Democratising the Brief
How can open-source coded designs alleviate the effects of a broken construction industry? How can architect work with the public in the future?
According to Shelter Survey in 2017, more than half of newly built homes in England “have major faults”, concerning construction, fittings, and utilities.
After Bovis Homes had to pay £7m to compensate the owners for the poor quality of their new properties, a YouGov survey for the housing charity Shelter was launched. The survey of 4000 people was conducted online, revealing that 51% of new homeowners, with a house less than 10 years old, had troubles related to structural issues and fixings.
The Home Builders Federation is the trading association that represents private home builders, who build 80% of new homes every year in England and Wales. Their customer satisfaction survey shows an increase of reports from the homeowners of complications in their houses, from 93% in 2015 to 99% in 2018.
Recently, Persimmon, the UK’s most profitable house-builder, has launched an independent review, following an executive pay scandal and several structural problems in newly built houses.
The main reason for the “broken housing market”, as labelled by the government in the White Paper, is the speculation over new constructions of a few main companies in charge in the UK.
The speculative housebuilder model is dominating the housing market, as evidently shown by the fact that half homes in the UK are built by only ten companies.
A big developer company takes over the construction of several new homes and has control over the entire process of land buying, designing, planning permissions, finance, and selling: it speculates by taking the risk of all of these processes, because the bigger the risk, the bigger the profit.
In this speculative model, the company is designing dwellings following studies of future trends of population and housing needs, therefore the new homes are designed to fit standard rules, thinking about the composition of an average family, minimising the costs over its flexibility, but also dimensions, insulation, quality of materials and fittings. Houses are not built to be inhabited, nor to be a long term solution: they are conceived as mere financial assets.
On the other hand, in the UK architects are not involved in the design of housing: RIBA surveys show that every year only 6% of new homes are designed by architects. Finn Williams, in an article written for Dezeen, points out that before 1979, the powerful welfare state gave work to almost a half of English architects, whereas now the proportion of professionals working for the public sector is 0.7%. The high concentration of architecture firms in the city of London focuses mainly on the private sector and on the building of offices, museums, or luxury apartments, certainly not housing.
How is it possible to create a chance for the architect to work towards more mundane designs? To create a way to have direct communication between the community and the designers based on cooperation and consultation?
PLATFORM PRACTICE: A network collective to open-source socially useful architectural designs.
Platform Practice is the result of a week long workshop series called Radical Practice Studio, part of the MA Architecture programme at Royal College of Art.
Platform Practice is a thought experiment for an online cooperative platform which would gather together architects, designers and construction builders that share the same values. It proposes a direct contact between the user of the service and the architect and, being open, allows everyone to have access to architectural design or consultation. The aim is a democratisation of briefing, that would allow homeowners to pitch for projects and access direct communication in an online form with the architects.
The designs on the website are produced following pitches from the community, public forums and management assemblies that are then published. They can be related to private interiors retrofit, adaptations, extensions or public design elements, which are crowdfunded online.
Inspired by existing platforms for citizen participation in decision-making, the website aims at creating a catalog of architectural solutions that are continuously updated and available to the public.
Currently, there are several steps from the briefing to the construction process, often not controlled by the architect but by a series of professionals specialised in different areas that coordinate with each other. According to Alastair Parvin, the cost of their interaction is around 20% of the cost of the building. In the whole of London, there are around four or five firms that design all the kitchen extensions for the majority of wealthy households: they are effective and efficient because of their ability to solve planning applications in an unbelievably short amount of time.
Platform Practice envisages a more accessible retrofit service that would use coding to quickly conform designs to meet regulations. Working together with other software platform (the first example is Plan X), that gather information and codify the Generally Permitted Developments guidelines of the different London boroughs, it would be possible to immediately establish the parameters regulating the permissions and the viability of the architectural intervention. The code would develop a type of bathroom retrofitting, kitchen extension, garden shed (etc.) that suits the dweller’s needs and inputs, automatically signaling if a planning application is required to move forward.
This system would help homeowners to introduce flexibility in their own homes, designing elements and spaces that are more suited to their necessities and that are continuously updated and varied by the architects working on the platform. This would allow the owner and long-term inhabitant to make their own decisions about designs and spaces they will live in, opening architecture up to those who would not normally have access to it. The designs of extensions and adaptations are open source on the website, designed by a specific code that allows to modify them according to the user’s requests.
A coded design can contain several pieces of information on regulation, engineering and costing before construction. For example, if a dweller needs a new accessible toilet, specific regulations occur, and normally this type of intervention is typically costed at around £20,000. The platform would provide a basic coded design to retrofit the bathroom, that can be adjusted accordingly to the user’s inputs of width, length, height, door distance. The code produces CAD files, a model and a manual to realise the design and the user can operate autonomously or by referring to a maker.
Through the Platform and the coded architecture, the architects would be able to modify designs accordingly to communities feedbacks and requests about design variations, or second-hand materials available in different areas of London. In fact, all the designs would take into account several types of materials and unusual solutions by understanding what is available around a specific area, therefore producing bespoke solutions.
By compressing the elements of regulations and planning application, engineering and management within a code, it is possible to allow designers and community to be closer to each other; thus, producing socially aware designs and allowing the platform to operate in transparency.
The project would be started off by an Assembly of architects, seeking funding from councils, with the intention of solving many problems caused by the speculative construction industry model for private and council housing. The architects working for the platform would then receive a fixed monthly income based on the membership for advertisings on the website for tools, fabricators and second-hand materials.
In fact, when a user downloads a design, they are given the chance to build it themselves by signing a liability waiver or to have it built by a maker. These makers, uploading their availability on the platform, could be contacted to help for maintenance by the dwellers, with financial help from the council.
The project main aim would be the involvement of architects toward a more mundane type of architecture, in direct contact with the community that needs it. It would also give the chance to help private owners and councils fixing the problematics given by the speculative construction industry and low quality of construction.
However, this thought experiment would only be able to fix the results of a broken industry, without actually digging at the root of the problem of the housing crisis given by the price of land, land banking and the increasing mortgage credit.
It also contains a big risk, given by the precarity of the workers, whose wage is relying on a platform and on its advertising. Moreover, the system relies on the liability of the architects, whose ethical responsibility is trusted to procure safe and socially useful designs. The only way to actually confirm this, is to make sure that the platform is collectively owned by architects and community members, possibly by the council as a mediating figure.
