Let's allow everyone to participate

To Ian Abley, 21.06.2007

Dear Ian

The proposal to connect planning with building control, developing technically and aesthetically approved house types without reference to any particular site, makes good sense and I am pleased to see pattern books being taken seriously once again.

But I wonder if one of the major benefits of the pattern book principle is being forgotten, or at least not given enough emphasis.

In the US and most other developed countries, pattern books effectively replace "architecture" in the field of popular housing. This is not necessarily a bad thing. In my opinion architects have more to learn from popular housing than vice- versa. The main purpose of the pattern book is to offer choice to the customer - that is, the individual house owner.

Connecting planning with building control To Colin Davies, 05.04.2007

In Connecting Planning with Building Control, the pattern book sounds more like something cooked up between designers, materials manufacturers, developers and planners without much reference to the people who are going to live in the houses.

In the system you describe, the number of approved house types would in practice have to be fairly small in order to achieve the aim of reducing the planning bureaucracy. Consumer choice would therefore be limited. This, admittedly, would better than the "take it or leave it" system of current speculative housing development in Britain, but it would fail to realise the full potential of the pattern book principle.

US-based web sites like www.eplans.com offer thousands of house designs, all customisable and all free to download, with full sets of CAD working drawings available for a few hundred dollars. These are the "McMansions" that are so despised by American designers and architects. They are not noted for their design quality and I am not about to advocate introducing them to Britain, but there is, I think, something to be learnt from the way they are designed and distributed.

One reason the system works so well is that most housing in the US uses the same basic building technology - the wooden platform frame, developed from the original balloon frame invented in Chicago in the 1830s. This technology is constantly developing, incorporating various inventions and commercial products from plastic siding to structural insulated panels, but it remains a common language that builders understand. So we have a series of house types that are spatially and aesthetically different but technically the same.

If a system like this were applied in Britain, the general tendency would be to separate planning and building control, not combine them. In other words, a system not dissimilar to the one we have.

At present Building Regulations are applied nationally and planning controls are applied locally. Surely this accurately reflects a real practical distinction between technical and spatial design.

Professional architects are trained to think of technical and spatial design as inseparable. They design whole buildings not just spatial arrangements. So the idea emerges of a house type that can be bought as a complete architect-designed package. History shows that these packages (like Konrad Wachsmann's Packaged House of the 1940s) are always commercial and industrial failures.

One reason for this is that architects are not well placed to develop new technologies because they don't work in factories and they don't have an intimate knowledge of the materials market. Meanwhile, the popular, non-architectural, pattern book-based housing industry gets on with the real business of providing for human need.

In Britain, the recent revival of interest in "Modern Methods of Construction" has given a new boost to the architect-designed package idea - witness the houses built recently at the BRE for the Offsite 2007 exhibition. But the emphasis is wrong.

The building products industry is always coming up with new house-building technologies, without any help from architects. I'm thinking of simple, practical inventions such as open-web joists, prefabricated foundations, insulated mass concrete walls and, of course, all the energy saving equipment like solar panels and heat recovery ventilation systems.

Few of these have any profound effect on the spatial design of small houses. Designers should know about these technologies, and be able to take advantage of them, but that won't necessarily make the houses look different.

So how can spatial design, technical design and consumer preference be brought into a productive relationship so as to provide the adaptable, low-carbon houses that society needs? The answer might well be pattern books, but let's not limit them to a few approved house types promoted by big companies and local authorities.

Let's allow everyone to participate, whether by designing houses or by choosing them. Let's see which designs really become popular.

The pattern books will be digital, of course, and designs will be free to download. Money will be made from working drawings. Each design will be a 3D computer model, multi-layered so that different options can be shown and the adaptability of the design can be demonstrated. It will also be available in different versions to suit different materials. It will be free, or "open source" in the current jargon.

It may be that some unknown one-man-band architect will produce the design that takes off and becomes the industry standard. It might emerge as a standard type such as you envisage, but if it does will be because it is truly popular and has found a real market.

Colin Davies 21.06.2007

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