Bath

Panorama of Bath from Beechen Cliff, 1824, Harvey Wood

In all the lectures I have attended in my life on Bath and Georgian architecture, I have never seen this image.  Bath as we value it developed throughout the 18th century; by time this drawing was made, some of the terraces would have been over a hundred years old, yet how raw it appears.  Nature was clearly to be held at bay, providing a prospect from which one might consider the elegant city.

I once stayed in a bedsitter in Queen's Square (1730, John Wood the Elder, Grade 1 listed buildings); elegant it was not.  Unheated, cold water tap, toilet on the landing, no bath access, dingy and absolutely freezing.  There was an architectural value in the Georgian city, but little social value.  There was still, in the early 1970s, unmended bomb damage from WWII and many of the terraces had been divided into hives of dark low-income bedsits.  This was also just the tail end of the council tower block which looked pretty good in comparison: modern, heated, full of space and light — again, an optimistic but discrepant architectural solution that soon foundered on social realities. 

It is still surprising how quickly Britain shed its social housing programs once the 1980s came and everyone, no matter how impoverished, was encouraged to cut free from the state and to become a property owner.  It took almost thirty years for this political, economic and social project to crash in the sub-prime bubble.  It would be difficult to find anything to rent in Bath today, certainly bedsitters are not considered legitimate housing any more unless as emergency housing for homeless families, and they certainly wouldn't be found in the classic terraces, squares or crescents of Bath.

Vivienda prefabricada en Cedeira: MYCC Arquitectos

Fernando Guerro, FG+SG. Vivienda prefabricada en Cedeira, MYCC Arquitectos, Madrid. 2010

MYCC  consists of three Spanish architects who studied variously in Dresden, Rotterdam, Vienna and Dortmund and then all arrived at ETSAMadrid, graduating in 2005.  Carmina Casajuana specialises in housing and urban design, Beatriz Casares works with Arquitectura Viva and Marcos Gonzalez is a specialist in urban environments. 

The project shown here is a pre-fabricated house in Galiza: Prefab House Cedeira. MYCC's statement about prefabrication and modularity clearly distinguishes between houses that are manufactured and those that are built – 'Something that leads us to believe in the efficient assembly line of an industrial building, covered and controlled, unlike a traditional work setting at the mercy of external factors that determine the construction.' 

Nothing too controversial here, this has been the argument for pre-fabrication for decades.  However, there isn't a great history of pre-fab housing in Europe: it simply isn't in their architectural tradition as it is in North America.  MYCC appears to be unhindered by the conventions of pre-fabrication with which our manufactured homes seem to struggle. 

Right, so it is about the design, not the process.  Perhaps.  This house has a loft, it has a glass front, it has a rusted steel screen over the glass front with workable shutters in it.  It is really beautiful, minimal, efficient, romantic.  It looks like an art gallery, it really is a cabin in the woods. 

Side walls and roof are the same material: from the photos it looks like an insulated steel panel.  We have these.  They are made in Airdrie and used to make ghastly imitation new urbanism housing for northern reserves.  However, here in the Casa Cedeira, the side walls and roof wrap the two storeys: the gable end walls are glass and steel.  How do we know this isn't Canada?  None of the steps have handrails and so they read as plane changes.  The main view of the ocean is screened, protected, rationed.  The relationship between house and landscape, even given that this house is newly constructed and the site is still scarred, is pretty uncompromising: it sits like a barn — neither the house nor the landscape are mediated or softened.  The hard line between building and site seems to have an urban sensibility to me.  Anything romantic about it is contained within the building itself, in the screen, in the light and shadows inside, not in its relationship with nature. 

I wonder if in Canada with our well discussed and theorised relationship with nature and survival, our cabins and cottages, camps and summer houses aren't too apologetic in their architecture, trying to either be invisible, or so deferential to things such as 'the view' that nature (whether it be the beach, the woods, or the front street) is over-exposed and unremitting.   Cedeira is more like a little fortress, autonomous and very much in control of its position.

Fernando Guerro, FG+SG. Vivienda prefabricada en Cedeira,night. MYCC Arquitectos, Madrid, 2010

Elemental in Santa Catarina

Alejandro Aravena. Elemental. Housing cores: a half-house on the ground floor and a two storey apartment above. The empty slot between the white cores are meantto be built into, shown here in a yellow example. Elemental, the Chilean architectural practice of Alejandro Aravena, has just won an award for a 70-unit housing project in Santa Catarina near Monterrey, Mexico.  Using government funding the expensive part of each house is built first: bathrooms, kitchen, stairs, party walls and roof.  This is the first half.  The second half is eventually built into the space between these cores.  Visual cohesion comes from a continuous roof over each set of units, and the placement and rhythm of the first halves.  There are 70 units on .6 ha; the area is middle class, not a slum, and half the project will be self-built.
 
Similar Elemental projects have been built in Chile, with less money and for poorer people.  It is a case of putting whatever funds are available where they are most useful, and leaving the rest to individuals who have some building skills and often innovative ways of occupying space, but not the wherewithal to build  a safe structure, a kitchen and bathroom, and then connect them to the utilities infrastructure.  Elemental SA is in a partnership with COPEC, a Chilean Oil Company to design projects with social impact through 'the development of complex initiatives'.  To get projects such as these in place requires more than a brilliant idea, it requires partners at all levels of urban development.  The city is their workshop.  

Formally built social housing all over the world is a landscape of regimentation; informal barrios and slums all over the world are landscapes of desperate invention.  Elemental's model allows the best from both: safe building standards and people's participation in their own dwellings.