Pause to reflect

In this blog I started by exploring an early written work by Christopher Alexander, because I was attracted to his thinking and I wanted to try and understand his basic ideas.  From this start, I have so far discovered three threads.

Contemporary Housing and eco-housing

The Staiths  Gateshead    Hemingway Designs with Wimpey Homes

This has led me to look at contemporary housing  in the UK and beyond  This includes eco housing and sustainable building, self build and also temporary housing (Architecture for Humanity) 

This is a challenging and practical area, and deeply important for our society.  Kevin McCloud and his team describe the difficulties they had in applying for and gaining planning permission for the Triangle scheme in Swindon, and now for larger developments in  Oxford and Stroud.  McCloud acknowledges that the Triangle is less developed than some continental schemes in Tubingen and Stockholm which were his inspirations and which "emerged from a culture of planning and construction that is far more evolved, and far more sophisticated, than in Britain", he says (see Rowan Moore's Observer article). 

Both Wayne Hemingway and Kevin McCloud work with building firms to improve private life by the design of affordable houses and community life by creating a landscape context which encourages people to share activities.  But are they, as suggested by themselves, simply using their own experiences as the foundation of their designs?  Does this translate to all users?

Alexander is also concerned to create an environment which reflects the  reality of people's lives, but as shown in the example of the Indian village (earlier posts), his interpretation of reality is based on observation and participation.  In his later works Alexander takes a wider, almost mystical approach to architecture, which links him to:  

Philosophy of dwelling, theoretical and applied

Bleak House    Diana Hand

The challenge to build housing which "makes people happy" is huge.  McCloud thinks it is about being an active member of a community in a well designed house. But housing and its meanings are many and complex.  In his "Timeless Way of Building" and "A Pattern Language" Alexander tries to lay down principles to find the elusive element of "life" which we all recognise.   Philosophers such as Heidegger write about what it really means to dwell, what we do when we build and how it alters the meaning of a place and how we experience that.  In my next post I will discuss a paper by David Seamon which shows how Alexander's ideas can be interpreted as phenomenological in origin.

Within this category also come theories of atmosphere and the "uncanny" in buildings and in dwelling.  According to this theory, we "secrete" our being into buildings, simply by living in them, and they are privy to our innermost thoughts.  So, rather than being consumer items, they are in fact reflections of our deeper selves. Bachelard in his famous book, "The Poetics of Space" applies phenomenology to architecture to explore such ideas.  Anthony Vidler writes about the "modern unhomely" in the book "The Architectural Uncanny".  His book is a historical perspective on the idea of the "uncanny", tracing it back to the eighteenth century, and into contemporary "deconstructive" architecture.

Iconic contemporary buildings 
 

Exterior of Ronchamp chapel (Le Corbursier)

Interior of Ronchamp Chapel

A room inside the Jewish Museum, Berlin  (Daniel Libeskind)

Serpentine pavilion, London  2011   Peter Zumthor 

Serpentine Pavilion London 2012 Herzog and de Meuron with Ai WeiWei

Some architects build the excellent low cost everyday housing aspired to by McCloud and Wayne Hemingway, some design special buildings which actually explore the sense of place and how materials and location combine to achieve that.  Examples here are Ronchamp (Le Corbusier), the Jewish Museum in Berlin (Libeskind), Serpentine Pavilion 2011 (Zumthor) and perhaps the Serpentine Pavilion of 21012 (Herzog and de Meuron with Ai WeiWei). There are many many other examples.  Often the living presence of a building or place arrives through use, or historical accident or long association, rather than by conscious design.  Seamon explains this in phenonomenological terms.

But these, although fascinating,  are essentially public spaces.  A different challenge from building an everyday environment for the process of dwelling!

Walter Segal and self build

 

Walter Segal

 Last year two architectural students, Matt Atkins and Ben Barfield Marks, were commissioned to build an office and playspace for the Oasis Children's Venture in Stockwell, South London.  Fortunately a 1980s building in Waterloo became available at short notice.  But it was a special building, built along the ideas of Walter Segal (1907-1985) , who had designed a method of building with timber frames which was simple and could basically be done by almost anyone with a rudimentary knowledge.

Oasis Childrens Venture and construction of new building

Segal believed that if people were involved in the design and construction of their own homes, they are more likely to appreciate and look after it and find satisfaction in living in it.  It is also an expression of their ideas (see the Ashley Vale, Bristol development in a previous post), unlike the  housing developments associated with Wayne Hemingway and Kevin McCloud, even though these are a great advance on mass building.   As Rowan Moore says in his article about the Oasis project, one self-builder said "you have the indescribable feeling that you finally have control over what you are doing".

Because of the simplicity and principles of Segal-designed buildings, Atkins and Marks were able to dismantle the Waterloo building and transport it to Stockwell.  200 people worked on reconstructing the building, and this, says the students, "galvanised people and made them want to work on it".

Wayne Hemingway

 

Wayne Hemingway

 Wayne Hemingway is a British designer, who, with his wife Gerardine, set up the fashion design company, Red or Dead, in the early 1980s.   The business was started by chance when they sold the contents of their wardrobes in Portobello market, and did so well that they decided to form their own fashion label.  By 1999 they had sold this successful label and set up Hemingway Design, which focuses on affordable and social design and "improving the things that matter in life" from clothing to sofas to wallpaper, up to and including an 800 unit housing project in Gateshead, in collaboration with Wimpey, the mass market house builders.

The Staithes Gateshead

Gateshead  - the way it was

 
WAYNE HEMINGWAY on The Staiths:
 

"In interviews and when I do talks I often get asked what do I consider to be Gerardine and I’s greatest design. I always go back to a meeting in 2000 when we demonstrated how our philosophy to put the landscape thinking before the design of the housing on our first housing development. The Staiths, South Bank in Gateshead paid such dividends to the liveability of the project.

We drew on our own experience of an active outdoors childhood and the joy that we were having with our children through being fortunate enough to be able to afford a large garden to make the bold statement of designing the play and recreation spaces before designing the houses. This nearly got us kicked off the project; Wimpey hadn’t heard anything like it. One of the first things at The Staiths we wanted to do was to build play areas that were challenging, creative and far more exciting than a few chickens on springs and a ‘health and safety’ approved climbing frame. We showed the council play officer an example of an exciting play area that we had come across in a wonderful development in Freiberg, Germany made simply from old trees that were left in their natural state for kids to balance on and a generous helping of sand. We wanted play areas to encourage ‘free range kids’. I remember the council saying that they loved our concept of ‘free range kids’ but couldn’t countenance a play area with sand all over the ground. This wasn’t about the danger of dogs and cats soiling the sand but another very strange reason was given. The council play officer proceeded to say that, “babies will crawl around the sand and eat it”. To which I replied, “but that isn’t a problem as we can replace it, sand is only £1.99 a bag at the local DIY store”. I then proceeded to search on the web for ‘Child eats sand and dies’. Try it, it’s not something that throws up any obvious returns, but common sense had already told me that and it was this use of common sense that allowed us to proceed with our vision of a housing estate led by ‘place’ and not architecture."

It is quite difficult to find more images of or information about the Staiths, but I have included this as a high profile example of an alternative to mass housing.  Like McCloud in my previous post Hemingway also stresses the priority given to landscaping the project.

Kevin McCloud and "Happiness, Architecture and Beauty"

Kevin McCloud is well known as the presenter of the very popular Channel 4 programme, Grand Designs, in which adventurous and often glamorous building projects are featured and masterminded by McCloud..

HAB's Triangle development in Swindon

However, McCloud is also a critic of mass building as being “unimaginative, overpriced, undersized and resistant to technical improvement”.  Six years ago he founded a company which he named “HAB” (Happiness, Architecture, Beauty”), with the aim of building better affordable housing.  

HAB's first project. completed in late 2011,  is the Triangle in Swindon, a development of 42 houses.  Rowan Moore in the Observer wrote about this project in his article of 20.11.11.  McCloud is now working with the Green Square building association group  on projects in Stroud, Chippenham and Oxford.  Their joint website is www.haboakus.co.uk.

The Triangle 

The emphasis in Swindon is on quite conventional terraced housing but with a sustainable approach (using hemp based product for the walls, chimney-like ventilators on the roof and open spaces designed to soak up excess rainwater, for example).   The internal design of the houses features small and thoughtful variations from the standard mass-build.  Bedrooms are placed away from corners to give more wardrobe space, windows are larger than standard, and ground floor ceilings are higher (even though, because of the need to stay within budget,  second-floor ceilings are lower.   Porches contain bike racks.  Each house is equipped with a “shimmy” screen, similar to an iPad, which is a way of communicating with others on the development.

However, and again rather surprisingly considering his TV profile, McCloud is more interested in the social aspect of housing than in building radical architecture.  “Anyone can build an eco- home but it does’nt solve anything.  What’s more interesting is the way people live and behave”.  The Triangle is landscaped to encourage people to cooperate and communicate, with allotments and poly-tunnels, for example.  McCloud considers landscaping to be an integral part of design in his aim to make people happy. 

The people who live in the Triangle are a mix of those who are on the local authority’s list of those in need of new homes, and others who pay a greater percentage of the market rent or who are aiming to buy their houses.  The project is therefore different from the usual privately owned majority on most new developments, and has a quite different ideology from the "housing for investment" belief.

It would take a gregarious and tolerant individual to live and cooperate fully with his or her neighbours to the extent envisaged by McCloud.  His definition of happiness as such a close knit community is admirable but might not suit everyone. McCloud does not describe his design process, and whether the future inhabitants were consulted. 

In 2012 the Triangle won an RIBA Award for excellence.  However, there have also been teething problems, with residents complaining about mouse infestation and poor building quality.  There is evidence that self build is a more satisfying process than ready-made housing and leads to greater commitment.  

Heidegger and dwelling

Diana Hand   Meditations on dwelling (2001)

 I have long been fascinated by the experience of dwelling and inhabiting and "being-in" built space, and I have included in this post drawings that I did while exploring this issue.  I am still exploring the issue, and  now have the experience of understanding it a little better. I have just re-read Martin Heidegger's famous essay,   and what follows is a hurried, brief and inadequate synopsis.  This is followed by a few of my current notes and ideas.  This post is fragmentary but I wanted to get a marker down because the ideas and processes are important to me. 

 

Martin Heidegger      Building Thinking Dwelling (1951) 1.

According to Heidegger, there are 4 dimensions of being – earth, sky, divinity and mortality.  Humans are mortals, and are passing through their time on earth.  Dwelling is a reflection of the fourfold, or the four dimensions.  By dwelling we bring together and focus the four dimensions.  By dwelling properly we celebrate our time on earth and recognise our spiritual and earthly context. Positive awareness of our finite time is an essential part of the well lived life. 

Heidegger points out that humans are not the masters of language but rather are shaped by it and its meanings.  By exploring etymology and ancient meanings, he says,  we can discover deeper truths about ourselves and the right way of living.  The old verb “bauen” (German), for example, means “To dwell or to stay in a place”.  The associated verb “wuon” means “to stay in place…. to preserve the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its own nature”.  Therefore mortals by dwelling are present in the fourfold.

How does dwelling relate to physical building?  Heidegger uses the example of a bridge to show how such an intervention in the landscape creates a meaningful “location”.  But the bridge is more than its qualities.  Contrary to received Western philosophy, which regards essence as less knowable than objective properties, Heidgger (I think) considers that the essence of the bridge (for example) as a “thing” is what enables it to gather the fourfold.  The location allows the spaces to exist, and although the bridge and other built constructions may be analysed quantitively “the spaces through which we go daily are provided for by locations; their nature is grounded in things”

Only if we understand the true nature of dwelling, can we build rightly, with an understanding of our relation to things and immediate habitual experiences rather than by abstract and quantitative theory and practice.  “....genuine buildings give form to dwelling in its presencing and house this presence”.  But we have constantly to learn to dwell, to reconstruct anew our relation to the fourfold: “”The real plight of dwelling lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling.  And they must ever learn to dwell”.  Hence thinking and reflection is an essential component of building and dwelling.

..............................

This is a fascinating and profound essay.  Each paragraph, even each sentence, is capable of generating new and original thought,  just as good philosophical writing should do.  Heidegger refers to his phenomenological beliefs when he explains that the essence of a being or a creation or a thing is real and knowable with its own integrity, and this worthy of respect…. “ to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its own nature”.  In this, with regard to the environment, he was prescient.  His architectural theory is also based on respecting our essential nature as inhabitants of the earth. 

 Like Alexander, who wrote his “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” about a decade later, Heidegger believed that the ordinary experience rather than (or at least as well as) abstract theory should be the foundation of design.  His ideas were influential in the 1970s and 1980s, and now again there is a movement towards community involvement in design.  One designer who has described his influence is Christine Kenline in her essay:   “Thinking about dwelling in building”).      More about this thesis in another blog.

Heidegger, like Alexander and many others of that time, was, among other things,  reacting against the impersonal rationalism of international modernism.  But what significance has Heidegger here for us?  We are still in the modernist era.  Our houses are more like machines for living than dwellings.  As such they are status symbols and investments.  "Dwelling" is out of fashion mostly in the modern world, and no wonder when it is women who are the backbone of domesticity in the dwelling culture. Nowadays women want what men have always had – independence and freedom  - “presence in their own nature as individuals” as Heidegger would have described it. 

There is also something reactionary in the search for a "lost birthplace, against the deracinated home of post-industrial society" to quote Anthony Vidler in his book The Architectural Uncanny (p. xi).  Such a search can tip over in to narrow chauvinism or worse.

But do we need to rethink dwelling for our times, as he also said we would need to do.  If so what form would it take?  A nod to properly thought-out communities in new building schemes, a reconstruction of the UK planning legislation to make self-build (and personal investment in houses) more accessible, and  a consideration of the physical spaces we inhabit.

Follow this link for a discussion by the phenonomenological architectural theorist  David Seamon about how the work of architects, including Alexander,realises the ideas of Heidegger in more practical terms. I will outline Seamon's ideas in a future post.


1. Heidegger, Martin  "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" in Poetry, Language, Thought   (1951)