ArchDaily is continuing their partnership with The Architectural Review, bringing
you short introductions to the themes of the magazine’s monthly
editions. In this introduction to the July 2015 issue, AR editor
Christine Murray takes on "the most pressing issue of our time," the
global housing crisis, asking "why don’t we shelter
the homeless in empty housing? This crisis seems nonsensical when the
postwar housing crisis was solved so efficiently."
The
architect-designed home is a desirable commodity, that Modernist
minimalist bungalow, all steel and glass with a large sofa, the Case
Study House complete with swimming pool, MacBook Air and stunning view.
But
there was once a different kind of architect-designed home, for people
in need of shelter, not investments – and it’s sorely required now. Housing
is the most pressing issue of our time, with one in every 122 people in
the world either a refugee, internally displaced or seeking asylum – a
record high, according to a UN report. Yet cash-strapped states do
nothing, build nothing. They stand eyes averted, hands in their pockets.
This is the absurd state of play: occupations,
evictions, shortages and surfeits, migrant influxes, mass exodus and a
plague of debt; citizens paying mortgages on homes they no longer own.
High-rise towers in London with no residents, flats cling-filmed to keep
the dust off, no kitchen ever installed.
But not just London; for their own reasons, Athens and Barcelona
have a glut of empty properties and a shortage of homes. It is nothing
short of inhumane to not solve one of these problems with the other. How
can we not shelter the homeless in empty housing?
It
seems nonsensical that we should find ourselves here, when the postwar
housing crisis was solved so efficiently. The former head of the civil
service in the UK described the housing shortage as ‘the biggest public
policy failure of the last 50 years’.
Grassroots networks are actively breaking the law
across Europe in order to house the homeless and prevent evictions, but
crackdowns are frequent and increasing. Governments are trying to stop
people from helping each other out of poverty.
Is
it a lack of confidence in architects, or a lack of confidence among
architects that currently plagues the profession? The ability to design
economically and creatively – to take a site and carve it up efficiently
and humanely into homes not for profit, but for the social good – this
is what architects do.
When the world
stops making sense, there is still joy in the discovery of a
well-designed house; its intriguing floor plan, the careful choice of
materials, perfectly detailed and well built, as found in Fayland House.
As the jury made its decision to award David Chipperfield Architects with this year’s AR House Award,
they discussed the potential controversy of celebrating a home with a
very large budget in the current social context of this year’s prize.
But
if you can design the perfect house, then you can design anything. The
house as a type has more than once been likened to a city, with its mix
of public and private spaces. It is an ideal test of an architect’s
skill.
We need architectural ingenuity
to tackle the housing crisis and answer the crucial questions: how
should we live together and what kind of people can we be?
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