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Mikhail Riches co-founder Annalie Riches says in this Social Housing Revival interview that architects are often wrongly blamed for the failure of social housing in the past.
Riches began her career designing great social housing to challenge the popular belief that architects “can’t do housing”.
However, she admitted there was controversy over the term “social housing” itself.
“I really hate the word ‘social’ housing,” she told Dezeen. “The word means there’s a problem.”
“I think it’s just housing. Whether it’s private, I wouldn’t design it any different – to me, it’s housing.”
Her London studio, co-founded in 2015 with David Mikhail, designed the prestigious Stirling Prize-winning council housing development Goldsmith Street.
Mikhail Riches’ predecessor studio, Riches Hawley Mikhail Architects, was founded in 2005 to specialize in the social housing sector, Riches said.
“I was probably the driving force behind it,” she admits. “I’ve always wanted to get into housing.”
“I mean Margaret Thatcher”
Riches’ interest in social housing stemmed from a fascination with Park Hill in Sheffield, which she gained while studying for an architecture degree in the city.
Completed in 1961, Park Hill is a Brutalist-style former council estate. Now the largest listed building in Europe, in the late 1980s it was in a state of decline and its “streets in the sky” were accused of attracting anti-social behaviour.
“I was a student in Sheffield and Park Hill was like a very large building in that city and was considered a failure,” she recalls.
“There was a view at the time that architects couldn’t build housing. I think they were blamed for a lot of the failures of large housing schemes, and I think that had a big impact on me.”
Riches believes that this accusation is unfair.
“The failure of these buildings is much more complex – it’s easy to blame the architect and his design,” she said.
“I’m talking about Margaret Thatcher – unemployment, the decline of the steel industry, unemployment, loss of hope and confidence in the country, and a lack of funds to sustain it.”
Mikhail Riches has been appointed architect for the second phase of the Park Hill refurbishment led by developer Urban Splash, following a competition in which Riches was “desperate to win” .
In addition to improving the energy efficiency of the building, the architects also implemented subtle interventions such as adding colored panels to the facade – considering that many residents already painted their balconies.
Riches admits that there were some issues with Park Hill’s design that meant “once it declined, it became quite favorable for bad behavior” – issues the studio tried to address by introducing street-facing glass and making public areas More spacious. more obvious.
“It’s a great building,” she said. “Its aspiration is extraordinary. It comes from a time when architects were involved in solving problems.”
Today, she believes, architects’ problem-solving abilities have been greatly diminished because they are marginalized from project budgeting, cost and procurement decisions.
“Power has been taken away,” she said. “I don’t think anyone really talks to architects. We’re not trusted and people think we just spent a bunch of money and added flashiness to things.”
Goldsmith Street ‘had to change the rules’
Goldsmith Street, a council housing project designed by Mikhail Riches for Norwich City Council, is a rare project where the architect can be trusted and was completed in 2019.
The project, which consists of 105 Passive Houses with a street layout, is the only social housing scheme to win the Stirling Prize (awarded to the UK’s best new building) in the competition’s 26-year history.
Riches said she did not anticipate the project’s impact during the design process.
“You never think something like this would happen,” she said. “It was only when I got to the site and saw it built that I thought, ‘Actually, this looks pretty good’.”
The impact on residents is also profound. Mikhail Riches has received reports from some tenants that they have successfully paid off their debts and that their health has improved significantly since moving in.
One resident sent a letter to the studio detailing how since arriving on Goldsmith Street she was no longer dependent on the food bank and was able to entertain guests for the first time in years.
“It brought us to tears,” Riches said. “It had a big impact on her life.”
In order to provide the density the site required without resorting to an apartment complex, the studio had to find ways around certain planning rules, particularly those that restricted overlooking neighbors.
“In order to achieve what we accomplished, we had to — we couldn’t break the rules — but we had to change them,” Riches said.
The solution was to mimic the layout of the nearby Victorian streets and adapt it in the back lanes – albeit with much larger gaps between the buildings – so that all habitable rooms on the first floor face the same direction.
Unusually, and crucially, at Goldsmiths Mikhail Riches contracted directly with the council as the client, rather than the more usual design and build set-up where the architect sub-contracted to the main contractor business.
This gives the studio greater leverage to try new things and negotiate with third parties during the project.
“I think there’s an inevitable loss of quality in design and construction,” Riches said. “Some we had to give up because you don’t have any power in the process.”
Mikhail Riches is currently working on a series of projects for City of York Council, which take a similar approach to Goldsmith Street, but Riches says they put a premium on sustainability and biodiversity. “More ambitious” in terms of gender.
“We’re just doing the same old thing on purpose.”
However, while Riches had hoped that the success of Goldsmith Street would spark a series of equally ambitious social housing projects across the country, this was not to be.
“It’s actually a pretty low-cost project, not expensive,” she said. “I thought, ‘Okay, now everyone does this – we’ve proven it can be done’. But it’s not that easy.”
As well as restrictive planning policies that “do not help improve quality”, Riches also pointed out that architects working on council housing projects are increasingly struggling as cash-strapped councils need to do more with less money. Come bigger.
“It’s become untenable for an approach of our scale, which is a real shame because that’s what we really want to do – we want to deliver social housing alongside local authorities,” she said.
“But now it’s getting to the point where it feels like a race to the bottom.”
Riches believes the main obstacle to delivering more and better social housing in the UK is a lack of political will.
“We’ve had a series of governments that don’t want to figure out how to do this,” she said. “It feels like we’re just doing the same old thing on purpose without even thinking about it.”
More and more architects want to make changes, but their influence is limited, she said.
“There are a lot of good architects who want to build good housing, but when I started doing housing, that wasn’t the case,” she said.
“So I think the design quality of housing is improving dramatically, but the problem is that most housing in this country is not built by those architects.”
“It’s very difficult to figure out how to be proactive and really change the debate. If you do something and it already exists and you can show that it’s done and it’s not a big deal to do that – that’s probably the biggest things we currently have the power to do.”
Photography is by Tim Crocker unless otherwise stated.
social housing renaissance
This article is part of Dezeen’s series on the social housing renaissance Explore the new wave of high-quality social housing being built around the world and ask whether a large-scale return to social housing construction could help tackle affordability issues and homelessness in our major cities.
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