fellowships!–!opportunities for young architects and students to conduct research alongside the exhibition while spending a month in Venice during the Biennale.

The subject of the design of the home, proposed by the curators Shumi Bose, Jack Self and Finn Williams, is one of the most pressing and challenging of our time. Often approached as a matter of function, lifestyle or personal taste, the configuration and interior architecture of the home is rarely treated as a serious design challenge. The curators have set out to re-write the brief for a home by considering the way we live through the prism of time. Through a series of acute observations about changes to family life, finance and technology they have arrived at an original way of re-thinking the familiar. The result is a highly intelligent and engaging exhibition, with a sense of humour that belies the challenging nature of the subject.

The curators declare: ‘life is changing; we must design for it’. Their approach easily matches the aspirations of Biennale director Alejandro Aravena. His biennale theme, ‘Reporting from the Front,’ emphasises action over commentary; success stories rather than critiques of failure.

Having selected a fascinating group of designers to respond to their brief of a home designed around time, the curators have tested the proposals on industry advisers from the development, leisure and finance sectors. In contrast to the low aspirations of much socially engaged architectural practice, which often dodges any sort of architectural proposition, the curators of Home Economics want the very best for the householders of the future. I salute them.

Vicky RichardsonCommissioner, British Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2016

11 INTRODUCTION

23 HOMESICKNESS Eddie Blake25 KEEPING UP APPEARANCES Tom Dyckoff28 THE HOUSING CRISIS IN ELEVEN GRAPHS Neal Hudson34 IT DOESN’T PAY TO WORK Aditya Chakrabortty38 THE HOUSE-HOME Mark Cousins41 HOW IS THE HOME CHANGING 43 THE WAY WE LIVE Verity-Jane Keefe50 BEYOND ERGONOMICS Martti Kalliala52 HOUSING BY STANDARDS Finn Williams

55 EXHIBITION

131 ENDNOTES

HOURSJack Self with Finn Williams and Shumi Bose

MONTHSDogma and Black Square

DAYSÅyr

YEARSJulia King

DECADESHesselbrand

71

83

95

119

107

At least two thirds of new homes in the UK are not designed by an architect at all. (page 52)

At the current rate of house building it will take 700 years to replace London’s existing housing stock. (page 52)

Bureaucracy is the real architect of the contemporary British home. (page 54)

Our current economic model makes mass ownership impossible in the long run. (page 81)

The future is always forced to occupy the spaces of the past, even if it refuses to acknowledge or engage with them. (page 93)

If London had the same density today as it did in 1815, it could accommodate nearly 35 million people. (page 115)

1 in 3 children born in Britain today will live to 100. (page 129)

SUMMARY

Homes in the south-east of England earn more money than most of the people who live in them. (page 23)

The feeling of disempowerment is palpable in the shared rented kitchens around the country. (page 24)

Land is a finite commodity!–!yet through its perpetual sale and resale it is able to produce infinite wealth. (page 26)

The cost of renting means many households need state assistance or to share with others to lower costs sufficiently. (page 29)

Britain is being defined down, so that an entire national economy is reduced to little more than a bet on London. (page 34)

A city that doesn’t want to house so many of its people is an economy that has no home for them. (page 35)

Britain outperforms the rest of the G7 even while the average worker earns less in real terms than they did before the banking crash. (page 37)

The domestication of animals included the domestication of humans. (page 39)

Far from being ‘a haven from a heartless world’, the home has become the central basis for the administrative state. (page 40)

The home might be one our most meticulously maintained normalcy fields. (page 51)

11

INTRODUCTION

At the core of Home Economics is the idea of the architectural model. This should not to be confused with a maquette (sometimes called a scale model), or the architectural project. While the project is conceived as a singular design for a specific location, the model is a template that can be used repeatedly to make an unlimited number of buildings. Depending on the precision of the design template, a model might produce nearly identical buildings (like the terrace house) or create something different every time (like the villa). The model is a set of instructions that generate typologies. It is the exemplar. The architectural project, as a unique work, is one interpretation of those instructions. It is the example. From the five Classical orders to Le Corbusier’s five points for a new architecture, the model is an attempt at the universal. Where the architectural project often strives to be unique, the successful model is ubiquitous!–!the more it is imitated the stronger it becomes. The power of the model when applied to housing is its ability to systemically alter the built environment, our familial structures, and forms of life.

Why do we want to redesign the home? What needs to change about how we live today? Our homes are the locus of all our personal and social desires, and the origin of social convention. The home is the very definition of the status quo, which makes it the atomic block for social change. To speak of the British home today is to speak of unaffordable rent and an acute housing shortage. But it is also at the heart of national discussions about wage stagnation, crippling levels of personal debt, precarious living and working conditions, gender inequality, the impact of perpetual austerity, and the general rise of a low-paid workforce. Britain is a nation whose wealth is more polarised now than at any other time in its history, and this situation is tied closely to the state abdicating responsibility for housing to the private sector. Moreover, the housing shortage has fuelled a feedback loop of intense real estate speculation and capital accumulation that has endangered family formation and basic social security.

Britain is experiencing a period of intense change. New technologies continue to transform how we think about labour, identity, and privacy. A renewed public debate about social and gender equality is overturning traditional preconceptions about family structures and power roles. What remains of the home’s relationship to its local community has been severely weakened by migratory lifestyles (both voluntary and otherwise). Meanwhile, the UK’s political backdrop is one of reactionary factionalism, virulent nationalism and popular conservativism. This radical social change is as much concerned with a crisis in our forms of life as a crisis of our housing supply. The container for those forms of life

1312

Home Economics!–!many of the instinctive judgements that accompany the dominance of space have been exposed and then rejected. An architect would normally design through categories like typology, tenure, location, cultural context, socioeconomic status of the end user. Instead, Home Economics is structured around five familiar time periods: hours, days, months, years, and decades. Looking through the lens of time exposes the fundamental processes that lie behind the production of the home as a critical field for design. For example, property speculation could be a concern for any type of home. But capital appreciation in a home occupied for a lifetime is fundamentally different from the popular narrative of ‘homes under the hammer’ being bought, renovated and flipped for a quick profit. Consequently, speculation is best resisted through years rather than decades.

Similarly, the issue of how to promote intergenerational communities has previously been approached through over- and under-occupancy of different typologies. There is a body of literature and statistics that reveal so-called ‘empty nesters’ with surplus capacity!–!often retired or elderly couples still living within large family homes. At the other end of the spectrum there is a corresponding overcrowding, where younger occupants are rammed into smaller properties!–!often students living in shared households in urban centres.

Conventional wisdom is only able to address the problem by considering available space and land usage at any given moment in time. One outcome of this thinking is to solve the imbalance by relocating the elderly (typically into retirement villages) to create more available space for the young. The obvious downside to this strategy is the separation of the elderly from their community networks and the alienation this entails. When the same issue is approached through a filter of time, it reveals that this condition is primarily a problem pertaining to the question of durability and adaptability of use. Thus, the question becomes how to design homes to accommodate any age group or family structure, eliminating the necessity for movement. When we design with time, we prioritise universal human needs.

It is enough to ask: What does it mean to be at home for a few months? And how does that differ from decades or hours? What does it mean to design first with time instead of space? The Western tradition of architecture has for the last century been trying to apply ideas of industrial ergonomic efficiency into the design of the home. When we draw a plan we measure out every imagined activity and find a space for it, inserting every piece of furniture as if all possible activities were happening in the home at once. The main difficulty with this way of designing is its inevitable future inflexibility.

is the home. It must be said that this is not Britain’s first housing crisis, and it won’t be its last. Artificial shortfall in housing supply is an intrinsic quality of capitalist property systems. And while the social changes taking place today are notably extreme, every generation faces more or less the same obligation to reinvent society and its traditions afresh. In this sense, there is nothing specifically new about the world we have inherited!–!the front line of British architecture (and society in general) has always been the ideology of the home.

Housing (as opposed to the home) is perpetually in short supply because our economic system of ownership pursues two opposing demands simultaneously. Capitalism seeks to drive down wages on the one hand, while maximising profit from rent and property appreciation on the other. Human societies cannot operate without a large source of inexpensive labour. Under feudalism this would have been primarily indentured, or free. Under capitalism, which attempts to monetise everything, this produced an industrial working class of wage labourers. But now, under neoliberalism, this group has been compelled into new forms of freelance and ‘gig’ employment. As a class it encompasses a huge swathe of British society, from migratory and zero-hour workers to the well-educated ‘creative classes’. This class expansion is commensurate with an aggressive wealth redistribution programme executed through the taxation system, which acts to polarise society. Since land and property values are based on rate of return, speculators have little incentive to consider the housing requirements of people on lower incomes. Where Home Economics differs from discussions of housing shortages and class relations is in tackling housing needs through the design of domestic life. The proposals of the exhibition acknowledge the intractable nature of the housing crisis; though this does not mean they abandon the struggle.

Home Economics aspires to be at once timely and timeless. It strives to present an analysis of the era we live in, and expand the discourse of architecture. At the same time, any work that attempts to become too much of its own time will very quickly lose relevance. In order to make a proposal that has a lasting value, a rigorous understanding of the historical forces that have shaped this epoch is vital. Home Economics is the first exhibition on architecture to be curated through time spent in the home. This involves inverting the conventional design relationship in which spatial dimensions are always considered more important than temporal ones. This simple move to preference time over space as the primary design driver has had unprecedented implications for the architectural models in

1514

Functionalism is the design of space around specific ergonomic activities, and rationalism is the use of impartial spatial relationships to achieve general conditions of space. Through focusing on five distinct temporal periods, Home Economics has found that by designing through time, we can overturn the functionalist perspective in Western architecture and reinstate a rationalist understanding of the dwelling.

The home is a subject that concerns everyone, not just architects. And while the models and research underpinning Home Economics are most applicable to the world of architecture, from the beginning it was essential that the subject matter be accessible and inclusive of a wider audience. Architectural drawings are specialised, professional forms of communication!–!not everyone can read a plan. Our ambition was to create a format that presented the domestic in a legible way. We recognise that our audience, on the whole, are not interested in complex explanations or theoretical arguments. Rather, we wanted to find a means to engage the visitor directly, through their experience of the home.

Like the plan, section, or elevation, the maquette (not to be confused with the architectural model mentioned above) is a tool for the representation of space. And like a sketch or a measured drawing, it can be either detailed and complex, or rapid and schematic. In every case the maquette is a miniaturisation, and the physical limitations of its scale demand some abstraction. A maquette forces its maker to prioritise information; it is neither possible nor desirable to include every minute detail.

For example, the postwar galley kitchen – precisely delineated for the optimisation of food preparation by a single person (most often the housewife) – is incapable of accommodating multiple people engaged in diverse, simultaneous activities. As social norms have shifted, with cooking now often treated as a shared leisure activity, this functionalist approach to the kitchen leads to redundancy. Another example would be the dimensions of a standard double bedroom: half a century ago a married couple in twin beds would not have been considered unusual. Today, the double bed has become so ubiquitous that any other arrangement (except in elderly partnerships where reproduction is assumed to no longer be a factor) appears odd; indeed, the double bed as the focus for the household is a requirement of UK bedroom space standards. The implicit moral assertion of this model is that the family is by default comprised of two adults sharing a place to sleep. This gives the family little choice about how to arrange their furniture, or how to structure their interpersonal relationships, and it tacitly enforces a very particular power relation and social structure.

If we look beyond this Western conception of space as dominant over time, there are many alternatives. In Japan for example, building plans are frequently drawn without including any furniture at all. To a Western gaze these empty squares of enclosed space suggest that nothing is programmed to take place in these environments. On the contrary, the Japanese room is conceived as containing different activities through time, and it is not possible to draw a single configuration. Lightweight furniture and ample storage transforms the room into a bedroom at night, a study during the day and a dining room in the evening. None of these uses impose their form on any other; they exist in parallel and autonomously. This is the design of universal space, in which time takes primacy.

How Britain spends time in the home each day

Media usage* 14h7mSleep 8h21mEmployment 2h54mHousework 2h22m excl. childcare Social life 1h22mSocialising with 50m friends and family

Hobbies 30mChildcare 24mReading 24mPersonal care 21mCooking and washing up 20mStudy 16mUnspecified 14mWashing clothes 8m

*Translates to 8h41m of media usage in real time, achieved through simultaneous delivery (‘second screens’). Only 3h40m of this period is devoted to television (divided evenly between live TV, catch-up, digital and on-demand)

Proportion of households under-occupying

Proportion of under-occupiers by age group

Older personhouseholds

27%

Other households

Hou

sing

cos

ts a

s %

of i

ncom

e

0%10

2030

4050

60

Older person householdsOther households

48%52%

57%

1716

The Japanese floor contains multiple uses through time, rather than through the space of the plan

The first ergonomic kitchen, 1926 by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky

Donald Judd’s Cobb House interior is not based on optimised functions

The exhibition design of Home Economics is conceived as a life-size maquette, almost as if a paper and card study had been blown up to the scale of 1:1. The decision to present the show through a full-scale maquette also relates to the difficulty of conveying space through images. When property developers produce commercial imagery their interiors often contain many objects whose only role is to convey ‘lifestyle’, rather than a form of life (a bowl of fruit jostles with artwork on the wall, barely visible behind an explosion of designer furniture, flat screen televisions and shiny fixtures). Sometimes these objects are so numerous and so crammed into the frame that the architecture (if it exists at all) becomes totally obscured. By contrast, Home Economics is pure architecture. When designing an exhibition of new models for how we might live, the act of reduction and enlargement allowed us to concentrate on only the most essential qualities. This is what we mean when we say there are no metaphors in housing: it simply is what it does.

The form of the full-scale exhibition interior first came to prominence in the 19th century, at events like the Great Exhibition of 1851. This coincided with a desire felt by architects to extend their influence over popular taste, and the form was quickly adopted throughout international exhibitions. By the 1920s, the full-scale model had expanded in application beyond just interior trendsetting. It was taken up by the early Modernists and transformed into an important genre for avant-garde architectural experimentation. Some of the most influential projects of the era, like Hannes Meyer’s Co-op Zimmer, existed only as exhibition installations. Equally, examples like Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion tested new construction techniques and spatial theories which were directly translated into his subsequent built work. By the 1950s the form had morphed into the ‘home of the future’ genre, and until recently it was hardly present in architecture at all (surviving almost exclusively within ‘better home’ expos). Since we were awarded the British Pavilion commission by the British Council in October 2015 there have been at least two notable full-scale exhibitions on the home. The form may be experiencing something of a renaissance. It may also point to a renewed attempt by architects to influence the ordinary and commonplace aspects of how we live.

Home Economics is concerned with the design of everyday life. As a subject, home economics is the so-called ‘science of the household’, invented to improve education for women in 19th century America. It evolved to encompass all domestic power relations, as well as labour conditions, technology, financial and political administration. No other subject had the capacity to intervene so directly in the material reality of the home; it claimed expertise on everything from how to boil an egg to how to mend a shirt, and from how to decorate a room to how to

1918

apply for a mortgage. When combined with the architectural model the result is a potentially powerful methodology. To design the space and operation of the normal is to propose fundamentally new social norms. This concentration on the banal and ordinary stands in strong opposition to a previous generation of architects principally concerned with ‘icons’ (building assets intended to be impossible to replicate except by the architects themselves).

Home Economics is an intensely collaborative work, developed in a collective way. The project began with a two-day workshop aimed at colliding the diverse range of participants with an equally broad pool of experts. Different kinds of architects and artists, many operating at the fringe of the discipline (including sole practitioners, firms, academics, and an artist collective with a background in architecture) exchanged ideas with developers, housing associations, and other advisors (themselves pushing the boundaries of their various industries). This was intended to provide a pragmatic context for the new models, as well as to expose those directly responsible for our built environment to experimental forms of architecture.

As the project progressed and other kinds of specialised knowledge were required, an open system of partnerships allowed the team to expand: financial institutions, design consultants, engineers (both of structure and light), fashion designers, and a record label all became nested within the project. We have been fortunate to work with people at the top of their industries and professions throughout all aspects of the show's production. In our ambition to achieve a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk we commissioned cultural works outside architecture!–!amongst them art, photography, and critical writing!–!and we reframed the catalogue as a polemical proposition, not simply a record. In addition to the room participants and advisors, we also created an exhibition team structure not seen in previous years. The design studio OK-RM approached experience, identity, and communication in an integrated and sophisticated way, creating a scalelessness across the show and its ephemera (installation, pamphlet, catalogue, etc). The architectural firm Hesselbrand (also responsible for the Decades room) worked as exhibition designers, developing the maquette principle and elegantly integrating the participants’ works into the rather unforgiving spaces of the pavilion. The Venice Architecture Biennale is one of the few places outside the academy where hypothetical projects are the norm, rather than the exception. It is a rare chance to present original experimental works and research in a context that has the power to shape the future of

Peter Behrens’ 1902 Wertheim dining room interior

Mies van der Rohe’s full-scale exhibition architecture, 1931

The only image of Hannes Meyer’s Co-op Zimmer exhibition interior, 1924

2120

architecture. The best-known example of this is perhaps the Biennale of 1979 under Aldo Rossi, which propelled postmodernism to the fore as the paradigmatic architecture of the next decade. In less dramatic years, the overwhelmingly theoretical approach of the pavilions has sometimes doomed their proposals to remain on paper, forgotten as soon as the exhibition is dismantled. For this reason, the legacy and realism of Home Economics has been a constant concern. As with all architectural projects, the visible result hardly conveys the colossal volume of work not immediately perceptible in the installation. The relationships formed during the course of this project have already produced promising results, from corporate partnerships to a commercial furniture line. Meanwhile, there is a strong likelihood that certain collaborations will lead to built work, new financial protocols, and new types of architectural practice.

Aside from this, a final word must go to the British Council, the commissioners of Home Economics. Their commitment to an open competition process is a testament to their dedication to supporting provocative ideas and unconventional approaches to architecture. We are immensely grateful to the many dozens of people who committed their expertise, skill, creative imagination, and energy into the communal project of Home Economics. The results in Venice, and our hope for its lasting impact in the UK, bear witness to the power of collective effort.

Page 8 The Time Use Survey, (London: Office for National Statistics), 2014

Page 9 Jenny Pannell, Hannah Aldridge & Peter Kenway, Market Assessment of Housing Options for Older People (London: New Policy Institute, 2014), 52

Page 11 Copyright Nick Tenwiggenhorn, The Cobb House by Judd, 1996 Various stills, Throne of Blood. Celluloid. Directed by Akira Kurosawwa. Tokyo: Toho Studios, 1957

Page 12 Hannes Meyer, “Die neue Welt” in “Der Standard”, 1926 Copyright MoMA, Exterior view from the Courtyard. Die Wohnung Unsurer Zeit Section. (Apartment for a married couple, Berlin 1931, by Mies van der Rohe.) Copyright Gregor Schuster, Peter Behrens Dining Room for the Wertheim Department Store (1902), 2013

Page 14 “Google Trends Search Results,” last accessed April 21, 2016, www.google.co.uk/trends/

Inte

rest

Inte

rest

2010

2010

2015

2015

Airbnb

Sharing Economy

Mortgage

Home Ownership

Comparative Trends for Google Search Entries!

Understanding how popular attitudes change over time can be severely limited by the nature, quality and consistency of available surveys. Google Trends, which maps the total volume of search entries for a given keyword over time can provide near real-time insights into subjects like tenure models.

23

It is a feat of human imagination. A truly arresting piece of abstraction!–!that the home can be resolved into a single number.

A home encompasses a lifetime’s attachment, a shelter, a location, the colour of a door, perhaps the feeling of immutable inviolability, a sense of ownership, or a view. And yet all of these things are resolved into a number. We distill a home and all it means into a single number. That number allows your home to be exchanged for some!–! or the entirety!–!of someone else’s home. And that number goes up. Relentlessly.

We distil the apparently benign home into pounds and pence, and through this it becomes a financial instrument!–!a kind of transubstantiation into a strangely familiar but incongruous thing. Cognitive dissonance emerges, ringing out from the gap between the use and the meaning of the building. Just like in the stories of ETA Hoffman or Edgar Allan Poe, there is a motif in the contemporary UK housing market!–!the contrast between the secure and homey interior and the dreaded invasion of an alien presence. This contrast is made more fearsome because the two are apparently the same thing. Your home just got more expensive.

Homes in the south-east of England earn more money than most of the people who live in them. Even the Prime Minister of Great Britain experiences this. As shown in his recent tax return, since he became PM his house in Notting Hill earned comfortably more than his salary. That idea, that an inanimate object earns more than you, is unnerving, uncanny even. The German word for uncanny is unheimlich, which directly translates as something like ‘un-homely’.

We have accepted this reality of market-defined housing as the norm, and the housing crisis along with it. Sometimes it is talked about as if the problem

is intrinsic or intractable. As if the UK’s property market was naturally occurring, like a cloud formation or an exquisite total eclipse. We stand and stare at the coronal filaments of soaring house prices, and are unnerved by the muted bird song.

This permanent crisis creates an ambivalent emotional paradox; we are simultaneously attracted by feelings of attachment and belonging, and repulsed by the burden of debt and exploitation. While ambivalence may be a real achievement of the psyche, it comes at a price. It costs the holder, like trying to picture the colour of deep blood red at the same time as picturing the colour of bright green moss. Your home may well be the most expensive thing you’ll ever touch, and while it is far more valuable than that, this becomes its predominant quality. That uncanny dichotomy is tough on you!–!it has a psychological impact. As Anthony Vidler notes in The Architectural Uncanny, the uncanny is associated with the twin spatial phobias of agoraphobia and claustrophobia, amongst other anxieties. Your home just got more expensive. Can you feel it?

The housing crisis compromises our ability to develop autonomy!–!infantilising us. One of the many minor spin-off effects of the crisis is that people are leaving the familial home later. Leaving home is an important symbolic and actual transition for young people; a cultural moment whose meaning and importance is deeply ingrained, yet being distorted by the forces of capital. A government has failed when it cannot provide policy that allocates basic goods that enable people to exercise their autonomy. For this young-adult generation, the government has failed to provide access to stable, safe, secure housing. For many, a home is completely out of reach, meaning a suffocating extended stay in a place you don’t want to be. As a generation we’ve been sold the idea that owning your own home is an important ambition, but that rug is being pulled from under our feet.

People form bonds with places, and the bond with our home is particularly powerful. Where we sleep, away from public display, where we have the most agency. When you feel at home, you feel right.

HOMESICKNESSEddie Blake

2524

You can, I think, discover all you need to know about the British home from a single episode of George and Mildred. This TV sitcom might be 40 years old this year (though inevitably you can find it perfectly preserved in low-definition glory on YouTube), its flares, trouser suits and casual racism somewhat dated, the jokes a bit hokey. In the late 1970s though, George and Mildred was the hit show in the UK. It had an audience of twenty million. It spawned five series, a stage show!–! even a film! Four decades on, its comedy of manners, of social classes battling on suburban lawns about what it means to be middle class!–!and its portrayal of the home as a place of financial investment for a new nation of small entrepreneurs!–!are all thrillingly prescient. These days, we think of the 1980s as the decade that turned Britain into a nation of homeowners. But no –!the causes of the worst housing crisis for generations originated many years (even centuries) before this time. After George and Mildred, the British home would never be the same again.

I’ll set the scene. So there’s George and Mildred Roper. George is ‘working class and bloody proud of it’, his wife Mildred is aspirational, constantly aghast at George ‘showing me up’. Both conform to classic British comedic stereotypes: George the henpecked husband emasculated by the forceful presence of the shrewish but sexually voracious Mildred. For years they’ve occupied the shadier end of the city, amateurish Peter Rachman-types, renting out shabby inner-city rooms to lodgers. Times, however, are changing. The council is compulsorily purchasing their old inner-city terraced house to build a concrete flyover, and Mildred is determined to grasp the opportunity to haul herself up the social ladder by moving to the suburbs. This is, after all, the decade when the west

almost gave up on the city. The year before, New York nearly went bankrupt. Deindustrialisation and suburbanisation were emptying out most other cities. London had lost a quarter of its population since the Second World War. The suburb, not the city, had become again the landscape of aspiration.

In Britain, though, another significant shift was occurring: social mobility was increasing at a rate not seen for decades. We remember the 1970s today for the bad times: the Winter of Discontent, the cold war, the oil crisis. What we forget is that much of the decade experienced economic boom. The 1970s were uncertain times, for sure, but they also contained optimism and incredible experimentation. The postwar consensus was coming to an end, geopolitics were shifting, and western countries across the world were trying to work out what was next. Five decades later we now know what was coming: neoliberalism. But at the time of George and Mildred, neoliberalism was one of many possible destinations. The future was still up for grabs.

In Britain, national governments both left- and right-wing began jump-starting an economic shift towards the post-industrial by tinkering with the postwar consensus on state control. After 1970, Conservative prime minister Edward Heath balanced old-school state investment with a new business agenda!–!‘go for growth’!–! loosening up the free market to stimulate a consumer boom. Credit was deregulated. Mortgages became easier to acquire. Private, not state-funded, housing estates in the suburbs began being built on a scale not seen since the 1930s. There was a property boom. The oil crisis, and punitive public-sector cuts after Britain’s 1976 bailout by the International Monetary Fund (insisted upon by a new breed of neoliberal economists) were worrying augurs of what was to come. But by the time George and Mildred was on its second series, Britain was on the rise again. Industrial action, inflation and unemployment were all falling, disposable income was rising. Mortgages flowed once more. House prices doubled. Britain was finally experiencing the kind of consumer and suburban boom it had enviously witnessed in America two

KEEPING UP APPEARANCESTom Dyckoff

The length of time we spend somewhere influences the attachment we have to a place, but that is not to say that we don’t form bonds quickly. It’s not that the home needs to be a consistent location for a lifetime (although that is what some people aspire to), rather there is a universal need to have a place, which may change, but which is secure, and not haunted by uncertainty. Even the reptilian brain seeks out a secure place; it experiences place attachment though it does not have social emotions. Place attachment is part of the deep history of the human mind. It is intrinsic. In short, we form our identity through attachments. While these attachments can be with a number of things (not least people), places are an important category of attachment focus. When these places become uncertain and uncontrollable, it affects us on a profound psychological level. It becomes harder to go out into the world and be free if you don’t!–!on some level!–!feel strongly attached to a place.

Society on the whole is more mobile than ever, particularly those at the extreme fringes; the super rich and the global poor are on the move. This points to the fact that it is not relocation itself which is undesirable, but rather, the lack of control over one’s own movement. This estrangement is nothing new!–!Marx noted in the Economic and Philosophical Notebooks of 1844 that the development of the rent system had rendered ‘home’ a temporary illusion at best. Sometimes illusions are a good thing though!–!it’s not the ephemerality that is the problem, it is the complete lack of control.

We have less autonomy. The feeling of disempowerment is palpable in the shared rented kitchens around the country. Autonomy is the universal urge to be the causal agent of one’s own life and act in accordance with one’s integrated self. Cognitive control over a place does not require ownership in a limited legal sense, but rather agency. Rent hikes, evictions, and council relocation are all symptoms of the housing crisis, which affect the powerless, amplifying autonomy loss. When forced relocation occurs, people experience a grieving process similar to when loved ones are lost. The immense uncertainty hovering over the heads of

Britain’s youth should not be tolerated. It is a minor version of the placelessness experienced by refugees and migrants, like those currently languishing in the Calais Jungle.

The lack of autonomy and the uncanny in housing are shown up in the cultural activity around housing. Paying for housing has become a ritualised dance!–!perhaps a way of dealing with the unbearable subject, by clothing it in symbol. In Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno, citing Freud, notes ‘that the uncanny is uncanny only because it is secretly all too familiar, which is why it is repressed’. There are the choreographed symbolic rental deposits, or rehearsed lines about rent hikes. House prices are recited at any given social gathering, and hysterical shadow boxing is played out through gezumping and gezundering. Hallucinogenic PR strategies peddle luxury flats which are sold to people who will never see them in the flesh.

The malaise caused by the housing crisis is a kind of homesickness!–!the ache is not for the physical place but rather for the feeling of home. Closing the gap between the function and meaning of housing, between the financial instrument and the location of one’s innermost residence would be a good place to start in the treatment of the pathology. The cognitive dissonance between financial instrument and home isn’t just a weird feeling, it is an injustice that unbalances people. In order to tackle the pathology we have to start one step back from tinkering with economic models, we have to understand our more basic requirements. Community Land Trusts, massive council housing building programmes, and rent control initiatives will all need to be implemented to tackle different aspects of the crisis. But none of them are possible without a shift in the political discourse, which requires an imaginative leap.

Throughout our adult lives there has been a growing sense that Something Has To Be Done. However, people also treat the problem as somehow intractable. For our generation it is a pretty vital task. It’s an imaginative task, not just in the sense of designing a better distribution system, but changing the collective psyche. It would be a feat of human imagination.

2726

them by the council. ‘I’m not going to live in a vertical slum’, insists Mildred. Mildred tends to get her way.

They are shown round the house by the defiantly middle-class estate agent Jeffrey Fourmile, the humour arising from the inability of George to read the signs of middle-class taste. The house has a patio (‘pat-ee-o?’, says George, slowly, as he reads the estate agent brochure)!–!where one might host barbecues, suggests Jeffrey (‘barber’s queues?’ asks the nonplussed George). It has an ‘Adam fireplace’ (‘a damn fireplace?’!–!yes, I know, the jokes are getting a bit thin). The house has all mod cons, including a waste-disposal unit and, the pièce de résistance, an avocado-coloured bathroom suite, complete with a bidet. ‘I don’t see why you need two loos’, grumbles George.

Mildred, though, can read the signs. Fashions come and go in the bourgeois home!–!avocado bathrooms one year, Scandi style the next. What does not is the middle-class behaviour behind these fashions: to not just own one’s home, but to flaunt one’s ownership. Perhaps Mildred has read Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 text The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, in which Veblen proposes ‘conspicuous consumption’ as an essential bourgeois activity!–!buying and displaying things non-essential to life as a means of demonstrating your wealth. Or René König’s assertion in 1973 that ‘what distinguishes the bourgeois is distinction itself’!–!the need to distinguish oneself in the pecking order, particularly when that order, in Britain, changes so frequently. (The name of the Ropers’ new street!–!Peacock Crescent!–!I’m sure, was pointedly chosen by the scriptwriters. Peck, peck!) The home in Britain thus becomes not just shelter, or a nest, but a method of fixing identity and wealth!–!especially newly acquired wealth!–!in an insecure world. This perhaps partly explains the deep-rooted British prejudice against living in apartments. Owning foundations, as well as bricks and mortar, makes the middle class who they are, or want to be.

Mildred, naturally, adores the house. The situation behind this comedy, though, is that Jeffrey the middle-class estate agent lives next door, and does everything

he can to stop the Ropers from moving in, fearing their presence will devalue his family home: ‘that man could drop the property market for miles around’. But to no avail. The newly freed market has spoken. The Ropers buy the house.

The five subsequent series follow the Ropers’ education in the arts of the middle class, with comedic consequences. The fluidity of social class since the 16th century and the consequent insecurity of personal fortune has long been a recurrent theme in British literature, from Jane Austen through Charles Dickens, to Alan Bennett. The particular national anxiety produced by the topsy-turvy social order in the 1970s, though, made that decade a golden age for the British television situation comedy series. Most!–! like Butterflies, Fawlty Towers, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin and The Good Life!–!depicted the middle class at home but under threat, failing to achieve fulfilment through material wealth. George and Mildred, though, perhaps owed its particular success to its portrayal of both the middle and aspiring working class, poking fun at both.

To cut a very, very long story short, by the time the actor playing Mildred, Yootha Joyce, died suddenly in 1980!–!cutting both her, and George and Mildred off in their prime!–!the Ropers had not quite graduated into fully-realised bourgeois behaviour. I like to think, though, that by 2016, George and Mildred have succeeded. They’ve had children (a little late in the day), and grandchildren. They've traded Peacock Crescent in for something grander in Wimbledon during the 1980s (such a profitable decade), when Mildred herself became an estate agent. (Well, she wasn’t going to wait any longer for George to get a job.) Their children have done OK. But Mildred, now in her 80s (people live so much longer these days), does worry about how the grandchildren are ever going to get on the property ladder. Tell you what, though, she should have held on to that inner-city terrace. Have you seen the prices in Peckham and Hackney? Be worth a fortune these days. Times and tastes, after all, always change. Land!–!at least until an asteroid hits the earth!–!does not.

John Russell!–!son of a middling family of merchants!–!did. He was made First Earl of Bedford by Henry, and given a patch of land on the outskirts of London to play with (what had once been the rather idyllic looking garden of a now banished Catholic convent). Almost five centuries later, Covent Garden contains some of the most valuable real estate in the world. The Bedfords still own most of it.

You didn’t have to be newly ennobled, though, to deal in houses. The crumbs that fell off the royal table were feverishly traded by the new middle classes, too. Fortunes could be made, land amassed. Property developers like Nicholas Barbon, son of a leather seller, got rich on the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire (and have continued to get rich on the endless rebuilding of Britain ever since). There was only one rule in Britain for the middling sort as it wheeled and dealed in homes: if you can, get hold of the land. After all, land is a finite commodity!–!yet through its perpetual sale and resale it is able to produce infinite wealth.

Anyway, back to George and Mildred. Another great transfer of property and power took place in the 1970s, and millions of new John Russells were created. My mum and dad were two of them, and so I was born in a starter home in the suburbs in 1971. The middling sort had risen in strength in the centuries after Henry VIII, and by the year 2000 they would become the majority social class in the UK. As the 1970s began, though, the working class still dominated the country: two-thirds of Britons were in manual labour, Britons like my dad (Britons like George, if he could ever get a job). The extension of credit, though, in the 1970s, and the invention of that new financial instrument, the modern-day mortgage, meant that for the first time the working class were able to consider home ownership.

The opening episode of George and Mildred has Mildred doing just that. The husband and wife visit a modern neo-Georgian home for sale on Peacock Crescent in an ‘exclusive development’ in Hampton Wick, south-west London (‘All BBC2 and musical toilet rolls’, moans George). George, you see, is perfectly happy to move to the high-rise flat offered to

decades ago. A tentative balance had been achieved between state regulation and the free-market.

The results were incredible. By 1977, the gap between the rich and poor in Britain was lower than it had ever been. That, alas, didn’t last. What did, though, was the popularising of a particular attitude towards the British home: that of the middle-class. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the ‘middling sort’ began to bubble up in those nations less predisposed to autocracy. Early modern-day capitalism may have been born among the moneylenders of Florence, but it truly flourished in Flanders, the Netherlands, the ports of the Hanseatic League, and of course, the British Isles!–! places where the wings of monarchs and monks were clipped, while merchants were allowed to soar.

This new middling sort were a curious lot. Some were in the professions regulating the new capitalist economy!–!law, perhaps, or government. Most were direct participants in the capitalist economy itself, as merchants. But the activity of all was governed by one thing: the buying and selling of commodities –!commodities like the home.

Exactly when domestic property development was ‘invented’ is a moot point. One thing we can be sure of is that by the time of the Great Fire of London in 1666 it was in full swing. The previous 150 years had been another unsettling period of social change, with Tudor and Stuart monarchs relinquishing power to unruly parliaments while currying favour with key allies by buying them off with gifts of land and title. Henry VIII’s Protestant Reformation famously transformed not only England’s religion; it also revolutionised its structure of property ownership, as lands grabbed from the Catholic church were given to families who found themselves suddenly yanked up the social ladder. The self-made man!is the key theme of the age, an archetype of which is Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith’s son who becomes!–!through his ability to wheel and deal!–!the second-most powerful man in the country, chief minister to the capricious Henry VIII.

Sadly Cromwell didn’t survive one of Henry’s mood swings. Another minister,

2928

Rising house prices are not just due to a lack of new homes being built. Two decades of falling interest rates, increased mortgage availability, rising income and wealth inequality, tax incentives and other factors all contributed to the current housing crisis. These often-interrelated factors mean solving the crisis will be a considerable challenge. This chart highlights how falling mortgage rates enabled first-time buyers to borrow more relative to their incomes, while keeping mortgage repayments affordable.

Record low mortgage rates mean it is relatively affordable to own your own home (even for recent first-time buyers). Otherwise, the cost of renting means many households need state assistance or to share with others to lower costs sufficiently. This has led to significant overcrowding in high demand markets, particularly in the private rented sector. Meanwhile, many older homeowners continue to under-occupy large family homes, as the supply of age-appropriate housing remains limited.

In the UK, house prices are unaffordable relative to earnings. Unlike other countries that had rapidly rising house prices during the 2000s, the UK saw no significant increase in new homes built. That may have contributed to rising prices during the boom, but helped to minimise the bust following the credit crunch. The rapid fall in interest rates helped many households to avoid the worst of the recession, however house prices are again rising faster than earnings.

THE HOUSING CRISIS IN ELEVEN GRAPHS Neal Hudson

Mor

tgag

e ra

te (n

et o

f MIR

AS

)H

ousi

ng c

osts

as

% o

f inc

ome

Mor

tgag

e re

oaym

ents

as

perc

enta

ge o

f inc

ome

Fig. 3 Housing Costs by Tenure

Fig. 2 First Time Buyer Affordability Chart

0%0%

204

240

810

126

14

2016

%24

2832

60

Owned Outright

1.6 Loan to income ratio 3.22.0 3.6

Social RentersOwned with Mortgage

A

A

A

B

B

B

C

C

C

Private Renters

A All household members with state assistance

B Household head & partner with state assistance

C Household head & partner without state assistance

19801990

2015

1993

2003

2007

040

2080

100

6012

0

201520081978 1985 1993 2000

United Kingdom

Spain

Ireland

Nom

inal

hou

se p

rice

s (2

007/

2008

pea

k =

100)

Fig. 1 House Prices

3130

The consequences of this are that the nation of homeowners is in decline. Although the decline in homeownership did indeed accelerate following the credit crunch, the private rented sector had already begun to grow much earlier in the 2000s, and mortgaged homeownership can be seen to peak in the late 1990s. The government is now committed to reversing the decline, although this will be a significant challenge given the current high-house-price market.

In reality, we can see that the events and consequences of the 1980s and 90s really only created a generation or two of homeowners. For many younger households today, their only option is the private rented sector. Unfortunately, this sector is primarily designed to accommodate short-term occupancies, as opposed to long-term household formation. Private rental is generally not appropriate for the increasing number of families that are finding themselves stuck in this model of housing.

Homeownership remains the most popular UK housing tenure thanks to various incentives, including rapidly rising prices. Although owning is relatively affordable, the biggest barrier remains the purchase cost. Prices at high multiples of household income require either large deposits or very high loan-to-value mortgages. Accordingly, many first-time buyers require help from family, or government schemes, while very high house prices in London make mortgages unaffordable to all but the most income rich, equity poor first-time buyers.

However, what the previous chart on first-time buyer deposit requirements does not reveal is the overall average income of house buyers. It only considers the affordability for actual first-time buyers. When we compare the average incomes of buyers with all households’ incomes, we find that the average buyer no longer has an average income. As house prices have risen faster than incomes, households with lower incomes have found themselves priced out of homeownership.

Hou

sing

cos

ts a

s %

of i

ncom

eH

ousi

ng c

osts

as

% o

f inc

ome

Fig. 6 Households by Tenure, England

Fig. 7 Homeownership by Age Cohort

0%0%

44

22

88

1010

1212

66

1414

1915

20 At age25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60

1955 19951935 1975 2015

Private Renters

Social Renters

Born in 1960Born in 1970

Born in 1980

Born in 1990

Owner Occupiers

Hou

sing

cos

ts a

s %

of i

ncom

eH

ousi

ng c

osts

as

% o

f inc

ome

Dec

iles

of I

ncom

e

Fig. 4 First Time Buyer Deposit Requirements

Fig. 5 House Buyers’ Income

0%0%

44

22

88

1010

1212

66

1414

23

45

67

89

1

1980

1977

1990

1993

2000 2005 2010

2008

1985

1985

1995

2000

2015

2015

change in data

United Kingdom

North West

London

Mean Home Mover Income

Mean First TimeBuyer Income

3332

It is not enough to simply increase construction; new homes must be the right types in the right locations!–! the trend towards urban living and smaller households does not mean just building small flats or large family houses. We need more homes of an average size. Until we seriously tackle the issue of new housing supply, we will continue to see house prices rising, particularly where demand is strongest and appropriate affordable supply is most constrained.

Fig. 1 Nationwide, ECBFig. 2 Council of Mortgage LendersFig. 3 DCLG English Housing SurveyFig. 4 Council of Mortgage LendersFig. 5 ONSFig. 6 DCLG, ONS, CensusFig. 7 Council of Mortgage LendersFig. 8 British Historical Statistics 1988, DCLG, WebberFig. 9 DCLG, WebberFig. 10 DCLG, CCHPR AE Holmans 2005Fig. 11 Council of Mortgage Lenders

Looking ahead, the challenge is to build more homes and increase the country’s housing stock by more than 1 per cent per year. Previous high periods of building (the 1930s, 1950s and 1960s) offer some clues as to strategies, although these periods also saw large numbers of demolitions and a lower net change to housing stock. Recent housebuilding levels are far too low, forcing greater efficiency of use: existing houses divided into flats, empty houses refurbished and non-housing converted.

Increasing new housebuilding will require increasing output across a range of tenures, and among a range of market participants. Private-sector developers and housebuilders will continue to play the largest part, but their output is constrained to the rate they can sell in this high-house-price market. A long-term solution will require increased delivery by local authorities, housing associations, build-to-rent investors and a range of other people and institutions.

Hou

sing

cos

ts a

s %

of i

ncom

e

Fig. 11 Housing Costs by Tenure

Hou

sing

com

plet

ions

Fig. 10 Housebuilding by Size & Type of Property

4+ Bed House 3 Bed House2 Bed House2 Bed Flat1 Bed FlatOther

040

k12

0k16

0k80

k20

0k

1984 20041974

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

1994 20141964

London

South EastEast

South WestEast MidlandsWest MidlandsWalesScotlandYorks & HumberNorth East

0%–2

020

–10

1050

4030

60

Ann

ual c

hang

e in

dw

ellin

gs

Fig. 8 Change in Population, Dwelling Stock & New Completions

1853

1925

1893

1955

1933

1975

1953

1985

1993

2005

1973

1995

1873

19451935

1913

1965

2013

2015

0%1

0.5

22.

53

1.5

3.5

Hou

sing

com

plet

ions

, Eng

land

Fig. 9 Housing Costs by Tenure, England

Private EnterpriseLocal EnterpriseHousing AssociationsUnknown

010

0k20

0k30

0k40

0k

New Housing CompletionsNet Change in Dwelling StockPopulation Growth (England)

3534

from Savile Row suits to gas cookers!–!is defined down to a playground in Zones 1 and 2, with its suburban hinterland either awaiting gentrification (hello, Tottenham! Nice to meet you, Peckham!) or in purgatory as a dormitory for cheap labour (Brent, Thamesmead). The new London beloved of government ministers, of The Economist and of the new breed of urban economist is really just a few square miles of industries dedicated to helping the rich get richer and feel better. That may be through the tax-planning factories of PwC, KPMG and the rest, estates management, or PR and lovely restaurants. And just so the asset-owning middle classes can still feel they have a stake, they get to engage in property speculation. Because when the average house in the capital now makes more money in two days than the average worker makes in one week (the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics), it really doesn’t pay to work.

These processes have been going on for decades, but they’ve picked up speed since the crash, so that an entire country is now rapidly being defined down to a handful of postcodes, cutting out whole regions, industries and demographics. It is into that radically reconfigured political economy that we must insert debates about housing, because the madness in our property market is only one major symptom of this wider shift. When we discuss the dire shortage of affordable housing in London!–!genuinely affordable, not the Mickey Mouse, Section 106-friendly version!–!we must realise that it’s not a bug, but a feature of the new Britain. Or, in other words: it’s not contingent, it’s structural. It’s not driven by BoJo, or by Barratt, or by dodgy deals at property fairs in Cannes!–!although they all play their part, of course.

In this case, the reality is also the metaphor: a city that doesn’t want to house so many of its people is an economy that has no home for them. It’s not that you can’t afford a place in London, it’s that London!–!in all its global-city, financial-centre finery!–!has no place for you. With the benefit of distance, we can see that the African-American factory-working families of rust-belt cities like Detroit

and Milwaukee have been effectively abandoned by their country. These people were once the black middle class. But now their manufacturing industries have died, their economic usefulness has been expended, and it’s up to them (pretty much alone) to deal with crime, the aftermath of the subprime crisis!–!even with poisoned water.

If we can take all that in about America then we should also get used to the idea that a growing number of people and places in Britain are effectively surplus to requirements of this new economic model. In the great defining down, they’ve been written off. And unless we rethink the economics of modern Britain, we have no hope of winning any but the smallest and most provisional victories on housing.

Every so often, a society decides which of its citizens really matter. Which get the star treatment and the big cash handouts!–!and which get shoved to the bottom of the pile and penalised. These are the big choices post-crash Britain is making right now. This is how we’ve ended up cutting disability benefits at the same time as we cut tax for the super-rich. That’s why we can shrug our shoulders when steel towns of Redcar, Scunthorpe and Port Talbot go down. When you have an Ayn-Rand-quoting ex-investment banker put in charge of Britain’s industrial policy!–!even though he openly says he doesn’t believe in industrial policy!–!that tells you how much industry actually matters in this country.

I’m not pinning all of this on Sajid Javid and David Cameron. Rather, I think they come after 30 years of reconfiguration of the economy. We can argue over precise dates, but broadly speaking Thatcher began in earnest the clear-out of British industry and the regions that were its home, while Blair tried patching over it. All Cameron is doing is heralding the endgame.

The real damage was done by Thatcher!– !destroying one in five of all manufacturing jobs within just 18 months in the early 80s. But of those three prime ministers it’s Blair who’s most interesting. He presided over a decade-long economic boom!–! the biggest boom Britain has ever had.

IT DOESN’T PAY TO WORKAditya Chakrabortty

A couple of years ago, I was writing a piece about the residents of a council estate in London that was being demolished, to be replaced by!–!surprise!!–!luxury flats. It was the usual sorry story and I did the usual dutiful things, including calling the local council to find out why exactly they wanted to dispossess more than a hundred households.

Mid-call to the head of communications for this local authority, he breaks off and asks, ‘Can I say something off the record?’

Now, any journalist!–!or just about anyone who’s ever seen a TV drama about journalism!–!knows what that means. It’s code for: I have valuable information that could shape your story, but only if you don’t divulge where it came from.

We veer off the record, and this guy says, ‘The thing is, on council estates what we find is there’s a lot of obesity. And benefits claimants. And, y’know, drugs and worse.’

I listen to this public official, his no-doubt handsome salary paid by the very same people he’s now slagging off. And I get sufficiently annoyed that, right on deadline when really I shouldn’t be doing anything apart from finishing my piece, I start a row.

‘So you’re saying that everyone in a council flat is fat or on the dole or on drugs?’‘No, not everyone but you know …’‘And why do you think council tenants are like that? Is it the municipal architecture?’‘We just think mixed communities work better.’

All in all, a pleasant 15 minutes. I file the piece and am left with these scribbled notes from this off-the-record briefing. So I obviously ring up one of the women heading the council-tenants’ campaign!–!

and tell her precisely what the other side is briefing about them.

Only a bit later does it dawn on me that what I’ve just heard is an example of something I’ve come to call ‘defining down’. It’s a process of narrowing the definition of your city, your country or your economy so that it cuts out some industries, some regions and some people. And where you end up is deciding!–!like the man from the town hall!–!that some people can be forced out of your homes, your borough, your city, because they no longer fit.

Nor is it just one bumptious bureaucrat. Go on YouTube and you’ll find a video from 2014 of the boyish chair of Barnet’s housing committee, Tom Davey. He’s in a council meeting and he’s claiming that he and his Tory colleagues must be providing affordable housing!–!because people are buying them. An objector, I think actually a Labour councillor, points out that the only people who can afford them are the wealthy. And the young Tory thumps the desk, saying, ‘Those are the people we want!’ Again, redefining who gets to live here.

Perhaps you expect such talk out of Tory-run Barnet. After all, it’s Thatcher’s former backyard and its True-Blue council is now also outsourcing around 90 per cent of its jobs. But its Labour counterparts define down too.

Think of Focus E15’s Jasmine Stone meeting Robin Wales, the mayor of the borough where her family had lived for more than 100 years, and being told, ‘If you can’t afford to live in Newham, you can’t afford to live in Newham.’

Or take a look at Waltham Forest’s core strategy, which states: ‘The Council wants to make the borough a place where high- and middle-income people choose to live and can afford.’ Unlike Barnet, these are places that have historically been home to London’s working class. But now they’ve had a taste of gentrification, of property speculation and land deals and smarter shops!–!and they want more, please.

Britain itself is being defined down, so that an entire national economy is reduced to little more than a bet on London. Meanwhile London!–!the great sprawl, the radical hotspot, the light-industrial hub knocking out everything

3736

hospitals and schools, and for the salaries for running our big businesses. 

The justification for all this is that the sectors and regions getting the handouts are ‘systemically important’!–!that we had to give them money so they could go on making and lending money to the rest of us. How many times have you heard politicians and pundits say that that’s why the banks had to be bailed out?

Well, look at the figures: in March 2008, on the very brink of collapse, just over three-quarters (76.2 per cent) of all bank and building society loans went either to other financial firms or on property for mortgages. Less than a quarter (23.8 per cent) went to what you might call the productive part of the economy, or non-financial businesses. You’ll remember how after the bail-outs George Osborne and Vince Cable urged the banks to do the decent thing and lend more to industry. They even set lending targets.

In 2015, bank loans on property or to other financial institutions had gone up to 86.9 per cent of all lending. The productive part of the economy, on the other hand, received just 13 per cent. Manufacturing received a paltry 1.2 per cent of all loans, despite making up 10 per cent of the economy.

Eight years after Britain’s speculative economy took down the productive economy, it’s not only back!–!it’s bigger than ever. This helps to explain why economic growth has become decoupled from incomes, so that the chancellor can boast of how Britain outperforms the rest of the G7 even while the average worker earns less in real terms than they did before the banking crash. Nor is this just a British syndrome. Across the West, real economies are stagnating even while the financial economies are awash with cheap money created by central banks. The productive economy remains in a slump, even while the speculative economy is pumped up with money.

As the speculative economy grows, so does the list of things it speculates on. That means homes in London have become a globally traded asset class, to be bought and sold on. Britons jostling up the housing ladder is a tradition at least as old as the dinner party.

Wealthy foreigners from dicey places stowing their cash in safe and stucco-fronted London postcodes: we know all about that. But much bigger, far more restless forces are now at work. You see this up close across inner London, with former council estates and new builds springing up at record prices with apparently guaranteed yields attached. You see this in City office space, the majority of which is now owned by foreign investors. You see this when a US investment firm swoops in and buys up an entire red-brick estate, such as New Era on the fringes of the City, and then jacks up the rents for the households living there. 

The property, you see, is valuable. A one-way bet in the one-horse economy that is Britain. But the people who live in them, the ones unable to participate in this new speculative era? They’ve been defined out of the city they come from.

Yet in those glorious years up until the credit crunch began in 2007, across whole slabs of the country!–!the Midlands, the north, Wales and Scotland, the private sector created barely any new jobs. The vast bulk of additional employment came from the state. So what was formalised under Blair was the creation of supplicant regions, dependent on central London for employment and for benefit payments.

Go to nearly any northern cities and you’ll see the devastation that has resulted. Leave the train station, owned and run by the public-sector Network Rail, and walk along the main road. There’ll be a university or two, which depend on public financing for some departments and for all its students. A public-sector hospital, of course. If you’re lucky, a BBC studio!–!although it’s probably been scaled back and the local newspaper is almost certainly on its last legs. And what about the local private sector? Most of it’s gone AWOL, apart from to provide a bit of retailing relief. Nearly every name in the FTSE-100 biggest companies share index is now headquartered in London, along with all their major corporate helpers: the big law firms, accountancies and PR outfits.

 Blair’s supplicant regime was always fragile. Now, under the guise of austerity, Cameron has effectively ripped it up, hacking billions out of the welfare system and shrinking the public sector.

When provincial cities were sites of production they had distinct economies and identities: Cottonopolis Manchester; Worstedopolis Bradford; Brummagem Birmingham. Leeds boy Keith Waterhouse wrote: ‘If they had soot in their lungs they also had red blood in their veins, and there was such a thing as provincial pride.’ Now they largely survive on meagre handouts from the capital, while Whitehall officials ask them to jettison their identities and become Northern Powerhouses. Or George Osborne offers them an elected police commissioner. That is what defining down looks like.  

Those spending cuts followed on from the banking crash, which was of course made in London. You’d have thought the financial crisis would topple the financial centre of London. Certainly, that was what

the newspapers and the experts foretold. If the 80s recessions pulverised the north, and Major’s slump flattened the Home Counties, this meltdown was going to be (to quote the numerous headlines from 2008–9) ‘grim down south’. It wasn’t, thanks largely to Gordon Brown’s rush to bail out the banks to the tune of £47,000 for every British household. This was paid within just a few months in cash, loans and underwriting. It was followed by a series of government schemes to help banks lend, which also proved a helpful aid to repairing their balance sheets. Finally, there has been the £375 billion of quantitative-easing cash pumped into markets by the Bank of England.

What all this money did was guarantee that the one place to come roaring out of the crash was London. House prices in the capital took off, even while the rest of the country still faced the prospect of negative equity. It began creating full-time jobs, even while the rest of the UK got by on part-time work and temporary contracts. And the one group to actually prosper during the crash was the rich, again largely based in London and the south-east. Take that £375bn of QE money!–!described by Nigel Wilson, boss of the insurer Legal And General as a ‘policy for the rich by the rich’. His view was confirmed by the Bank of England’s own research, which confirms that the richest have made the most out of their disbursement of public money.

What we’ve seen over the past eight years has been a massive bankrolling of a small elite of business owners and top executives in the south-east by working- and middle-class households across the country. Let’s count them: the Thames Tideway, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, Crossrail (set to be the biggest construction project in Europe). One think-tank totted up all the coalition’s planned spending on transport projects from 2010 to the election in 2015. Londoners enjoyed public investment of £2,731 per head, far outstripping any other region. The north-east received a measly £5 per head. Central London has also become home for the fees for managing our public- and private-sector pension funds, for building our PFI

3938

consequences for culture. Settlement entails a site. The planting of crops and the domestication of animals requires some kind of material structure. What is it that is required? It is a structure of domestication. The animals, the crops, the very humans themselves move into another zone. The site will become the place for the production and reproduction of what is necessary to life, and the continuation of the generations. Both hunting and gathering can continue, but a quite decisive event has occurred from which there is no return.

At the moment that trade, production, and the village emerges, the sty has become what could be thought of as a house, or following the Ancient Greek, an oikos. From this process historians and social theorists have derived the idea that the oikos, the house, is the basis of a system that can be called the economy. Unsurprisingly then, when the Athenian Xenophon wrote a dialogue, the Oeconomicus, it appears to be a text devoted to estate management. The relative schema is based upon a married couple working the economic potential of a farm. The house plays its own economic part alongside the fields and the pasture. This play has led some to believe that the Oeconomicus is the basis of the economy, a term obviously derived from oikos. We are invited to think that the links between households began to be articulated as a market. Even beyond this, some theorists argue that while the polis expresses the public side of the town, the oikos defined a ‘private’ social relation, a market relation. The town or the city should therefore be seen as the interweaving of these public and private dimensions. They will organise the way property law evolves since this question of the house is obviously central.

But this whole view feels too neat, and too premised upon teleology and the idea that what existed in the distant past is nonetheless destined to produce the situation we inherit today. It doesn’t take account of the fact that in Greece there was another word for house with very different cognate terms: domos. As a noun it signifies the house, but in its verb form it can also be used to the describe

the instruction of a wife, the training of a slave, the disciplining of children, and the breaking in of horses!–!and even the training of oneself, through body building. This describes more graphically the nature of domestication. It is an act of extended will, exercised by a man who acts as a patriarch!–!upon his wife, his slaves, his children, his animals, and above all himself. It is often forgotten that the domestication of animals included the domestication of humans. A domestic unit was only animated and organised by a strong, and at times violent, will.

It was here, surely, that the other side!–! the home!–!began to emerge. For the child, the physical domestic regime it was born into would have had a powerful effect. The god-like figure of the father would have dominated the child’s experience of love and hatred. The domestic system clearly inculcated a strong idea of home. It was where the child or the adult came from, and sometimes returned. Whatever claims upon the adult the city placed, they would not erase the association of love with the home. In one sense, it seems the home is almost invented as a memory of the past, even while it still physically remains in the present. It is captured in Greek by the idea of nostos, of longing return. Most obviously in the Odyssey, the home becomes the object of a passion!–!especially when the return home is arduous, delayed, and dangerous.

The home has entered the list of those terms that excite powerful feelings. The house-home begins its progress from the period of settlement. As animal husbandry completely changes the life of an animal, so this domestication wraps the infant in a repertoire of feelings: love, obedience, loyalty, but also of rebellion, competition, and independence. The human animal has to negotiate a way through these possibilities. It is enough to say that the home, and therefore the house, becomes the very touchstone of feeling. This is so much the case that in the 17th century a new illness had to be coined in military medicine!–!it was nostalgia, the pain suffered by being unable to return. Under the power of nostalgia soldiers would eventually put down their weapons and start to walk home. Military discipline

The house is home to an insoluble problem for architecture. If architecture is one important element in building, another element is that of the house. Architecture and houses belong to different worlds, with different histories. They belong to different regimes of existence.

The historian Jérôme Carcopin wrote a book titled Daily Life in Ancient Rome. In its preface he gives an account of sitting in his study about to work on the volume when he finds himself looking at a 19th century lithograph of Ancient Rome, seen from the River Tiber. He remarks that the public buildings seem correctly imagined and sited correctly, but that the rest of the available space of Rome in the picture was mistakenly covered with villas. He muses that the villa type did indeed exist in Roman history, but that the error of the artist was to neglect that the villa was the type of building Romans used as a country or seaside second home. It would not have appeared in the city as a neat little house on a street. Urban living in Rome, we know from many sources, produced tenement blocks!–!rightly thought to be chaotic, dangerous and overpriced. Certainly the rich and the powerful had their palaces, as well as their extramural retreats. But the more pervasive problem for the architectural historian is that which we may call the ‘anachronism’. It is not just that the historian commits an historical error concerning the type of buildings that Romans typically occupied. The real problem is that of the historian altogether, and it is one shared in much that is written about the house and home. Anachronism is the tendency, and sometimes the compulsion, to see the present in the past. In the lithograph it was vital that the citizens of Rome had houses, so the model closest to our own version of the house was falsely represented as the Roman home.

Indeed, this anachronistic tendency can become so insistent that some have argued that the house is the origin of architecture. Forget the pyramids, the temples, the palaces; the most fundamental need before any others, according to the Abbé Laugier, is shelter. His account centres around how natural objects!–!trees, branches, foliage!–!could be used in the construction of a primitive hut, made of cut trees as simple columns and beams, with a leafy covering. This polemic on the origin of the first house is still accepted by the heir to the throne, Prince Charles. Laugier’s argument, like so many others in the 18th century, rests on the assumption that if you want to discover the nature of something you should discover its origins. Our analysis here goes in the opposite direction.

Nonetheless, we are able to ask the question: where did people who lived in the past actually live? We don’t really know. After the event of settlement they may have lived in human ‘sties’ within an enclosure made from rudimentary material structures (intended to keep animals in and other humans and animals out). This type of settlement inevitably responded to economic growth by allowing the human sty to develop specialised internal spaces, taking shape according to ‘indoor’ production and the needs of breeding young children. Production would not have been seen as distinct from reproduction. Both would have seemed like safeguards in the continuous struggle to exist. Over time, the domestication of humans was separated from the function of agriculture and husbandry through the concept of the farm. Early on, alternatives to this singular arrangement emerged; the sty for humans could be split off from the agricultural site to form a specialised collection of sties. This came to comprise first a village, and later a town and permitted the emergence of a marketplace where surplus produce could be bought and sold.

In terms of constructing the genealogy of the house-home the issue of human settlement is paramount. When humans abandoned the life of hunter-gatherers to adopt a settled form of life!–!of agriculture and of animal husbandry!–!it had untold

THE HOUSE-HOME Mark Cousins

4140

The home is changing in response to the changing lifestyle trends of our generation, with the focus moving away from the tangible space to the intangible value-added services and sense of community, demanded by an ever-increasingly transient population.

Reza Merchant, CEO, The Collective

Home, as a physical place, the source and scene of experiences, is threatened by a new ‘connected’ world, virtual, unearned and rootless.

Crispin Kelly, director, Baylight Properties

The home is changing from a stage set for domestic life to a space where private, public and professional lives coexist and collide.

Isabel Allen, design director, HAB Housing

The home is being progressively designed to achieve regulatory compliance, rather than necessarily to suit the needs of future occupiers.

Steve Sanham, development director, HUB

The home that captures light and volume undermines traditional form.

Roger Zogolovitch, chairman and creative director, Solidspace

The home is not changing fast enough, but priorities are finally shifting: location over space, affordability over investment, a point of life home over a home for life.

Marc Vlessing, CEO-and co-founder, Pocket

The home is changing in response to the changing lifestyle trends of our generation, with the focus moving away from the tangible space to the intangible value-added services and sense of community, demanded by an ever-increasingly transient population.

Reza Merchant, CEO, The Collective

With younger generations becoming more accustomed to sharing cars, taxis and now homes, we are seeing a middle ground emerge between buying and renting where people choose to minimise consumption in favour of accessing their homes as and when they need.

Barry Jessup, director, First Base

How homes are made is changing, from speculative, cost-driven, mass production of units to individual customer-designed homes; from counting bricks to investing in dreams, the future is custom build.

Chris Brown, executive chairman, Igloo Regeneration

The affordability crisis presents a new challenge for homes to be designed for ongoing commercial productivity!–!spacious enough to enable intergenerational cohabitation, dividable enough to allow Airbnb style asset sweating, indestructible enough to provide a guaranteed future income stream for the kids.

Colm Lacey, director of development, LB Croydon

HOW IS THE HOME CHANGING? Seventeen British developers, local authorities, housebuilders and housing associations at the forefront of their industries were asked to answer the question.

was unable to counteract this state, and if the soldier was not allowed to go he would simply lie down and die.

The house-home underwent a fundamental transformation during the 19th century under the pressure of the growth of towns and cities. This pressure pushed London towards an ecological disaster; the expansion of the population could no longer be accommodated. The filth, the lack of fresh water, the absence of sewage disposal was creating a dangerous health threat to everyone in the city. Urbanism appeared initially as the investigation and proposals to deal with London’s existential problems. These, along with the overcrowding of houses, described a vast difficulty that became known as the ‘housing problem’. The emergence of the term ‘housing’ describes a process in which the house became a political and administrative object of concern and reform. Housing as a term designates the precision and regulation needed to house the population and it quickly became the object of policy at a local and at a national level. The outcome was a series of reforms, and recognition of the structural issues that underpinned the housing problem!–!the form of provision, the market in land prices, the access to finance on the part of would-be buyers, and the nature of the rented sector. Towards the end of the century it was clear to most people that philanthropy could not cope with the lower income section of the population, and that local government would have to intervene to build properties at an affordable rent. Clearly, this housing problem has never been solved.

At the same time, new types of society brought about by industrial production and the dramatic urbanisation of countries also deepened the significance of owning or renting a house-home, whether it took the form of a house, a semi-detached, part of a terrace, or increasingly in some kind of a block. The growth of democratic reform gradually extended franchise and increased the proportion of the population who could vote. But less noticed was the increasing centrality in national administration of the household and the householder. The infrastructures of water, sewage, gas, electricity, and the telephone

were mainly distributed to households. The postal service was organised in response to the rise in significance of the address. While parliamentary life addressed the citizen, administration addressed the household. Indeed, a major problem for the homeless was not just the lack of a place to live, but the lack of an address upon which the administrative and financial identity of people depended. The more the problems of housing increased, the more the household was involved with all aspects of life!–!education, health, welfare, everything we consider ‘having a life’. Indeed we could replace Le Corbusier’s dictum that ‘the house is a machine for living in’ with ‘the house is a machine for having a life’. Too much is demanded of the house-home.

Revolutionaries and some architects have fought to disengage the house-home from having so many functions. They have usually entailed soliciting some of its functions to external and collective provision. But the house-home, whether it takes the form of a privately owned villa or a flat in social housing, continues to maintain its centrality in the social objectives that are placed upon it. Far from being, in Victorian terms ‘a haven from a heartless world’, it has become the central basis for the administrative state. Moreover, housing in the private sector has almost expelled the architect. Architects never managed to gain control of housing. The contemporary architect-designed house is a rarity. Most often it is a type of project in which the architect ‘does’ architecture to show what he or she can do. It is not a solution, at the moment, to the housing problem.

4342

THE WAY WE LIVEVerity-Jane Keefe

A Pocket Living 1 Bedroom flat 

Hackney Downs, London, E8Purchase price, 2015, £230,000Single male young professional

The more blurred and flexible the boundaries of our life and work become, the more tightly our homes can be customised to fit, sometimes too much so!–!we must build common social spaces to make sure our homes aren’t too self-centred.

Tobias Goevert, head of regeneration + design, LB Harrow

Working patterns have changed significantly in the 21st century and the boundaries between work and socialising have become more and more blurred, this is also changing residential models in large cities.

Peter Harris, director, SUSD

We are making homes that are better networked yet less convivial, increasingly similar yet less attainable, more open plan yet less flexible.

Daniel Hill, head of thamesmead strategy, Peabody Group

The race to build the quantity of housing we need in our fast-expanding cities and the grave danger that puts us in of creating flats and houses that are not part of real communities means we must proactively drive the answer to this question and build homes that are beautiful, comfortable, affordable and, above all, units of community.

Martyn Evans creative director, developer

In the main, the home as a physical construct is not changing, whereas social and family structures are, which is putting huge economic and physical pressures on the fabric we are inheriting.

John Nordon, design director, PegasusLife

Ten years ago you bought your new car from the car showroom, today you specify the exact car you want and it is built bespoke for you; the home is changing the same way.

Tom Bloxham, founder, Urban Splash

There is a danger that for the many, the ‘home’ increasingly means parents, adult offspring (and partners), grandparents and even complete strangers, living under the same roof in smaller and smaller spaces throughout their lifetimes!–!our challenge is to make sure that doesn’t become the norm … John East, strategic director for growth and homes, LB Barking and Dagenham

Exclusion from conventional home ownership could give the next generation the freedom to invent new and exciting ways to live - what seems like a struggle now could reform the concept of the home forever as people, places and markets adapt to a new era.

Rachel Bagenal, director, Naked House

4544

D Purpose Built Student Accommodation Premium Range Studio flat or ensuite

Unite Students, One Stratford, London, E20Rooms from £204!–!£400 approximately per week

C Starter Home 2 Bedroom house with garden 

Hills Residential, Homes for LifeStevenage, Hertfordshire, SG2Purchase price, 2013, £199,995Young couple and two rabbits 

B Shared Ownership 2 Bedroom flat 

Family Mosaic, Crouch Hill, London, N19Purchase price, 2016, 50% share £242,500Rent on 50% £725 per month

4746

G Co-living Bedroom plus shared facilities 

Old Oak Common, Willesden Junction, London, NW10Room for £260 per week

E Rentable creative workspace Living room inc. off-street parking

Vrumi, Clapham Common, London, SW4£55 per day

F Property Guardianship Ex Local Government office building

Global Guardians, Croydon, London, CR0£500 per monthYoung male musician

4948

J Luxury Retirement Village Serviced Apartment plus shared luxury amenities

Battersea Place ShowhomeBattersea, London, SW112 bedroom apartment, £860,000

H Airbnb Entire Studio with bathroom, kitchenette and washing machine

Commercial Road, London, E1£74 per night

I Local Authority Temporary Homeless Hostel Accommodation for families Studio and communal kitchen

London Borough of Barking and DagenhamThames View Estate, Barking, IG11Costs unknown 

5150

the world comes into conflict with reality and needs to be violently adjusted, or where a metaphor has been stretched to its limits and suddenly snaps.

The home might be one our most meticulously maintained normalcy fields, yet potentially one of the more fragile, as it is packed with metaphors at their breaking points. Even ‘home’ itself is one!–!the idea of the single nuclear family home as established after the Second World War is still the basic underlying model through which the home is understood and portrayed. For example, consider the confrontation between the idea of homeownership and the real workings of financial capitalism.

Conventional wisdom!–!via the second law of thermodynamics!–!tells us that everything is subject to entropy. Unless cared for, all is on its way to a speedy collapse/death. Accepting this wisdom boils down to establishing a relationship with decay. One can celebrate it, accept it or temporarily try to mitigate its effects, but never reverse it. Yet generally we try to ignore it. As most consumer goods have become essentially disposable (and anything digital can be constantly updated), we are able to remain wilfully ignorant about the decay of our material possessions. Or we decorate spaces in a ‘shabby chic’ aesthetic!–!the 21st-century version of Ruinenwert!–!celebrating the visual effects of (simulated) distress-over-time inflicted upon their surfaces and furniture.

It is only when it comes to the decay of our own bodies that we truly need to confront reality. Slowly what was once normal to us!–!certain ranges of motion, motor functions, appetite for novelty!–!starts to deteriorate. The scope of what is ergonomic to us decreases, as does the scope of metaphors available to us for digesting new things. Think of your own experiences of introducing a new technology to an elderly relative! –!or of being the elderly relative. On a personal level, each individual is confronted by the future through the process of ageing. At the time of writing it is the only future that has consistently arrived to every human being that has lived to an advanced age.

So perhaps the future does in fact arrive, but insidiously: first, through us as individuals arriving at the future when we ourselves become old; and second, through the occasional, piecemeal snapping of metaphors we have been relying on for understanding the world. These two processes work hand in hand: the former contributes a great deal to the latter.

So how to design a home in which to wait for the arrival of the future, a home for a lifetime? Perhaps by designing one that resists both normalisation (and the metaphors which bring it about) and the very process of ageing itself. The Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa) designed by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, together known as the Reversible Destiny Foundation, might give us some clues. Built around the turn of the millennium in Long Island, New York, the house, conceived as part of the couple’s campaign to defeat mortality, seems to dispose of many of the standardised cultural ingredients that add up to the notion of house and/or home. Inside, one encounters an artificial topography that shuns any notion of comfort or ergonomics. Jenna Sutela writes: ‘Gins and Arakawa believed that engaging with balance and using one’s body to maintain equilibrium stimulates the immune system, and eventually stops the ageing process. Comfort, on the other hand, was understood as a precursor to death. […] They describe a house leading its users into a perpetually ‘tentative’ relationship with their surroundings. The landscape of the house, in combination with the body’s friction, produces an aesthetic of resistance to corporeal complacency, keeping its users young and agile. Everyday you are practising how not to die.’

While it is unclear whether the Bioscleave House actually achieves its goal (no one lives in it and Arakawa and Gins have in fact both recently passed away), certainly the ethos and tools of the Reversible Destiny Foundation find resonance among transhumanists and those inclined to so-called ‘paleo’ lifestyles and ‘natural movement patterns’. Maybe an architectural response!–!a home beyond metaphors, beyond ergonomics!–!is on its way.

In his essay ‘Welcome to the Future Nauseous’, Venkatesh Rao sets out to develop a provisional theory of why the future never seems to arrive. That is, why we never feel that we live in a future that we had earlier imagined, but rather live in a permanent, continuous present. When we scrutinise our lives 20 years ago, it is obvious we live in a very different time, but the future future still appears to lie beyond some fixed-distance horizon. For example: think about any depiction of the ‘Home of the Future’ from 20 years ago. In many ways we do in fact live in those futures (via mobile computing, Amazon, Nest, Deliveroo etc), but does it really feel like we do?

Rao attributes this phenomenon to a process of normalisation. According to him we live in an artificially constructed and constantly maintained ‘normalcy field’!–!the general cultural aggregate that we consider to be normal. New things, regardless of whether they are technologies, social norms or services, enter the normalcy field by extending metaphors, as skeuomorphic heuristics: the car arrived through the motorised carriage metaphor, the World Wide Web through the document/scroll metaphor, the computer in your pocket through the telephone metaphor, Airbnb through the bed and breakfast metaphor, and so on and so on. Thus the sensation of a continuous present: rather than move forward, the so-called normalcy field is being continuously stretched through time to cover and integrate ‘new things’. (In fact Rao himself goes as far as to say that we live in a mangled version of the 15th century, at which time the bulk of our ur-metaphors were established.) Here the question of design becomes important. Anything that is to become successful and widely adopted needs to be brought into the world via

a successful metaphor that enables its swift normalisation. This is the essential task of design. Ergonomics is the science and art of designing things that fit the human body and mind. Or, by extension, ergonomics is the science and art of comfort; of designing the artificial world in such a way that it requires a minimum amount of energy!–!physical and cognitive!–!for a human to adjust and operate. For ergonomics to be applicable, if not universally, at least across large populations (eg, as exemplified by the Neuferts’ architectural design standards), it must presume both an Eigenmensch and an Eigenkultur!–!‘standardised human/culture ingredients’!–!from which its norms can be derived and to which they can be projected. The variance in human anthropometry, biomechanics, cognitive psychology and cultural literacy is sufficiently predictable for everyday things to be generally designable in such a fashion that they are not uncomfortable (or don’t kill us) and we are able to use and understand them with fairly little assistance.

Or rather, we understand the parts of things we interact with: their interfaces. Most things we engage with!–!whether they are home appliances, digital networks or public services!–!are in reality much too strange, occult and complex for us even to begin to understand in their totality in any meaningful way. It comes as no surprise that the interfaces of these things are generally designed around metaphors.

An important aspect to understand about Rao’s concept of the normalcy field is that it is distinct from reality!–!it is a model of the world mapped onto the world itself. Ergonomics spans this distance. It is how the field interfaces with the world itself.

The title of Rao’s essay, ‘Welcome to the Future Nauseous’, is a reference to what he sees as the obsolescence of Alvin Toffler’s idea of ‘future shock’!–!the experience of the future hitting us at such speed that we experience it as an instant existential trauma. Rather, what Rao sees as an imminent scenario is ‘future nausea’, or the experience of a breakdown of one great, shared sense of ‘normal’. In other words, a breakdown of shared metaphors. It happens when our model of

BEYOND ERGONOMICS Martti Kalliala

5352

responsibility for the content of a building, and its role within the city.

In any typical new residential development in the UK, many of the most important decisions will have been made before any architect is involved. The question is whether architects follow Zaera-Polo’s lead and design within these conditions, or whether the conditions themselves can be a subject for design.

The size of a residential development is largely dictated by negotiation with the planning authority, by national and local policies, and by housing standards covering everything from accessibility and sustainability to safety and space. Many architects see this bureaucracy as an inconvenience!–!boxes to tick, obstacles to work around, red tape to be cut. By assuming that policies and standards constrain creativity, these architects are reconciling themselves to compromise. But if we see policy as part of the design process it becomes a powerful creative tool. The Rule of Regulations and SUB-PLAN: A Guide to Permitted Development, both written in collaboration with David Knight, show how visualising the effects of policy on housing can make it a tangible field for imaginative design.

The instrumental relationship between policy and the design of the British home is most evident through space standards, or their lack. In 1961, the Parker Morris Committee report Homes for Today and Tomorrow established space standards based on household activities that became mandatory for all UK public housing. These standards were withdrawn in 1980 by a new Conservative government concerned at the cost of housing, who argued the market would provide the right type of homes. Since then, the average size of British homes has shrunk to the smallest in Western Europe. In response, the Mayor of London introduced the London Housing Design Guide in 2009. For better or worse, the guide moulded an entire generation of residential architecture in the capital. The consequence has been a ‘New London Vernacular’ defined by east-west facing linear blocks (to avoid single-aspect north-facing homes), an array of balconies (to provide each home with a minimum of five sqm private outdoor space), and an absence

of external stairs (to ensure level access).When the Mayor of London recently

consulted on rewriting these standards, only three architecture practices submitted a response. Given that the guide has had such a critical and direct effect on the design of homes in London, surely it is time that architects give the standards proportionate attention as a design project.

The intended audience for a residential development is largely driven by the concept of ‘viability’. Viability assessments were first introduced in London in the 2000s to justify extracting greater contributions for affordable housing from developers, offsetting the gradual withdrawal of public subsidy. In 2012 the concept of viability was baked into the planning system through the National Planning Policy Framework, ensuring that the burden of funding public infrastructure would still allow for developers to make a reasonable profit. In other words, the total income for a development!=!land!+!development costs!+ planning obligations + 20% profit.

However, the hard-nosed clarity of this equation is obscured by poor consistency, transparency, and accountability in how viability assessments are executed. Most assessments are protected from public scrutiny due to ‘commercial confidentiality’. As a result, even Boris Johnson concedes, ‘the whole viability assessment business is something of a dark art’. Behind closed doors is an industry that excels in fine-tuning the figures to maximise profits, while delivering an acceptable level of public benefits. Their results predetermine how much affordable housing can be provided on a site, and how many penthouses must cross-subsidise it.

Spreadsheets have become the battleground where the future form of the city and who it is for are played out. Yet very few architects are even literate in the basics of viability. If viability is more an art than a science, it should be subject to the same critique and creativity as other more visible aspects of the planning process. There is a role here for architects to use ‘creative accounting’ to find alternative ways of building more socially viable developments.

The affordability of a residential development is clearly one output of

In 1902 the Wertheim department store in Berlin commissioned 12 leading architects and artists to design a series of full-scale ‘modern interiors’ as models for a new German domestic life. A dining room by Peter Behrens was singled out by a contemporary critic as ‘one of the most interesting of the whole series. It is a uniform creation where every shape is subject to the intention of an orderly will!…!A basic rectangular form!…!appears as flat ornament on the walls!…!in the porcelain service, the knotted carpet, and in relief on the silverwares’. Behrens’ display of total design proved so popular it was sold as a complete room five times. In some ways, it did become a model for the modern German interior; Behrens went on to mass-produce a comprehensive catalogue of domestic products for AEG. But it also helped establish a model of architectural micro-management over the home that remains a misleading ideal for the profession.

Over the last century, architects have used model interiors as a compelling and familiar medium to communicate new ideas about the home to the general public!–! particularly at world fairs and expos, where the domestic interior is a common format that crosses cultural borders. Exhibited interiors offer a full-scale doll’s house to exercise complete design control, from the form of the space, to the fixtures and fittings. The domestic products that spinoff from these interiors have become a kind of hallmark of the star architect!–!Alvar Aalto’s vase, Le Corbusier’s wallpaper, Aldo Rossi’s coffee maker, Renzo Piano’s refrigerator, Peter Zumthor’s peppermill, Zaha Hadid’s kitchen tap, or David Chipperfield’s coffee spoon. Henry van de Velde not only designed the architecture, interiors, furniture, and cutlery of his Bloemenwerf house, he designed matching dresses for his wife.

This concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk has not only defined the historical canon of 20th century architecture, it has cast expectations about the role of the architect we still struggle to reconcile with the realities of 21st century practice. Too many students of architecture enter education under the false promise of a starring role. Too many architectural courses exist in a clientless, budgetless, zero-politics vacuum which perpetuates this myth. And too often, the contrast between the freedoms of education and conditions of practice leave the brightest students without the faculties to challenge the system itself. Beyond the pages of the architectural press, the reality is that most British homes built today are the antithesis of a Gesamtkunstwerk!–! they possess a kind of complete authorless-ness. There were 629 new build homes showcased on Dezeen in 2015, which represents a small fraction of the 142,890 homes constructed across the UK in the same period. At least two-thirds of new homes in the UK are not designed by an architect at all.

Where architects are involved, the growing technical, legislative, and economic complexity of the building process has gradually flattened their influence to the facade!–!sandwiched between the increasingly powerful forces of economics and politics, or budget and bureaucracy. In the UK this results in the practice of ‘jacketing’!–!using architects to design facades for readymade standard house-types to secure planning permission. Some developers hedge their bets by submitting parallel planning applications for ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ elevations of the same internal layout. Once permission has been won, the ‘planning architects’ are often dropped for cheaper subcontractors or in-house technicians.

Alejandro Zaera-Polo recognised this power shift in 2008 when his General Theory of the Building Envelope conceded, ‘the envelope has become the last realm of architectural power’. Zaera-Polo’s claim on the importance of the border between inside and outside was a pragmatic response to the briefs he was increasingly being asked to answer!–!essentially wrapping pre-determined volumes with attractive skins. But it also abdicated

HOUSING BY STANDARDSFinn Williams

54

this viability equation. In fact, in the absence of government grants, affordable housing is being cross-subsidised by increasingly high-value private market housing!–!polarising provision at the top and bottom ends of the scale. For the house buyers between these extremes, affordability also depends on the availability of mortgages. Architects and planners may consider mortgages beyond their influence, but mortgages have a formative influence on the shape of our homes and our cities.

In the United States, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), created under Roosevelt in response to the Great Depression, provided government subsidy to mortgage lenders!–!as long as they agreed to their terms. From 1934 until the early 1960s, the FHA’s Underwriting Manual imposed mortgage terms explicitly promoting cul-de-sac single-family suburban homes, and prohibited racial integration. These standards guided real estate practices across the US, producing sprawl and segregation on an enormous scale. The FHA’s Manual was arguably the most influential publication on American urbanism of the 20th century!–!despite being written without any design input.

Mortgage terms continue to exert a powerful influence on the form of the British home today. For example, the requirement for an eligble property to be ‘habitable’ excludes many renovation, conversion and self-build projects!–!while raising the threshold of affordability and reducing our ability to better use existing buildings. Might architects help redesign debt in a way that increases affordability?

How long a building will last is rarely even addressed in an architect’s brief, or their response. A building’s lifespan is the result of industry standards that largely go unquestioned!–!despite falling increasingly short of the durability we might expect.

The National House Building Council (NHBC) monopolises the market for construction warranties in the UK, covering 80% of newly built homes. Their Buildmark warranty offers ten years of guaranteed protection!–!but only when the home conforms to the NHBC’s own set of standards on detailing, materials, and

workmanship. These standards limit both the design of new homes and their shelf life, by prescribing products that typically have a design life of 25–45 years.

Even within the first five years, the ubiquitous housing that results from this formula shows signs of wear and tear; the rainscreen cladding is dented, the Siberian Larch timber is stained, or the render is cracking. Within 50 years, most of today’s new housing will need to be completely re-clad, if not re-built. Meanwhile house buyers are taking out leases of 99 or 125 years on the same properties.

There is nothing wrong with impermanence if it has been considered. According to Frank Duffy ‘there isn’t any such thing as a building. A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components’. The problem is that the lifespan of housing is being delegated to standard warranty products. But what if warranties were designed with as much ambition and invention as the details of an architect-designed house? What effect would a 200-year warranty have on how we design the home?

Space standards, viability assessments, mortgage terms, and standard warranties are just part of a preset bureaucratic framework for UK housing that architects are expected to step around. There is a common pattern here; some of the most powerful design tools lie furthest from the architect’s accepted remit; and the more formative the decision, the less architectural intelligence goes into making it. Bureaucracy is the real architect of the contemporary British home.

An understandable response would be to try to eliminate bureaucracy. But recent government attempts at ‘streamlining the planning process’, have led to more uncertainty, complexity and litigation. Like the Hydra, every attempt to remove bureaucracy ultimately breeds more of it.

The alternative is to recast our expectations about the role of the architect to include redesigning these standards. That means learning to see bureaucracy not as a constraint, but as a field for architectural creativity. It also means letting go of the idea of designing the cutlery, and learning how to design without drawing. In this way, the model interior might still be a relevant tool to redesign the conditions of the modern home.

HOURSOwn Nothing, Share Everything

Jack Self with Finn Williams and Shumi Bose

1The front door seems to fl oat above the pavilion’s portico, just as the exhibition itself is offset from the walls and fl oor of the building.

2On climbing the steps, the visitor navigates around an oversized replica of a Georgian panel door, whose glossy black surface is the focus for the Giardini’s central axis.

3In the central Hours space, modular daybeds are arranged in various confi gurations (alone, a pair, and in a group). They become spaces for solitude (work or rest), conversation and recreation.

4The daybeds are comprised of three elements: a frame, a ledge and a mattress. Here they are seen in powdered steel, corian and linen, but these could be easily swapped for other materials. Thus a universal form can assume diverse fi nishes.

5The pavilion interior is painted black, and all natural light excluded. An offset white wall marks the height of a domestic ceiling, and the rooms are bathed in horizontal light of varying intensities.

1 5 9 13 17

18

19

20

14

15

16

10

11

12

2 6

3

7

4

8

11A kitchen on an outer surface of the totem relates to the imagined social spaces between the structures.

12The wooden fl oor of the pavilion has been totally concealed by linoleum. This threshold links to the back corridor (which has no time period).

13In Years’ room, a grey party wall represents the structural services conduit of the naked apartment architectural model.

14From the perspective of a fi nancial institution, the defi ning element of the home is a toilet and hand basin.

15Two types of wall are shown in Years, the permanent structure (represented in grey) that comprises the shell of the building, and the internal partitions added by residents (represented by yellow masonry here and a transparent perspex stud wall as seen in 12).

16View from Years into Decades, showing one of the fl oor mats in full, the coloured threshold and the varying light conditions between rooms.

6A common wardrobe of household objects dominates the central space, and includes a curated selection of archive pieces from fashion designer J.W. Anderson.

7The junction of three daybeds. When combined, this furniture assumes ambiguous forms. This particular confi guration recalls the Roman triclinium, or dining couches; the platform serves as a place to eat. 8With diameters of 2.6m, the two infl atable spheres in Days dominate their context. Visitors can climb inside and experience their prints from the interior.

9Between each room are breaks in the continuous wall element. These deep, coloured thresholds contain mats inscribed with the text ‘a home for...’ and their rooms’ time period. This image shows the threshold between Days and Months.

10The staircase in the Months room leads to an upper level and bedroom. It sits behind a pair of doors that can be closed to create a totally private space within the ‘totem.’

17Decades provides qualities of space and surface, not functional programs. This hard surface below a bright window could be for a variety of activities, including work or leisure.

18The square bed in Decades is designed not to force either a specifi c use or family structure.

19One half of Decades is dominated by an inhabitable core, which contains all infrastructure.

20The massive front door, mounted on its triangular supporting structure, as seen on leavingthe exhibition.

This photographic essay is by Thomas Adank with the contribution of Johann Besse. It was realised on the 15th and 16th of May 2016 at the British Pavilion in Venice.

0 10

0 10

Typical floor plan showing pinwheel core structure

Site plan of Quay House, Canary Wharf. The dashed line indicates the DLR elevated line that cuts across the site

Welcome home. This is your communal living room, which you share with a number of other apartments on your floor. You normally spend a couple of hours here each day entertaining friends, socialising with neighbours, working or relaxing. The modular daybeds allow you to tailor the space for different forms of labour, rest and play. You describe it as your own private living space; it feels like a shared home, but not a public room.

You share a number of common objects with your neighbours!–!from practical things that are infrequently used (like power tools) to objects you can better afford together, like clothes. You keep these objects in a large transparent ‘garderobe’, or communal wardrobe. Even though you live in the centre of the city, your rent is not expensive. You use your savings to invest in shares of the company that owns and manages your building.

72

View of tower proposal for Quay House, Canary WharfInteriors are formed solely by transparent garderobes and daybeds

Space is not predetermined in function

0 10

0 1

GarderobeDaybed

Rammed earth (London clay) bathroom detailInterior view demonstrating the free plan and a garderobe wall unit configured as a kitchen (£625pcm per person)

COMMON STOCK

Ideology never exists in the abstract. It is not a noun in this sense, but a verb. Ideology happens. Or, more precisely, ideology ‘takes place,’ (an expression that properly describes its dual temporal and spatial qualities). Our beliefs about the world only exist at the moment they become tangible. A thought has no agency, but when it becomes an action it has consequences. This is especially true of the acts that create artefacts and objects, which continue to exert influence long after their authors are no longer present. In the end, it is not enough to describe the reality we want to inhabit; we must build it.

To become normalised and accepted, ideologies must adopt a form that is comprehensible to the audience of their era. The welfare state was a collective will towards a universal standard of living. Today, that has been recast as the impractical dream of a failed socialist utopia. Yet strangely, when those same desires are couched in the contemporary language of Silicon Valley they become somehow trendy. The phrase ‘sharing economy’ neatly grafts communism directly onto capitalism – which is to say, it allows for the appropriation of solidarity and goodwill by neocapitalism. The structure of the sharing economy may be communitarian, but control of the means of production (the apps and algorithms used to coordinate decentralised exchange) is firmly concentrated in the hands of corporations. If the users of a sharing economy platform were also its benefactors, it would be indistinguishable from the Soviet fantasy of a computerised communist economy.

Sharing is a particularly relevant concept in the design of housing because, unless the model is monastic, the home is always a space occupied by two or more people. Its use and resources have to be negotiated, which can become either a source of communality or conflict. When the atomic financial unit of the house is the bedroom (as in the shared house), the additional common spaces (such as a living room, kitchen or bathroom) can become highly contested and financialised. The amount one member pays in relation to the others can produce a commercial hierarchy. But when the home itself is the whole financial unit (as with a single-family home), the negotiation of space is no longer driven by economic competition but solidarity. Every resident has an equal stake, and its overall success becomes a common concern. At the scale of a housing building, like a tower block, this principle becomes even more important. If the basis for ownership is the single apartment, then maintenance of the structure itself requires political administration: a leaking

roof is only perceived as an existential threat by those directly underneath it, while those on the ground floor have no motivation to contribute to its repair. On the other hand, when the block is owned in a cooperative it becomes more egalitarian: since what is owned is a share of the whole, everyone wants to repair the roof. In this model, each resident has the same investment in the care of the common structure and spaces. This is the opposite of a model based on private and individuated ownership.

One might assume the sharing economy in the built environment would be mainly concerned with this question of common interest. However, to date it has only produced one type of housing ‘product,’ a kind of pay-as-you-go access that disenfranchises the user from ownership altogether, and thus any asset appreciation. Since individual freedom of movement is essential for integration into the global economy, this model uses the apparent smoothness of arrival and departure to create an exploitative and inherently precarious domestic condition.

The time period of hours immediately suggested a form of shared ownership that could address some of these issues. To own an object or a space for a few hours is to possess it when you need it and to relinquish it when you don’t. In the context of housing there is an ecological dimension too: if we pool our resources together we can have a better quality of life by dramatically reducing our material requirements. We might not be able to afford a home with a large room for special occasions. But if we chip in with a number of others we could afford to collectively buy a house with a large room, then share its occupation. The same is true of even the most banal domestic object: it is really necessary for each apartment to have a vacuum cleaner, when a single one between us would do? If we split the cost it will be cheaper, consume less resources, and be just as efficient. If we are prepared to share, we can have more.

Rather than concentrate on how space within the home could be shared over the course of several hours, this model imagines a new type of domesticity altogether – one not carved out from within the existing space of the home, but added to it. The focus has been on how sharing might provide a resident with amenities they could not afford by themselves.

The financial system used to fund the housing model’s construction is a very long-term corporate loan (in this case fifty years) that allocates shares to residents in proportion to their repayments. Long-term debt is an excellent way to create affordable housing because it

Interior view of a typical apartment (£625pcm per person)

Sharing can be a luxury, not a compromise.

The bed and sofa are converging: in 2014 the bed overtook the sofa for the first time as the most used piece of furniture in British homes.

Our current economic model makes mass ownership impossible in the long run.

Communal storage suggests new ways of sharing personal objects; a transparent structure questions our relationship with everyday domesticity.

In a fair and just society, we will collectively own the sharing economy.

British fashion designer J.W. Anderson has curated the clothes of a common wardrobe shared between households.

The bed today is a place for production and reproduction, working and relaxing, socialising and sleeping.

Each apartment possessing its own vacuum cleaner is neither necessary, nor environmentally responsible.

When we combine our resources, the result is more than the sum of the parts.

produces three types of sustainability: social, financial and environmental. Although a large amount of interest is paid over the half century, this makes monthly payments very low. And because the building has to last such a long time, any maintenance costs impact on profit. This drives energy and material efficiency. Unlike a cooperative, which relies on up-front cash buy-ins from its residents, this organisation conveys shares based on time of occupation. Those shares are not forcibly sold if the resident moves away. They get the best of both worlds: freedom of movement and security of investment. The value of the shares will naturally fluctuate with the market value of the building. In other words, the shares act as an easily exchangeable derivative product. It is important not to see this question of ownership and financing as in any way separate from the architectural model.

This form of finance heavily preferences small sites with high density. The model therefore takes the typology of a high-rise tower block, applies long-term financing to reduce the cost per person drastically, and then adapts the typology. To demonstrate an example, a tower in London's Canary Wharf produced the following results:

Height: 270m Gross Internal Area: 65,964m2

Floors: 92 (incl. 2 basement) Occupied floors: 87 Average floor area: 717m2

Land value (2015): ~£7,684/m2

Site area: 1883.7m2

Maximum site value: £26,600,000 Construction cost (2015 estimate): £178,102,800 Loan amount: £208,000,000 Fixed interest rate: 5% per annum Loan term: 50 years Monthly loan repayment: £944,608 Total interest paid over term: £358,765,183 Tower capacity: 1392 residents Base rent: £650 per calendar month per person Market value on completion: ~£440,000,000 The model adapts the structure and design of the high-rise to explore new forms of shared domesticity. Traditionally, the tower features a lift and stair core with a central corridor leading to apartments. Here, the core was broken down into its constituent elements to form a double pinwheel supporting a steel deck system. There are no internal supports, unless one considers the eight circular wet rooms as large inhabitable columns. As the core was pulled apart it eliminated the corridor, while creating spaces between

apartments that could be collectively occupied. Each floor features a large communal living room shared between sixteen people (one of these rooms was represented in the central space of the British Pavilion). Since the room is provided in addition to your own apartment it is a space you're not forced to use, but can choose to occupy.

The interior spaces are dominated by two pieces of furniture designed by Jack Self and Hesselbrand. The first of these is a daybed. In 2014, for the first time ever, the bed overtook the sofa as the most used piece of furniture in the British home. This was primarily due to a decline in live TV and rise in on-demand services. Simultaneously, the amount of time spent working from home is increasing, as remote email becomes more common. So too is the number of hours dedicated to online socialising. The bed has become the primary space of production and reproduction, of work, leisure and rest. It is our main social furniture, as indeed it was before the 16th century. The daybed is comprised of three elements: a simple steel frame, a long shelf and a mattress. The form is intended to remain universal, even if the material selection changes. The economic status of its owner should not privilege access to design. The daybed appears in several configurations in the show, as a place of work, social activity, and combined into a gestalt soft platform. This hints at the model’s pursuit of non-functional space – the rooms, like the furniture, are not predefined in their use.

The second piece of furniture is a ‘garderobe,’ or secure wardrobe. This is a totally transparent, acrylic structure whose scale and density allows it to act as a wall element as well as storage. It aims to present a critique of ownership by forcing new relationships between both the resident and their objects, as well as between the objects themselves. The garderobe juxtaposes our most prised possessions with the most banal domestic utensils – artwork abuts appliances, heirlooms alongside laundry, mops meet mixers and medicines. In Home Economics, this garderobe presented the common objects of a communal household. In addition to the spare futon and record player, the curated common clothing from fashion designer J.W. Anderson provoked questions about the limits of what we are prepared to share.

The possibility of a truly egalitarian and socialist model of housing emerging from within the capitalist paradigm is an explicit goal of this project. This research and proposition represent an attempt in that direction. Through the exhibition format, and through graspable scales, this work seeks to normalise that ideology.

DAYSHome is where the Wi-Fi is

Åyr

You’re constantly on the move, from city to city around the world. It doesn’t matter where you are, you can always climb inside your inflatable retreat whenever you need!to –!this is your portable and personalised space, where you can make yourself at home. To feel at home here you only need a Wi-Fi connection, which you use to flit between your social media feeds, entertainment, virtual and commercial consumption. You used to think of inflatables as either practical infrastructure, like the air bed, or pure entertainment, like the children’s bouncy castle. Now your personalised spheres offer a new type of space, one that responds to the transience of your global mobility and is just as unique as you. No two are the same. So come on and climb inside, wherever you are you can get away from it all and reconnect with your friends. Relax!–!what’s new on your screens?

84

Portrait 2, ÅyrPortrait 1, Åyr

Portrait 3, Åyr

progressive. It had to be replaced by pods, pads and all sorts of technical cocoonings that offered a much more versatile realm for becoming thanks to their reduced presence. In the effort of dematerialising architecture, the avant-garde proposed a minimal architecture that left bodies free as they dwelled without buildings.

The promise of nomadic freedom projected by postmodern nomadism and immaterial architecture was freedom. With some historical distance this was not realised. The philosophical dominance of space and the physical dominance of resources conflated the freedom to move your body around with liberty. Interestingly, the emergence of this model of liberation coincides with a general sophistication of the liberal cosmology (ie, value system). Container standards and international measures established during the Second World War had conferred commodities with the capacity to move virtually unbounded on the planet. The new frontier was the putting-into-motion of the feelings of the world.

The liberalisation of sentient bodies required an emotional infrastructure devoid of the rigidity and locality of the household. They required an infrastructure that could formalise associations beyond the familial format and that could weigh the value of individuality beyond matter. In short, something greatly adaptable but measured enough to guarantee the reproduction of the cosmological order. All that is solid had to melt into air, but all that is holy wasn’t to be profaned. The liberal world wasn’t going to disintegrate by dispossessing its subjects from their place.

The cosmic poles of our liberal souls revolve around one point – freedom. This involves the freedom of movement, freedom of being, free markets and liberated exchange. However, in the process of this liberation, the liberal man became estranged from place. It was time to liberate him further, by conferring upon him a portable totem (like those of the nomadic aboriginals). Its purpose was to allow him to stay fixed at the centre of his own world, while simultaneously permitting his untethering in space. Nonetheless, the oxymoronic nature of this liberty – home everywhere and yet nowhere – continues to disorientate. Amongst the contemporary nomadic classes, even the most privileged still complain of being the victims of gentrification.

Sublimation is the process whereby solids turn into gas without having to pass through the liquid state. It is an appropriate phenomenon to describe how early neoliberalism, with its focus on rapid commodification, creates bubbles of all kinds: dotcom bubbles, subprime bubbles, tulip bubbles, filter bubbles. In this context, the membrane became the architecture of choice and came to prevail as the no-frills solution to the fleeing incommensurability of sublimated things.

It separated just enough to delineate their essence and hold their meanings. It generated just enough difference to make value real enough to be exchanged. Yet, if membrane architecture managed to concretise the utmost reduction of the materiality of value, it wasn’t enough. A new ground had to be invented. One which was even less material and which literally potentialized humanity by mechanising dialectics, that is, the difference between 0 and 1.

The golden age of membrane architectures marks the last gasp of modernist architecture before it is dragged by the neoliberal wave. Like a skin, a screen and a facade, the membranes defined and mediated the relationship between interiors and exteriors, homes and worlds, selves and others, and overlaid a virtual topography with no gravity nor perspective. The domestic pods, placed in the landscape against the ill visions of the real, realised the illusion of escape. They are the spaces that incubated our digital present, sealed the fate of the built-form and prefigured the one the platform.

At this point in time, several decades after the last architectural prototypes, the immaterial ambition advanced by the sublime enclosures has proved to be no less than concrete. We are living on the grounds sketched by our parents then, but we do not wish to escape our home like a failed suburbia. When there is no outside, the exit has to come from within. We surf surfaces, flick through images and caress with soothing impulses the glazed transparencies articulating our augmented reality. We know that our quest facilitates the corporate translation of bodies into profiles to enable their automatic control, but what else to do since old freedoms are medieval when you’re dwelling in orbit. We thus revise our constellations tirelessly, word by word, image by image, story by story, a digit at a time, hoping to be driven to eternity through

URBI ET ORBI

The Achilpa aboriginal tribe planted its sacred pole wherever their hunting and gathering took them, so that they displaced the centre of their world with the pole and maintained the communication with the sky while being continually on the move. The Pan American airline was only able to become truly international by opening hotels offering an American home-away-from-home at each of their destinations, setting many of the standards of the global hotel industry in the process. The Feel At Home add-on on my UK mobile allows me to order a series of inflatable environments from Guangzhou in China while at a friend’s barn in the depths of France’s Pyrenees mountains. I have network and power; I can reach my colleagues, relatives and memories; I am at home in this removed place I had never been to before.

Nomadism has never been about being homeless, nor about being home everywhere. It relies on having the possibility to orientate emotionally and symbolically while being in foreign spaces. The cosmicisation of unknown territories always needs to go through a consecration.

This cosmic rule of existence also applies to the cybernetic nomadism of our parents. The inflatable pods, relaxation pods, sensory deprivation pods or climate-control spheres are evolutions of the primitive hut which makes a space into a hospitable place. The emergence of the desire to make the whole earth hospitable coincides with the first sights of the finitude of our pale blue home from outer space. The inversion of the Western gaze sealed the transformation of inhabitation from colonisation to domestication. The reformulation of domesticity that happened after the Second World War and peaked in the 1970s was both the vehicle and the symptom of a deep restructuring of the Western’s cosmos which is capitalism. The nascent neoliberal subjects formulated themselves first by imagining the city and the world as a domestic utopia. They progressively projected a new domestic landscape.

Today’s housing crisis is the legacy of former generations, when the previous means to accumulate value and exercise power began to lag. Liberation, individuation, automation: value needed to be produced and captured

by other means than the limited material resources of the whole earth or the alienating consumerist factory floors; self-realisation was to be reached beyond the secularised religious and familial values and beyond the confines of the household and the rigidity of norms. Under the disguise of liberation, a new emotional framework was to be found. In other words, mentalities and techniques to be ‘who u wanna be’ while being a commodity, to be home everywhere while calling nowhere home, to be individual and more divided than ever.

The worldly project gained its domestic essence by forming against the deceptions of postwar family life, in the attempt to create the promised home that never was. Proto-entrepreneurial youths started by shedding their own parents to spread true homeyness everywhere. They planned a homebound liberation when home alone, tried to seize the means of reproduction by being true to their selves and crafted emancipating devices in their dad’s garage while yearning for a Playboy bachelor pad.

The ambition was seductive and, in fact, rather fair. The experience of the modern home was mostly soured with the lived reality of housing. The relief was to be found outdoors in turning the wild into a fun garden. The project thus started with the construction of bubbles designed to accommodate the rules and relations of the mythical home. The temporary zones proposed places where human interactions aren’t denatured, where violence is absent, where the self is strengthened by comfort, where production is also consumption, and where work is not work any more but a full, unhindered labour of love. It was a life without object and a life without work, a life in Eden made possible by the network.

High on selfhood and communality, driven by the riddance of waged relations, the avant-garde drafted today’s affective infrastructure, that which may have actually liberated some aspects of life but also laid the foundations for today’s subjectivities and technologies. These liberal techologies were the catalyst for breaking down the rigidity of traditional rules and hierarchies.

Like the norms that had to be torn down, the solidity of modern architecture was also considered too static and corrupting to be

How can a home be more than clothing, but less than architecture?

80% of smartphone owners check their email or social media accounts within 10 minutes of going to sleep or waking up.

You travel ever-increasing distances, yet live in an ever-decreasing circle of references.

More than 53,000 properties in the UK are being rented on a daily rate.

The future is always forced to occupy the spaces of the past, even if it refuses to acknowledge or engage with them.

The short-term accommodation company Airbnb takes its name from ‘AirBed and Breakfast’. The company’s founders developed the concept after using inflatable mattresses to convert an apartment into a shared home for a couple of days.

Your personalised space feels familiar anywhere, but generic space everywhere feels uncanny.

our lucky stars. Like Ulysses traversing a thousand-and-one plateaus, we know that we are bound to forever return to our new selves, because the forever infants aspire to the freedom of images like the eternal youth envied the freedom of things.Many facets of the vision of existence matured by the baby boomers have been realised. In terms of ideology, the digital, its platforms, profiles, and personal devices have conquered more of life than was ever thought, and the sustained resourcefulness of the virtual disclose that it is only the beginning. In terms of architecture, the genealogy from Fuller’s world fairs to Uber’s split fares shows that the structures experimented by the techno-utopians do continue to live on. Mostly actualized by exploiting the cheap labor of the south to fulfil their affordable obligation, inflatables and geodesics are the contemporary materiality of the temporary event, less the philosophico-political event than the one celebrating products or entertaining the crowd, if the two haven’t ever been the same.

As the material consequences of demateri-alisation are being felt, the twofold legacy of the inflated cosmology ought to be exhibited jointly. The materiality of life has been hitting back many of those who were entitled enough to take a break from it. Where to go and how to be when your safe space is a thin bubble which shape and size is mostly updated with-out your control? The infinite selfless division, motion and valuation which is at work and puts to work should be despised, but we shouldn’t forget that the productive totality where we reside now was made acceptable by a blend of optimism, privilege and innocence towards the possibility of an idealised domestic totality. It seems that the more domestic the city has become, the less room there was to dwell.

It is time to reflect upon the blinding actuality of our past future. The legacy of this well-intentioned avant-garde resonates at each bubble bursting while each bubble forming stands as a homage to the relevance of that sort becoming. This is nonetheless the historical time we inhabit. A time which is far from being more sober towards its future that previous ones, as it hectically attempts to cope both with the anxiety of neoliberal no-futures as much as the modernist dismissal of pasts. The immaterial megastructure that has now integrated a majority of bodies and spaces in its web is proving to be a

particularly resilient platform to practice the vampiric excavation of previous zombie histories, whether their are romanticised organic healings or fetishishised archetypal sexualities, or the images thereof. Beings, space and time cannot be thought without the technologies hosting and furnishing them. Bodies have been smartened by their devices, and cities consequently made eminently smart. Images have become the brick and mortar of existence as the digital infrastructure became as primal as architecture for existence. However, this hasn’t hollowed buildings and constructions of their relevance. The ethereal dreams of membrane architectures were only realized to the extent that dwelling was made more autonomous from architecture, made more portable by making it fit in the pocket. But, if the digital only impedes on the raison d’être of architecture, it exploits and thrives on its past materialities. It has reinvented architecture from without, rendering it less than architecture but still more than fashion.

MONTHSA house without housework

Dogma and Black Square

Inhabitable core, first level plan

1 Entrance2 Storage3 Bathroom4 Technical shaft5 Kitchen

Inhabitable core, second level plan

6 Sleeping alcove7 Shelf / hanger8 Technical shaft 9 Storage

When you first heard your new home was modelled on a boarding house you had doubts ...!but after living here for a few months you can’t imagine a better form of life. It’s not a hotel, and it’s not a rental flat, it’s a well-organised communal household, which allows the ideal balance of private enclosure and social contact. Everything you need is provided!–!your personal totem is a two-storey utility core containing private spaces for sleeping, washing and preparing food. The open-plan areas between you and your neighbours are shared, and you spend the days here working and socialising. You feel liberated in your totem: you don’t need to buy furniture, sign up for utilities or get internet installed. It’s all as easy as booking a room. Most of all, there is no housework!–!cleaning, laundry and all the other domestic chores are included in your rent. This home makes perpetual labour history.

96

12 2

3

4 5 2

6

78

9

9

60cm

View of boarding house in Boreham Avenue, London

View of boarding house in Goswell Road, London

View of the interior space with entrances to the inhabitable cores

View of the interior space with sofas and desks embedded along the perimeter

Unused land in proximity of London’s Crossrail as sites for the boarding house

1 Hayes Harlington, Botwell Lane

5 West Ealing Manor Road

9 Whitechapel, Pedley Street

2 Southall, Uxbridge Road

6 Ealing Broadway Florence Road

10 Canary Wharf, Salter Street

3 Hanwell, Lower Boston Road

7 Acton Main Lane, Shelimar Road 11 Royal Victoria, Boreham Avenue

4 Hanwell, Rosebank Road

8 Farringdon, Clerkenwell Road

12 Royal Victoria, Coolfin Road

Typical plan of a boarding house

The basic system, composed of a load-bearingskeleton hosting regularly distributed cores, canbe adapted to different conditions. Depending on the available space, the modular structure can develop in a variety of urban morphologies by expanding both vertically and horizontally. The frame is stable enough to support a mid-rise tower, while the staircases

are part of the pattern of cores. Lifts can be attached to the façade as add-on elements. If the site allows it, the boarding house can frame a courtyard, offering a shared, open cloister to the guests. In some cases, the prototype can take over a whole block and be deployed as a sequence of linear buildings separated by gardens.

9 10 11 12

5 6 7 8

1 2 3 4

1

1

2

2

3

3

4

4

5

5

6

6

7

7

8

8

9

9

10

10

11

11

12

12

5km 2.4m

is consistently rejected by a generation that increasingly resists marriage. Instead, an alternative means to reconsider the rhythms of our working and affective lives is put forward – an act, perhaps, of realism, against the ideology of the domestic which our generation neither can afford, nor desires.

3 The housing model we put forward can be formulated as an attempt to rethink a genealogy of projects of living spaces that we could define as boarding houses. The boarding house is a residential complex in which the inhabitants rent their space for a limited amount of time. It distinguishes itself from both the hotel, and the rental flat, because all chores pertaining to domestic labour (cleaning and cooking, in particular) are conceived as work, professionally offered by those who run the house, and paid for by the tenants. While a hotel might not offer to cater to domestic chores, due to the very short stay of the clients, in a rental flat domestic labour is always performed within the family structure, and unpaid. On the contrary, in the boarding house domestic labour is professionalised and waged. This peculiarity frees the tenants from the need to perform their household chores, while making cooking and cleaning more efficient by sharing resources.

This model emerged as a response to two issues that had arisen in mature capitalist societies since the 17th century: on the one hand, the social ambition to control, house and make productive the poor and, on the other, the market need to house single men displaced by work. One precedent of the boarding house were therefore the hostels and hotels catering to travelling working men of diverse conditions – from sailors to miners to scholars and artists, these men were uprooted from their families, and could neither afford nor manage to organise a more traditional form of dwelling for themselves. If most examples are very humble, we should also consider that this category contains luxury residential hotels that were very diffused in the West since the 1800s. However, the other precedent is the workhouse, an institution where a minimum welfare provision – bed and board – would be provided to the poor in exchange for work.

Neither of these types was born out of philanthropic concerns as they merely accommodated shifts in labour patterns. Similarly, the boarding house proper would emerge in the mid-1800s as a response to the large influx of foreign workers in newly industrialised cities, or newly colonised territories. We are witnessing today a similar

shift in working conditions and it is precisely in such a conjuncture that the model can become relevant again. In the mid-1800s, entrepreneurs and charitable organisations tried to reform the boarding house; the Rowton Houses diffused in England, for instance, represented an effort to offer cheap and ‘hygienic’ living condition to the working class. However, this could only remain a temporary solution, as the precariousness implicit in the model was not well suited to the kind of social structure the industrial city needed. The best model indeed was the family home, which would provide a compensatory haven from the stress of the factory, while also representing a prime engine of consumption, and fuelling the growth of the real-estate market. Boarding houses did none of these things; they were not paradigms of idyllic intimacy, they did not encourage the tenants to buy more furniture, knick-knacks and clothes, and needless to say they did not push users to tie themselves to a larger dwelling through long rental contracts or mortgages. So towards the end of the century the boarding house was perceived as the bearer of a social stigma which was entirely instrumental in its eventual disappearance.

Only in the global crisis of the 1930s did its relevance and usefulness become apparent once again. Living in a boarding house meant reducing private space to a minimum, owning few belongings, not settling down; as workers followed opportunities to make a living, they found themselves willing to compromise on the values of rootedness, belonging and kinship that were paramount in traditional societies and that the Industrial Revolution had already weakened. Also in this case, authorities had to accept the presence of this kind of accommodation; however, as soon as economic conditions improved after the war, boarding houses became strictly regulated in all the Western world, and in particular in the United States, where they were virtually outlawed on the basis of their poor living conditions.

Again, the reason to eradicate them was ideological and economic rather than philanthropic: these places did nothing to mask or naturalise the dire working conditions of their occupants. They did not sweeten precarious, dangerous and alienating jobs by making them palatable through the compensation offered from the family home. They did not send the workers back to their wives in the evening, but rather clustered them in what could potentially become a hotbed of rebellion. They did not encourage their inhabitants to plan ahead, and therefore to buy commodities, get mortgages, get married. Paradoxically, they even enabled a form of

LIKE A ROLLING STONERevisiting the Architecture of the Boarding House

1 Our proposal is a dwelling meant to host a dweller for a limited length of time. We imagine this new type as an alternative to the nuclear family apartment, which dominates the housing market both in London and elsewhere and that is both unaffordable and undesirable for singles and short-term tenants. For these reasons we propose a living space that requires no commitment in terms of investment and maintenance. The type can be applied on sites of different size and configuration as it is based on an adaptable, modular skeleton, filled with single-occupant units. The unit is a two-storey core, which contains bathroom, storage, a small kitchen surface at the lower level, and a generous sleeping alcove for up to two persons above it. Although it is affordable for a single dweller, the latter can invite his/her partner into his/her individual space. This individual space can be seen as a self-sufficient interior, as the access to the upper level is contained within the core itself, behind a door that can be closed to isolate the user from the noise and activity of the surroundings. In this way, the bathroom can be accessed directly from the upper level which is imagined as an intimate, quiet space – a soft platform to sleep, read, watch videos; a large round window gives the upper level air, light and a view. The module of core and skeleton is defined, but can be multiplied in different horizontal and vertical configurations to fit different sites. We believe these sites should be in proximity to major transport infrastructure as the users of such a type would need to be highly mobile; we retraced a constellation of possible sites around the Crossrail line, cutting an east–west section to London and touching upon very diverse urban conditions.

2 As housing prices soared in the last decade, buying a house in London has become extremely difficult for first-time buyers, almost unfeasible for middle-income workers and outright impossible for singles. The rental market caters to an increasingly significant portion of the population including young, educated workers under 40 – those who would traditionally be expected to form a family and buy a house. The pre-eminence of rental is not only a reflection of the current condition of real estate, but also a consequence of the habits and needs of these subjects. Young workers not only cannot buy: they might not want to buy in the first place, as both their jobs and private lives are fundamentally precarious. Most of this generation work on short-term contracts that

make commitment to stable accommodation undesirable, as one might need to relocate quite often to adapt to a labour market that is increasingly volatile. These workers, who tend to be single, or involved in short-term relationships, postpone the start of a family until a later phase of their lives – or write it off altogether. He/she finds him/herself in a very fragile economic situation as it represents a perfect target of speculation. He or she is not tied to a spouse, family or community able to support him/her financially and socially; as his/her future cannot be planned, demanding better or fairer conditions is impossible.

In this situation, architects seem to have very limited agency. However, we do not believe this is the case: on the contrary, we argue that the untenable living conditions of the precarious, single young worker are also created and aggravated through the repetition of one single type of housing, that is to say housing for the nuclear family. The replication of dwellings meant to contain the nuclear family – a male parent, a female parent, and one or two children – excludes the easy possibility of accommodation of a plethora of subjects who don’t fit the mould, from elderly people to childless couples, and, more significantly, the precarious single worker which is perhaps the single largest demographic excluded from the nuclear family apartment type. The family flat is impossible to subdivide, difficult to share and over-dimensioned for a single. The family flat enforces a specific way of living and its predominance equals a virtual imposition of that way of living over others.

For these reasons we think the moment has come to put forward an architectural alternative to the existing models on the market, that is to say, the family flat, the students’ dormitory and the hotel. These models do not only impose a rigid choreography of use – they also imply a problematic economic rationale. The family flat – the temple par excellence of the ‘productive’ population – needs a family to be maintained, paid for and cleaned: a family composed of at least one productive (male) member able to pay for it, and one re-productive (female) member able to take care of it. Any other economic model, let alone social or affective model, won’t work. On the other hand, the commercial dormitory and the hotel are designed for users who are supposed to be ‘not productive’ – the student, and the tourist – simply because they are not stable, and are therefore exploited as source of extraction of profit. But the equation between stability and productivity is not valid any more –if it ever has been – and the re-productive, domestic labour of the housewife

Private renting in the UK has doubled over the course of the last 10 years.

The politics of domestic labour forces us to adopt certain power roles. We are only liberated from the family when there is no longer any obligation to do housework.

The boarding house is to the home what co-working space is to the office.

The totem structure is impossible to categorise, and it exists at the junction of architecture, infrastructure and furniture.

The number of temporary workers in the UK has increased by 20% over the last six years.

In a boarding house, domestic labour is separated from the individual cell, which becomes a pure temple for living.

Private renters in the UK spend almost 40% of their income on rent in comparison with the European average of 28%.

gender equality, for, once domestic labour is professionalised, the woman is no longer the servant of her husband. As increasing numbers of single women entered the labour force after the First World War, boarding houses offered them a possibility to escape the patriarchal house without entering a new contract with a dominant male. For all these reasons, boarding houses were highly problematic places, carriers of a possibility to reject the ‘natural order of things’. They could be accepted in extreme scenarios – the colonisation of the American West, the expansion of industrial cities in Britain, the restructuring of Depression-era economy – but they have never been an endgame or a supported political project.

And indeed if the boarding house represented at times an emergency solution, it also stands as a place of possibilities: of freedom from perceived hierarchies, and of social aggregation and solidarity. Perhaps we find ourselves once again in a condition of shifting labour patterns; boarding houses have recently reappeared in those pockets of the post-industrial world where competition on the knowledge labour market is fiercest. In San Francisco, the tech industry has sparked the diffusion of communes and boarding houses where the tenant can only rent a ‘pod’; in Seoul, increasing numbers of young graduates can barely afford to rent a single room without a window in a goshiwon – establishments initiated as rentable study rooms in which, with time, first a bed and then a bathroom joined the initial provision of desk and chair.

4 Our boarding houses for London are meant to be affordable housing solutions for temporary inhabitants to be built in various sites in London in proximity to the stops of the Crossrail line. This new railway infrastructure that will cut the city from east to west will allow distant and peripheral areas to be quickly connected with central neighbourhoods. Areas of the city that at present are not ideal for workers that need to be mobile, and that rely mostly on public transport, will soon become potential sites where lower costs of land might make housing more accessible, tenable and desirable. Additionally, our boarding houses are built on sites that at present lack a clear use definition – urban vacancies, neglected sites, residual parcels or forgotten interstitial areas. All these sites could be leased or obtained at lower rates from either public or private owners through special planning agreements. Time-limited building permissions could be granted in exchange of controlled rent-price boarding houses.

5 Although all boarding houses are different from each other in terms of volume, all of them share the same modular structural systems, the same interiors and the same finishing. All boarding houses are based on a modular concrete skeleton with prefabricated concrete slabs. Outer elevations are obtained with light insulated metal panelling and metal frame windows. Vertical circulation varies according to the conditions of the site and the overall dimensions of the boarding houses – some of them have internal staircases and lift, others external prefabricated staircases. All interiors are based on the repetition of the same inhabitable core to be placed at the centre of each structural module. These prefabricated elements are identical to each other and are stacked – once the concrete skeleton and slabs are completed – one on top of each other with the help of a crane. These cores are stacked so that pipes and cables that are contained in a vertical shaft placed at one corner of each unit can serve the whole column of units. Inhabitable cores are the most technological components of the entire boarding house and their production inside factories rather than on-site is meant to simplify the construction process, improve quality and reduce costs.

Around the core, double-height shared spaces can be used by the inhabitants as living rooms or working spaces depending on their preferences. This space, which is rather limited in terms of overall surface, is equipped with built-in furniture such as sofas and tables to be placed in the bow windows along the elevations. These elements – together with the part of the core that is completely open to this communal space, such as a working ledge equipped with a sink and a hot plate that the inhabitants can use for cooking or crafts – reduce the need of inhabitants to purchase any kind of furniture that they might not be able to take along with them once they decide to move out. The result is a housing model that is no longer made of rooms, but of continuous spaces and individual alcoves. Besides responding to the need for housing of temporary inhabitants, the aim of our proposal is to use the model of the boarding house to de-domesticise housing and thus to challenge the latter’s economy and ideology.

The project team for Dogma was comprised of Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara, with Luciano Aletta, Ezio Melchiorre, Andrea Migotto and Stéphanie Savio.

The project team for Black Square was Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, with Jongwon Na and Lara Yegenoglu.

YEARSSpace for living, not speculation

Julia King

Interior views of a naked apartment in various stages of completionThese illustrations by Anna MillWhen looking to buy a new home, you suspected you were

being taken for a ride. The tacky countertops, ugly lights and built-in ovens!–!the finishes and fittings were so expensive, and not at all your style. That’s where developers make most of their money, and you simply refused to pay. Your home is designed from the bank’s perspective, stripping out every cost that is not required by your mortgage. It’s called ‘shell’ construction!–!just a roof over your head, running water, electricity, a toilet and a basin. Nothing else. Not even a kitchen sink! Some people thought it looked bare, but you saw a blank canvas. You saved a lot of money and, over time, created a space that reflects the way you choose to live. The price of your home is tied to shell value, locking in the original discount. Your fixtures and fittings are your own, and you can either take them with you, recycle or resell.

108

Visualisation of the ‘Welcome Home’ letter distributed as a prop in the exhibition

7KLV�LV�RQH�RI�WKH�IHZ�SODFHV�LQ�/RQGRQ�ZKHUH�RQH�FDQ�OLYH�DʄRUGDEO\��LQ�JHQHURXV�VSDFHV���ZLWKRXW�KDYLQJ�KDG�WKH�OXFN�RI�D�ORWWHU\�ZLQ�RU�DQ�LQKHULWDQFH��:HOFRPH��DQG�WKDQN�\RX�IRU�EHLQJ�SDUW�RI�LW�

Housing for all – for years to come

$V�\RX�NQRZ��W\SLFDO�KRPH�RZQHUVKLS�LQYROYHV�DFFUXLQJ�D�VL]DEOH�GHEW�XSIURQW� ,QVWHDG��E\�EHLQJ�SDUW�RI�1DNHG�+RXVH�\RX�

� ���6WDUW�ZLWK�]HUR�GHEW� ���3D\�D�ȸVKHOO�UHQWȹ�HDFK�PRQWK� � ���$FFUXH�HTXLW\�LQ�WKH�ȸVKHOOȹ�RI�WKH�EXLOGLQJ�RYHU�WLPH

,I�\RX�GHFLGH�WR�PRYH��\RX�FDQ�VHOO�\RXU�HTXLW\�EDFN�WR�1DNHG�+RXVH�ȳ�DQG�EHQHʅW�IURP�WKH�ULVH�LQ�YDOXH�RI�WKH�EXLOGLQJ�RYHU�WLPH�LI��LQGHHG��WKH�PDUNHW�YDOXH�KDV�ULVHQ���RU�XVH�LW�DV�HTXLW\�WRZDUGV�D�VHFRQG�SURSHUW\��

A housing revolution

7KH�UHVXOW�LV�WKDW�\RX�EHQHʅW�IURP�ULVHV�LQ�WKH�KRXVLQJ�PDUNHW�ZLWKRXW�KDYLQJ�WR�WDNH�RQ�D�KXJH�DPRXQW�RI�GHEW��$QG�WKH�HQWU\�SRLQW�IRU�QHZFRPHUV�WR�WKH�EXLOGLQJ�UHPDLQV�DʄRUGDEOH�IRU�\HDUV�WR�FRPH��ZKLFK�EHQHʅWV�RXU�FRPPXQLW\�DV�D�ZKROH�

Better than renting

%HFDXVH�\RX�RZQ�WKH�HTXLW\�LQ�WKH�EXLOGLQJ��WKHUH�LV�QR�ODQGORUG�ZKR�FDQ�LQFUHDVH�\RXU�UHQW�RU�DVN�\RX�WR�PRYH�RXW��,QVWHDG��\RX�JHW�WKH�VHFXULW\�RI�OLYLQJ�VRPHZKHUH�WKDWȶV�PRUH�WUXO\�\RXUV���

Bare necessities

2Q�PRYLQJ�LQ��RQO\�WKH�EDUH�QHFHVVLWLHV�DUH�SURYLGHG��WKH�EXLOGLQJ�LV�ZDWHUWLJKW��ZLWK�HOHFWULFV��ZDWHU��KHDWLQJ��YHQWLODWLRQ� DQG�VDQLWDWLRQ��7KLV�KDV�DOORZHG�XV�WR�NHHS�WKH�FRVWV�RI�WKH�EXLOGLQJ�GRZQ�DQG�IRU�\RX�WR�ʅW�RXW�WKH�DSDUWPHQW� LQ�D�ZD\�WKDW�VXLWV�\RX��

Customising your space

7KH�VSDFH�ZLWKLQ�WKH�DSDUWPHQW�LV�\RXUV�WR�FXVWRPLVH�DQG�DGDSW�DV�PXFK�DV�\RX�ZDQW��)RU�H[DPSOH��\RX�FDQ�DGG�RU�UHPRYH�ZDOOV�ZLWKLQ�\RXU�DSDUWPHQW�RU�SXW�XS�DQ\�ʅ[HG�IXUQLWXUH�RU�VWRUDJH�XQLWV�WKDW�\RXȶG�OLNH�WR�DGG��<RX�FDQ�GHFRUDWH�LW�DQ\�ZD\�\RX�OLNH��

,I�\RX�VHOO��WKH�QHZ�RZQHU�LV�EX\LQJ�RQO\�WKH�ȵVKHOOȶ�UDWKHU�WKDQ�DQ\�RI�WKH�FKDQJHV�\RXȶYH�PDGH��<RX�PD\�VHOO�SDUWV�RI�WKH�LQWHULRU�WR�WKHP�VHSDUDWHO\�� RU�WKH\�PD\�DVN�\RX�WR�UHWXUQ�WKH�DSDUWPHQW�WR�LWV�ȵQDNHGȶ�VWDWH��

<RX�KDYH�WKH�IUHHGRP�DQG�DXWRQRP\�WR�GR�ZKDW�\RX�OLNH�ZLWK�\RXU�DSDUWPHQW� ,WȶV�\RXUV�WR�PDNH�

:H�ZLVK�\RX�WKH�ZDUPHVW�RI�ZHOFRPHV� DQG�KRSH�WKDW�\RX�KDYH�D�ORQJ�DQG�KDSS\�VWD\�LQ�\RXU�QHZ�KRPH��

Welcome to your naked apartment.

View of interior of a naked apartment Image by Hugo McCloud and Harry Dwyer

25to3o 80

371

4

26

Site plan of the Clarence Road GaragesLetter of support from the Naked House Community Builders, partners and advisers to the Years model

The average cost of a home in London is now £530,000–that's beyond the reach of most people. This crisis in affordability is defining the lives of a generation. Crisis necessitates a creative response.

Naked House is a group of young Londoners who decided to developour own affordable housing model. The idea was born out of desperation as we struggled to find a home that we could afford and that was designed with us in mind.

We reject the obscene accumulation of wealth in homes that is commonplace in London and want homes to be affordable for everyone, always.

Our model goes back to basics – saving build costs by creating communities of genuinely affordable “naked” homes.

The Naked House unit will be a well-designed shell. It will provide a base layer that can be built on, improved, adapted and extended over time by the occupant. We have taken the banks’ requirements for getting a mortgage as our brief. The Naked House unit will meet these requirements and nothing else.

Driving down build cost is only part of the equation. To make homes genuinely affordable, you need to work on every component of the house building process. We have begun with the practice of a traditional house builder, taken it apart and turned it upside down.

Land cost is a significant component. To remove this cost, we have developed a leasehold arrangement on public land. This enables us to sell Naked House units for what they cost to build and nothing more. The occupant then pays a monthly ground rent to the Council who owns the land. This brings long-term revenue to cash-strapped local authorities and makes the homes much cheaper at the outset.

We are not making a profit, so there is no developer margin built into our model – just income to cover operating costs. And there are no sales and marketing costs. Anyone can sign up for a Naked House as long as they earn under £90,000. We don’t need fancy show homes or sales brochures. The homes will speak for themselves. To ensure that the Naked House units remain affordable in perpetuity, we have a resale covenant in the lease. This locks in the original discount for subsequent purchasers.

This is a model that can be replicated, so we are working to secure plots of land across London. Over 200 London households have joined the project already and we’re growing every day.

SPACE FOR LIVING, NOT SPECULATIONFinance as an opportunity, housing as a home.

The most important form of exclusion these days is in housing: who gets to live in a city?Suketu Mehta

Housing today is perhaps the most important form of social exclusion, and arguably the defining issue of our time. It is universally accepted that the UK has a housing crisis not seen since the Second World War, while simultaneously facing Victorian levels of inequality. Whether we need to build more homes, make changes to stamp duty, tax foreign investors, introduce property tax, restrict mortgage lending, fill empty homes, redistribute wealth or all of the above, architects – or architecture – seem to have been written out of the equation.

The QuestionIt is in this context, that we (myself and ‘industry advisor’ Naked House) were asked to ‘critique the speculative model of property’ within the time condition of years. We proposed to go beyond an interrogation of the kind of housing that would be good to see in the UK to critique and speculate the housing ‘problem’ through the lens of the market, regulation, policy and finance; specifically the mortgage which has played perhaps the most important role in the rise of Britain's debt economy. For it is ultimately the mortgage that fuels the economy that surrounds housing, with homeowners often spending more on interest than the actual build cost of the home, perpetuating an artificial regime of scarcity through debt.

Furthermore we asked: what would housing – and the way it is financed – look like if not predicated on the idea of the house as an asset for speculation but as a home? And critically, how can the economic and political structures underpinning the current production of housing present themselves as design parameters? The aim was to develop a housing model which could achieve affordability over years.

Because of the propositional nature of the brief, while rejecting the profound social inequalities that manifest through private property, we decided not to reject the notion of ownership and capital gain associated with private property, but to imagine capital appreciation as a common rather than individual good. This is an important point because, while indeed it is important to know what you oppose, in the spirit of getting things done perhaps an approach to political activism is the ability to operate from within ‘the system’ through a series of camouflage bluffs.

Finance as a design parameterBenefiting from the partnership with Naked House, the natural starting point was to seek opportunity in the mortgage itself; something Naked House is already doing. In 2015 they won a competition by New London Architecture (NLA) calling for solutions to solve the housing crisis with an entry that proposed stripped-back, shell-like houses that enable homeowners to customise and adapt the layout of their homes in order to fit their needs. For the Biennale we asked how we could seek more opportunity in this strategy beyond reducing ‘build’ costs.

In addition, given current economic trends, a concern for the present Naked House model is that even with a re-sale covenant to maintain affordability, with housing market values now far outstripping median wages, units would quickly become unaffordable even for this model, particularly in London (Fig. 1). In order to push the design and associated financing with affordability in mind, we engaged with a mortgage expert at a major high street bank. Primarily this confirmed that the minimum requirements for a mortgage from a finance perspective rest on a loose notion of 'habitable', universally defined by all banks as: hot and cold running water, services for a bathroom and kitchen – specifying only the ability of the homeowner to carry out ablutions – and the means of heating and lighting. The emphasis of the toilet should not be underestimated: our shit is arguably the final frontier of the hyper commodification of our lives as the only basic dwelling need charged as a service tax and not a metered (and measured) product like gas, electricity and water.

In doing away with all except the minimum requirements of finance we are left with a ‘habitable’ – ie, serviced – shell laying the groundwork for the Venice proposal: a multi-storey apartment structure and the associated financial diagram to maintain affordability. The exhibition at Venice is a model representation of these minimum requirements.

Small sites, big opportunityIf London had the same density today as it did in 1815, contained within its existing footprint it could accommodate nearly 35 million people. Densifying parts of London is surely one of the many solutions required to deal with the housing crisis. One of the problems is that councils left with small pockets of land are currently not well equipped, or phrased differently, the contemporary planning paradigm is not suited to developing such small plots. One such council, Enfield, has engaged with Naked House to

Current market trend

Naked House resale covenant

Median wages

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Standard mortgage model

Proposed model

Valu

e i.

e. A

cces

sD

ebt

Ow

nership

Time

No Debt High Debt

Hig

h Fr

eedo

m

to D

esig

nM

inim

al F

reed

om

to D

esig

n

Time

Domesticity requires a lot less than we might think. What are the core qualities that make up a home? And how basic could its material conditions be for it to still feel homely?

The price of the typical UK home is forecast to rise by 50% in the next 10 years.

Without price controls, discounted house sales (through subsidies or reduced construction costs) will only benefit their first owners, and lead to accelerated market speculation.

More than 170 tenants were evicted every day in 2015, the highest figure since records began.

Home ownership in the UK is now so unaffordable that the average age of a first-time mortgage applicant is 39.

Family relationships are fundamentally reconfigured when the home becomes primarily valued as an asset.

If you moved into rented accommodation in London today, you will spend about £91,500 on rent before buying your first home.

look for solutions to develop small plots such as the Clarence Road site – which has been used as a real world condition to inform the proposal (see Clarence Road Garages).

Our proposal begins with this arrangement: that land would be leased to a parent company – a not-for-profit community interest company (CIC) acting like a developer – for a minimum 125-year period at a 5 per cent return on the value of the land through a ground rent. The land would be valued at the point of achieving planning permission and would be payable on an annual basis to the Council. Each homeowner would likely pay around £3,000 a year in ground rent. This provides the council with a long-term (and much-needed) revenue stream and removes the intractable land value problem from the equation. The parent company – which for the sake of this exercise has been imagined as industry partner, Naked House – would negotiate the lease, take out a commercial loan to build the shell and assume overall liability as the parent entity. The loan would be secured against the head lease and the parent company, limited by shares, would own 51 per cent of this entity (the shell), with the rest owned by the residents. Unlike mortgage-based models, where homeowners are burdened with debt, here ownership is accrued over time without debt (Fig. 2). Decoupling shell and unitThe shell – based on a 423m2 block in Enfield – would have space (referred to as a unit) for 20 housing-compliant, one-bed apartments of 50m2 each, roughly costing £1.8 million to build. This cost would be transferred into an annual ‘shell rent’ to the residents in addition to the ground rent, plus a fee for maintenance; cumulatively amounting to £600 per month per unit, well below the local average.

Residents buying a unit would pay a nominal fee of £1 for the space and would become a leaseholder in the parent company. The fit-out would be as per the means and desires of the resident, and could be funded through cash over time or raising a loan with the bank, and is completely separate from the finance associated with the shell. The apartments would always cost £1 and upon re-sale the units would return to their ‘naked’ state. Value would only be realised at point of re-sale and potential borrowing could happen for second properties based on upmarket values of shares associated with the shell. The key idea in this proposal is that wealth appreciation is shared with the residents from the shell and not the actual unit they reside in within it.

Cultural shiftThis proposal aims to influence cultural attitudes towards the idea of the home as a store of wealth.In recent years, the home has come to rival pensions as a long-term financial investment. The potential return on investment heavily influences whether to add another bathroom to your property, or what colour to paint your home in the event of re-sale, and so on. In bringing complete control back to residents without the burden of debt, housing can be enjoyed as a home not an asset (Fig. 3). It should be recognised that the ideas that underpin this model are not new. Many aspects of the proposed financial system already exist in Germany. The difference in this case is an emphasis on the formation of institutions with the capacity to operate at scale – not relying on individuals or the small groups often associated with projects such as Baugruppe in Berlin, or Elemental in Iquique.

Much emphasis during this process has been on engaging with, and seeking affirmation from, large-scale financial institutions. Local housing activism can only achieve so much, a radical collective approach is needed and architecture, or architects, can play a critical role in this if we are willing to engage with the systems that underpin advanced capitalist production.

People need to stop thinking of decent housing as something only a few deserve, and realize that it is something we all need ... Never has our financial model for allocating that housing been more obviously wanting than it is now.Danny Dorling

DECADESA room without functions

Hesselbrand

Maquette of a room without functionsYour home is functionless, but that’s not a bad thing. Instead of cramming specific programmes into the smallest area possible, it is designed to provide you with generous, adaptable, useful spaces. You occupy two spaces, one inside the structural core and one outside it.

There are no predetermined rooms with predetermined activities!–!no ‘kitchens’, ‘bedrooms’ or ‘bathrooms’. Your home has a diverse range of spatial conditions that suggest different activities. There are qualities of light and dark, open and closed, private and public, wet and dry, soft and hard. Your square bed captures the essence of your home: it doesn’t dictate which way you should sleep, or even how many people can rest here together. Over the decades your life has changed from youth to old age and from singleton to parent. But your home has always accommodated your needs. Your neighbours reflect this demographic spread, and the residents’ community promotes intergenerational exchange. Twice a week you volunteer as a childminder for the building.

120

View of the interior: a space for intimacy View of the interior: a space without pretentionsTypical plan of the housing model Cross section indicating alternating aspects

0 5

0 5

View of housing model: a proposal for a new form of life in the city

PRIME

Our ambition is to design a new housing model that provides homes for the growing number of people in London who struggle to dwell in an environment built almost entirely around the nuclear family. The housing crisis is from our perspective not simply a question about increasing the supply, but a call for questioning how we live. Today we spend an increasingly large part of our lives outside the pattern of traditional family life, resulting in a growing need for alternative forms of housing. In response to this condition we imagine an intergenerational housing model for the elderly and the young who are the two fastest growing demographics in London. Their increasing presence gives them large political and economical influence, and provides a great opportunity for proposing a new form of life in the city.

New forms of lifeIn only a few decades the traditional passage through life has seen a radical shift, changing the basis for our human relations. As we live longer and settle down at a later age, we have become lifelong learners in constant pursuit of new experiences. However, this spirit of self-realisation is paralleled by the mourning of an era where the individual enjoyed an unprecedented freedom. Today, the widening gap between wages and the cost of living has made it almost impossible to live in London without support from financial institutions or the family. In this nearly neo-feudal society, we become increasingly indebted and will never be entirely free. To counter such an evolution, we aim to use the full potential of architecture to provide citizens with housing and workspace that assumes less financial risk (for user and investor alike) and instead is capable of offering a more socially and economically sustainable form of life.

Changing demographicsOver the next 20 years London will grow by 1.5 million people, generating a need for 50,000 new homes to be built per year. Nevertheless, the unavoidable problems of the housing crisis should not undermine the urgency for imagining new models of housing. Living and working can converge in new forms to both enhance the possibilities, and ease the pressures of living in London. The elderly and the young are the two fastest growing social groups in the city, yet they are the least provided for in terms of specific forms of architecture. Together they are reshaping the demographic landscape, putting enormous pressure on the city. As the most economically and politically influential groups, bringing them together could offer a powerful tool for questioning the status quo of housing architecture.

LocalsIn urban areas with high density and living costs, there is a growing tendency for the ageing population to consider downsizing their home without moving to a new area. The same areas often have few young people working in the service sector, leading to a demographic polarisation. Our proposal is situated in Chelsea in central London, an exemplary site for these conditions. It provides a new typology of housing combined with integrated and semi-public services, attractive to both the elderly and the young. The elderly provide an already established public life in the area, while the young bring new influences and services, creating a more socially sustainable area where people can be locals across generations.

Timeless architectureWe believe that large-scale housing is key to imagining new life in London. Architecture has great potential spatially to promote and stimulate more collaborative forms of living that can improve both economic and social conditions for its users. As an alternative to meeting short-term investment returns on housing, we propose a long-lasting design that stays relevant for decades. By reimagining the ways we live and work, across generations in the city, we can revoke the prevailing transitory form of dwelling that predominates in London today. This approach requires a constant dialogue between the timely and the timeless, between what it means to live today and what constitutes the eternal qualities of space and the human form.

Together and apartWe propose a model for housing that allows people to be able to live out their entire life within its structural walls. A model where communitarian living bridges generational gaps and recognises the interdependency between social and private space. Our proposal is an architecture where living and working, together and apart, are not contradictions but complementary poles.

Slab and plinthThe project is composed of a residential block and a communal plinth. The block is comprised of a single row of living units, which occasionally are joined together allowing for multiple sizes of households. The block connects to the plinth on the ground floor in a large threshold space accessible to both the residents and the wider community. This semi-public space reinstates one of the very cornerstones of the city in the building – the possibility of unpredictable meetings. A broad range of services along with workspaces is offered within the lower levels of the plinth, ordered to create an environment where the inhabitants of the building and

View of the interior: a space for the self View of the interior: a space for belonging

Future-proofing our homes means abandoning architecture’s reliance on technology or specific pieces of furniture.

Functionalist space is designed around ergonomically optimised actions that determine precise social relations. When cultural norms change, these spaces can quickly become impractical or redundant.

Most building materials used in new housing in the UK have a lifespan of around 30 years. Yet over half of the existing homes are over 70 years old.

1 in 3 children born in Britain today will live to 100.

Rationalism is the design of space through abstract or universal ratios. In 18th-century Georgian Britain, terraced houses used Classical proportions and harmonic dimensions to create adaptable, useful and timeless spaces.

the users of the spaces below can meet. By permitting multiple and unrestrained ways of entering and moving through the building, the distinction between inside and outside (what typically constitutes the division between private and public domain) is challenged. Consequently, the proposal as a whole assumes the responsibility of offering a social and inclusive platform to both residents and visitors alike.

Function does not equal spaceThe locus of the project is the residential unit which, unlike the traditional apartment, has neither corridor nor service space. It consists of a single room that holds a series of differentiated spaces. It is a room without functions where actions can take place where needed and desired, designed to encourage the user to become more conscious about the environment he or she inhabits. To allow for a different form of flexibility, the room is split diagonally, both abstractly and figuratively. This produces spaces that are defined by their qualities rather than their functions. Light and dark, open and closed, private and public, wet and dry, soft and hard; each part of the unit offers a combination of different qualities. Unlike the promise of flexibility by virtue of reconfiguring space, here it is the permanent and specific form of the architecture that allows for loose use. All different spaces within the single room are designed to avoid traditional specifications of capacity or orientation, in order to question our need for adaptable, useful and timeless architecture.

The solid and the voidThe floor area of one living unit is 37m2, equalling the minimum standard for a single person dwelling in London. To make every square metre count, circulation space is removed so that wherever you are you can always sense the room in its entirety. The two halves of the diagonal layout, the solid and the void, create a space that gradually decreases towards the back of the unit. Here, the windows are smaller to make more intimate spaces and create a sense of privacy. At the opposite end, the room opens up towards the communal balcony with a large window frame, providing indoor and outdoor seating. This design creates a home wherein a person can define a space and use for themselves in his or her own right, and the mediating between social and private makes collective life easily accessible but also as voluntary as possible.

Service structure and spaceThe walls that separate the residential units constitute the core, which is the primary space maker. The core walls reconcile service, structure and space, making them inseparable from one another and giving the building a simple logic to a range of complex spatial scales.

The relationship between service, structure and space is absolute; the walls making up the core are not only the structural element but also organise how you live and what make it possible to invent and refine your own life. The plumbing of the housing unit has been designed with the same care as the rest of the architecture, allowing for appliances and fittings to go beyond a singular purpose and transcend a merely functional use. The shower provides an example of where a monofunctional purpose makes way for a space to take on different roles; having the potential to be used as a private balcony or study or even both.

Bathroom and kitchenAlthough plumbing made the kitchen and bathroom inseparable from each other, they have always developed in opposite directions spatially. The bathroom has evolved from a chamber pot and screen in the corner of a room into a dedicated space with fixed furniture. Meanwhile, the kitchen has evolved from a room dominated by single-use, heavy elements into a mobile island. In line with this trajectory we propose a seamless bathroom and the nomadic kitchen. The bathroom can be accessed from two sides and is placed at the centre of the household, both structurally and conceptually. It was the first private space in the home, and it may become the last. It is the only door that when locked arouses no suspicion. It is the space where you can be who you are when no one else is looking; a space without pretensions. At the opposite side of the central wall – and conceptually contrary to the bathroom – there is a long ledge. A concealed wireless charging plate runs through the room like an electric mantelpiece, permitting devices to be liberated from the wall socket. Objects such as frying pans contain their own heating elements and operate wirelessly, allowing cooking to take place at any point along the ledge – including from bed. Cooking becomes a purely social act.

We are in a situation where the unification of private and public domains, the imperceptible division between work and leisure and an overall housing shortage dominate every generation in London. In this context, our proposal aims to interpret and address critically the relationship between city and building, structure and space, individual and collective. We believe that we are capable of demanding much more from the spaces we inhabit, and our proposal puts forward a new strategy for architectural design, answering to our new needs. An architecture more open to interpretation and based on universal qualities can answer growing concerns for equality, inclusivity and personal freedom.

131

This publication was produced to accompany the 2016 Home Economics exhibition, which took place from May 28 to November 27 at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. It was commissioned by the British Council and published by The Spaces with REAL.

Editorial Director Jack Self

EditorsFinn Williams Shumi Bose

Production EditorsJulia DawsonEmma Capps

Catalogue Design OK-RM

Printer Graphicom

Copyright 2016 The Spaceswww.thespaces.comCopyright 2016 REALwww.real.foundation

CatalogueAcknowledgementsPocket Living Mike TsangRosa Hammond HortonNatalie Steyaert David Crosby Cathy EastburnTom Milsom Global GuardiansUnite StudentsLondon Borough of Barking and Dagenham

First editionISBN 978-0-9573914-8-2

Shumi Bose, Jack Self and Finn Williams are curators of the British Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Their individual practices cross a number of disciplines, amongst them design, education, planning, developing policy, writing, editing and curating.

Black Square is the office of Maria S. Guidici, and Dogma is the office of Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara. Aureli, Tattara and Giudici have exhibited their work widely, from gallery-based shows in London to international events like the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2014 and Venice Architecture Biennale 2012.

Hesselbrand is an international architecture practice based in London and Oslo. Founded by Martin Brandsdal, Magnus Casselbrant and Jesper Henriksson, the studio delivers a broad range of architectural services, including strategic design and research projects.

Julia King is a British-Venezuelan architect, sole practitioner and researcher in the UK and India. Currently developing low-cost housing for slum dwellers in New Delhi and Agra, her existing and ongoing body of research concerns affordable domestic typologies.

OK-RM is a London-based design studio working in the fields of art, culture and commerce. Founded in 2008 by Oliver Knight & Rory McGrath, the studio is a collaborative practice engaged in ongoing partnerships with artists, curators, editors, architects, designers and institutions.

Åyr (formerly known as AIRBNB Pavilion) is an art collective based in London whose work focuses on contemporary forms of domesticity. Åyr is founded by Fabrizio Ballabio, Alessandro Bava, Luis Ortega Govela and Octave Perrault.

The British Council is the commissioner of the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations and educational opportunities. All their work is in pursuit of charitable purposes and supports prosperity and security for the UK and globally.

REAL, or the Real Estate Architecture Laboratory, is a cultural and architectural foundation and an institutional partner of Home Economics. REAL’s dedication to spatial equality encompasses the financing and construction of architecture, its terms of ownership and its contribution to standards of living.

The Spaces is a digital publication from VF Publishing exploring new ways to live and work. From residential buildings to public domains, co-working clubs to hotels and retail hot spots, we will look at the spaces that are pushing boundaries and meet the people who are changing how we live.

Eddie Blake is a writer and senior designer at Sam Jacob Studio.

Aditya Chakrabortty is senior economics commentator for the Guardian.

Mark Cousins is a British cultural critic and architectural theorist.

Tom Dyckoff is an architectural historian, writer and broadcaster.

Neal Hudson is an associate director of Savills residential research.

Martti Kalliala is an architect whose work focuses on emerging spatial conditions.

Verity-Jane Keefe is a visual artist working predominantly within the public realm.

132

HOME ECONOMICSCommissioned and organised by the British Council

Curators Shumi BoseJack SelfFinn Williams

Room DesignersHours, Jack Self with Finn Williams and Shumi BoseDays, Åyr Months. Dogma and Black SquareYears, Julia KingDecades, Hesselbrand

Artistic Director Jack Self

Visual Identity and DesignOK-RM

Exhibition DesignHesselbrand

Structural EngineerArup

AdvisersJ.W. AndersonThe CollectiveFjordFergus HendersonNaked HousePegasusLifeRoyal Bank of Scotland

British Pavilion Selection Panel Marie Bak MortensenRob GregoryEddie Heathcote Joanna HoggCharlie Hussey Teresa Stoppani

Commissioner Vicky Richardson

Project Manager Gwen Webber

British Council Project TeamHarriet CooperMary DohertyAlastair DonaldDebbie LeaneHarriet SeabourneOscar Taylor

Pavilion ManagerCaterina de Rienzo

Events CoordinatorMyfanwy Grantham

External RelationsYuki Sumner

Public RelationsSutton PR

Technical ManagerLee Regan

Technical Team Alex BookerLuke Currall Tim EveRichard Galloway David GarnettJoseph RichardsDavid Small

Exhibition FabricationMike Smith Studio

Exhibition TranslationsPaolo Cecchetto

Exhibition Acknowledgements Francesco AnselmoAtelierOne Adrian CampbellPiero MorelloElisabetta Rabajoli

Exhibition AssistantsLiam den HamerConstanza LarachFrancesca Romana Dell’AglioUshma Thakrar

The British Council would also like to thank the following organisations for their generous support of the British Pavilion: Diamond Architects; Grosvenor Britain & Ireland; The Modern House; Valchromat.

British Pavilion Exhibition Sponsors

9 78 0 9 57 3 914 8 2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any formor by any means whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and review and certain non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. Every effort has been madeto trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in the image credits and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.