Red, White and Grey… A Standardised National Landscape
In 1955, architectural critic Ian Nairn coined the phrase ‘subtopia’, a term referring to the suburban monotonisation of the English landscape. Referring to early twentieth-century mass development, Nairn’s polemic criticised the repetitive byelaw and suburban housing that created tedious local landscapes in which streets seemed similar across the country. In Essex, since the mass ‘Essexodus’ from the East End following the Second World War, neo-vernacular development has been present throughout the county. However, there are visible material nuances between post-war mass development and those built after the 1973 Essex Design Guide.
In the context of the UK’s ‘housing crisis’ and a development market dominated by a handful of players, new development is now not only similar but is the same. Nationally, housing is being built with the same materials, by the same developers, with the same sources and to the same designs; the result is a nationwide neo-vernacular style. Rather like Andy Warhol’s repeated pop-art prints of coca-cola bottles, these neo-vernacular developer homes are the same wherever they are. The issue with any mass style is that it is contextless. Although in a national context, the neo-vernacular is ‘in keeping’, at a local scale it disregards all traditional nuances. The neo-vernacular is composed of elements sourced from various regions across the UK, for example, roof slate sourced from the West Country and brick clay from the South East. Although within the neo-vernacular there is prescribed material diversification, the palette is still limited to brick, render, PVC, grey slate, and occasionally weatherboarding. This rising style is in direct correlation with the decline in local traditional methods such as thatching, flint knapping, pargetting and half-timber construction.
Vernacular building materials are a product of the resources that are immediately geographically available. In Pevsner’s introduction to Essex (2nd edn), he declares there is “no good natural stone” in the county. However, the ground is the main source of building material in Essex; clay is the dominant lithology of east and south Essex, notably within the ‘Thames Group’, thus brick and clay-tiled buildings dominate the vernacular of Essex.
What can we do?
To prevent the monoculturalisation of the land, it is crucial to express the local vernacular in contemporary construction. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should be building pastiche Poundbury-esque pattern book architecture, but arguably a house in Dorset should be differentiable from one in Essex. To retain a varied national landscape, we must reintegrate traditional building methods and materials, particularly those endemic to specific regions, such as pargetting in Essex and Suffolk. Perhaps more crucial is to ensure material variety, not merely among a single development but from other estates in the area, as illustrated in the Newhall estate in Harlow. Note that traditional materials don’t necessarily have to be used in the traditional format. The hyper-vernacular ‘House for Essex’ by FAT and Grayson Perry, is perhaps the antithesis of Nairn’s ‘subtopia’; jam-packed with local symbolic references, construction methods, and materials, it both sits perfectly within its context and sticks out like a postmodern obelisk — it’s brilliant.
In the context of greenfield construction, to embed architecture within the ecological vernacular, another notion is to use ‘living materials’. Emilio Ambasz and Terunobu Fujimori are examples of architects who not only accommodate nature within their designs but create co-inhabited spaces for people and nature. In the built environment, minerals and plants are reconfigured from their natural state into buildable materials, yet processed materials are not solely endemic to the human experience, but can also be inhabited by nature.
A timeless argument made by countless architects is that buildings should be representative of the time period they are built in — this is certainly reasonable. But it is also reasonable to argue that buildings should be representative of the region they are built in. A challenge for young designers is to create intriguing unique architecture that pays homage to both the spatial and temporal contexts.
Originally published at cpressex.org.uk on November 21, 2018.
