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Calvin Po narrates this article for you to listen to.
In 1924, Winston Churchill said in a speech to the Architectural Association: “We build our buildings, and then they build us.” It was flattery of the highest order, designed to curry favor with an audience of budding architects and exaggerate their awareness of how much power they have in shaping society. It’s remarkable how clueless architects have become, 100 years later, when it comes to the greatest architectural crisis of our time: housing. According to the Royal Institute of British Architects, only 6% of new homes in the UK are designed by architects. Everything else is handled by volume homebuilders, with the top three alone building 25% of the homes produced to cookie-cutter designs.
In the niche left by architects, making homes affordable has become a focus. Architects are increasingly getting clever at solving this problem by cutting corners. OMMX is a company that is working with developers to lower the cost of buying a home by stripping it down to the bare essentials. They will build the infrastructure – electricity, heating, basic bathrooms – and then let residents install cubicles, fixtures and fittings according to their needs and tastes.
However, this is not a new approach. It almost becomes an architectural metaphor. In the 2000s, faced with tight public housing budgets, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena boasted of building “half a good house” that the residents themselves extended (see below). As early as the 1930s, Berlin’s chief urban planner Martin Wagner proposed “growing housing” in the aftermath of the Great Depression.
While compelling on the surface, these semi-self-build routes feel like architects admitting defeat, accepting their limited agency in the face of financial pressures, and selling the final product under the guise of feel-good marketing pitches. Just unfinished houses.
Some architects have retreated into the realm of speculation, and the Green Belt remains an object of fantasy.
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