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 Manufacturing buildings must be about producing architecture that cannot be achieved on site
James Woudhuysen writesIan Abley writesJames Heartfield writesMiffa Salter writesRichard McWilliams writesMartin Pawley writes

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Homes 2016

James Woudhuysen and Ian Abley look forward to 2016. Tony Blair no longer chairs a Cabinet committee on the Thames Gateway development. Forget the 0.12 million new dwellings that deputy prime minister John Prescott conceded should be added to Gateway’s 1.6 million inhabitants in 2004. Instead, and after having to free up the planning process, a whopping 1.2 million homes have been put in over a decade – 10 times the initial intention.

In 2016 the Will Alsop Toyota Mark 4 two-storey model is taking market share from the 2015 Zaha Hadid Asda bungalow. The range of functions, quality of workmanship, customer service and regular upgrades is amazing. These manufactured homes are giant Apple iPods for their age: powerful, sleek, easy to operate and full of personally selected details. But never modular or plasticky.

James Woudhuysen and Ian Abley argue that the housing crisis demands a far more ambitious approach to prefabrication than the government and its agencies are currently delivering. Funding for research, development and design in the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister currently stands at £29 million, while the Ministry of Defence has £2.5 billion at its disposal for R&D. That needs to change.

Instead of being a country of dilapidations, Britain needs to start using its design talent to offer solutions to the housing needs of present and future generations. Too many blueprints for the home of the future begin from the interior. They should start from the factory.

Click here for Homes 2016 by James Woudhuysen and Ian Abley, the first Broadside supplement from Blueprint

Click for our series on the Thames GatewayThe September 2004 issue of Blueprint saw the first Blueprint Broadside - an occasional series of essays that the editor, Vicky Richardson, hopes will stimulate debate about the most important issues in design.

She is concerned that debate in design magazines is confined to the odd letter to the editor, and wants the Blueprint Broadsides '... to begin to stir things up a bit'.

Thanks to sponsorship from Corus Living Solutions, Blueprint is distributing the pamphlets free with the magazine to thousands of readers in the UK and abroad, as well as sending them to the 300 most influential people in housing, architecture, product design, Government and the media. In her introduction Vicky kindly says:

'It’s appropriate that the first Broadside, Homes 2016, should be written by James Woudhuysen and Ian Abley, whose book Why is construction so backward? was published recently to great acclaim. Here they argue for an ambitious solution to the housing crisis. While the Government and housebuilders have seized on the idea of prefabrication because it is potentially quick and cheap, Woudhuysen and Abley’s inspiring sketch of 2016 shows that – more importantly – it offers the possibility for homes to be as well-designed and technologically sophisticated as consumer products – like ‘giant Apple iPods’.'

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We all hope that you will enter into the spirit of debate by firing back your own broadside. You can either write to Vicky at Blueprint by clicking on the logo above, or to James and Ian at this website.
Why is construction so backward? James Woudhuysen, Ian Abley, Stefan Muthesius and Miles Glendinning

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