Triangle House in Thailand features gabled walls, a courtyard and a lily pond

Built beside a lily pond on the outskirts of Bangkok, these two adjoining houses both feature prominent gable walls that prompted neighbours to name the property Triangle House (+ slideshow).

Thai architect Phongphat Ueasangkhomset designed the two buildings to provide a combined residence for a single family in Nakorn Pathom. Both structures sit on the northern side of the pond, separated by a central courtyard.

The clients requested a straightforward layout, with all rooms on one level to make it easier for elderly members of the family to move around.
To achieve this, Ueasangkhomset created one rectangular and one L-shaped building, both with a typical pitched roof.

Each house has its own living room, kitchen and dining space. There are two bedrooms in one and three in the other.

"I wanted the houses to be simple and modest, yet still have their own character," the architect told Dezeen. "With the 45-degree-sloped symmetrical and triangular roof shape, they are suited to the local climate."
"Since built, it's been called 'the triangle house' by the neighbourhood," he added.

The site itself is also triangular, which created opportunities for several gardens around the edges of the site.

The two houses sit on opposite sides of the paved courtyard. Glass walls run along both courtyard-facing facades, so residents can open their living rooms out to the space.
This allows it to become a central meeting place, and also makes the residence "party friendly".

"The living space and terrace of both houses are facing each other, visibly connected with large folding glass doors," said Ueasangkhomset. "They stay open most of the day."

Inside, the slope of the roof allows generous ceiling heights in these rooms, as well as in the adjoining kitchens. The architect said this was "because the family love to cook and spend most of the time here preparing the food, receiving family and friends".

All of the bedrooms are located on the eastern side of the site, as far away as possible from the noise of the road.

Triangle House was completed in 2013. Similar suburban properties in Thailand include a house featuring seven-metre-high doors by TACHA_Design and a family home by all(zone) that reinterprets standardised housing.
Photography is by Chaovarith Poonphol

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Project credits:
Architects: Phongphat Ueasangkhomset
Interior designer: Parnduangjai Roojnawate
Lighting designer: Phongphat Ueasangkhomset, Parnduangjai Roojnawate





 

How to blow up concrete structures and boulders without using dynamite

Say you have a heavy concrete structure or a big boulder on your property and you would like to get rid of it inexpensively. It is too big and too thick for a sledge hammer or a jackhammer.
You could use dynamite or maybe primacord, but this requires special permits and training. Plus the neighbors may not be happy with the noise and vibration. What you need is a silent explosion that anyone can do.
Here is one possible solution:

It is called Dexpan, and it is a "non-explosive cracking agent". It works by expanding slowly rather than instantly. This is a time-lapse video of a similar product called Betonamit

Sylentmite is a third product in the same class:

 Another option is the Boulder Buster:

A Brief History of the Mall byRichard A. Feinberg, Purdue University and Jennifer Meoli, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE MALL

Richard A. Feinberg, Purdue University

Jennifer Meoli, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

America has been "Malled." The "air-conditioned, sanitized, standardized" shopping malls "have become the new Main Streets of America" (Consumer Reports, 1986). Along with power mowers, "the pill," antibiotics. smoke detectors, transistors, and personal computers, the shopping mall was selected as one of the top 50 wonders that has revolutionized the lives of consumers (Consumer Reports, 1986). Because alternative retail settings may differ in important economic, social, and psychological characteristics, the shopping mall may exert a significant influence on individual and collective consumer behavior.

Why then has there been so little attention to the mall by the consumer research community, either as an important setting for consumer behavior or a social and consumer phenomenon in and of itself? While we can find Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris defending malls against evil doers and Michael J. Fox taking off back to the future from the mall in recent movies, we would be hard pressed to find a scholarly treatment in our best journals.

History of Shopping Centers

Shopping malls didn't just happen. They are not the result of wise planners deciding that suburban people, having no social life and stimulation, needed a place to go (Bombeck, 1985). The mall was originally conceived of as a community center where people would converge for shopping, cultural activity, and social interaction (Gruen & Smith, 1960). It is safe to say that the mall has achieved and surpassed those early expectations. In today's consumer culture the mall is the center of the universe.

According to the history of shopping centers provided by Consumer Reports (1986, for other histories of the shopping center see Jacobs, 1985; Kowinski, 1985) shopping centers had their birth in the 1920's in California where supermarkets would anchor and serve as a magnet for a strip of smaller stores. According to Samuel Feinberg (1960) shopping centers got their start a bit earlier, in 1907, in a Baltimore neighborhood where a group of stores established off-street parking. In 1922 The Country Club Plaza in suburban Kansas City, a group of stores only accessible by car, was built. In 1931 the Highland Park Shopping Village in Dallas became the first group of stores that had its own parking lot with the stores facing away from the access road. The first enclosed mall was developed in a suburb of Minneapolis in 1956. Designed to get the shopper out of the harsh weather, it introduced the world to shopping complexes as worlds unto themselves--free from bad weather, life, crime, dirt and troubles. It is somehow fitting that the largest mall in the United States, called "The Mall of America," is now nearing completion outside Minneapolis.

Whatever and wherever its start, the phenomenal growth and development of shopping centers naturally followed the migration of population out from the cities and paralleled the growth of the use of the automobile. By 1960 there were 4500 malls accounting for 14% of retail sales. By 1975 there were 16,400 shopping centers accounting for 33% of retail sales . In 1987, there were 30,000 malls accounting for over 50% of all retail dollars spent (about 676 billion dollars, 8% of the labor force, and 13% of our gross national product--Keinfield, 1986; Turchiana, 1990).

Malls are now the retail, social and community centers of their communities. Indeed, shopping malls are the center pieces for rejuvenation of urban centers (e.g., City-Center Indianapolis, Faneuil Hall - Boston, South Street Seaport - New York City, Harbour Place Baltimore). 'Some malls are so large that they are communities. Chicago's Water Tower place has hotels, restaurants, offices, stores, restaurants, and residential units. The West Edmonton Mall in Canada, The largest mall in the world, has over 800 stores, ice skating, 24 movie screens.

Despite unsupported forecasts that the country is over-malled (e.g., Turchiana, 1990) the increasing dominance of malls seems inevitable (Ballard, 1981; Burstiner, 1986). Many of these malls will be smaller strip centers ("Overbuilding: A real...," 1987), but there are plans for mega-malls modeled after the Edmonton Mall (Martin, 1987).

The competitive environment that a mall faces today is considerably different from that faced in their early days when their primary competition was a downtown business district. Many of the best "locations" are gone so that a mall's primary competition is now likely to be another mall. Shopping malls- appear to be in a mature phase of the retail life cycle where market shares and sales may be leveling off (Sternlieb & Hughs, 1981). The challenges that face developers within this context will have to become more consumer oriented in the sense that more attention will need to be paid to the why, when, what, who, where, and how's of the consumer when it comes to all aspects of "the shopping mall" (for a complete review of published articles on shopping centers before 1982 see Dawson, 1982).

Research on Shopping Malls

Research on mall issues can be characterized as mainly centering on models of mall patronage/choice (e.g., Cox & Cooke, 1970; Howell & Rogers, 1981). These models have been guided by retail gravitational approaches. These approaches assume that a mall will be differentially attractive as a function of their utility. Research has identified a variety of factors that could define the utility of a mall: distance traveled - Bucklin, 1971; travel time - Brunner & Mason, 1968; accessibility Bucklin & Gautschi, 1983; size of mall -Bucklin, 1967; number of brands carried - Crask, 1979; number of stores - Weisbrod, Parcells, & Kern, 1984. The inability of these various studies to adequately account for mall patronage has led to studies focusing on more "subjective" types of variables such as social factors (Feinberg, Meoli, & Sheffler, 1989) and mall image and mall image variables (e.g., Gentry & Burns, 1977-1978; Nevin & Houston, 1980). Unfortunately these too have not led to overwhelming success and acceptance.

The enviable success and impact of the shopping mall may have something to do with the potential of shopping malls to enhance community life. There is no conflict between shopping malls, profits, and people. The basis for a shopping mall is to make it an "indispensable servant of the community" (Rouse, 1962). Right now consumer research seems to be on the sidelines of this phenomena. However, like the lead pack dog, since the mall is at its basics a consumer phenomenon, consumer researchers should be making the dust, not eating it.

REFERENCES

Ballard, C. (1981), 'Trends in Retail Development: 1980's and Beyond," In George Sternlieb and James Hughes (Eds), Shopping Centers: USA, New Jersey: State University of New Jersey, Center For Urban Policy Research.

Bombeck, E (1985), "Lost Forever In A Shopping Mall," The Daily News, Sunday- December 22, p. 16.

Brunner, J., and Mason, J. (1968), "The Influence Of Driving Time Upon Shopping Center Performance," Journal of Marketing, 32, 57-61.

Bucklin, L. (1967), 'The Concept In Mass In Intra-urban Shopping," Journal of Marketing, 32, 32-36.

Bucklin, L. (1971), "Retail Gravity Models and Consumer Choice: A Theoretical and Empirical Critique," Economic Geography,47, 489-497.

Bucklin, L. and Gautschi, D. (1983), "The Importance Of Travel Mode Factors in the Patronage of Retail Centers," In William Darden and Robert Lusch (Eds), Patronage and Retail Management, New York: Elsevier Science Publishing Company.

Burstiner, I. (1986), "Retailing For the Next Twenty Years: Looking Forward In Time," Basic Retailing, Il: Irwin Publishing, 648-671.

Consumer Reports (1986), I'll Buy that: 50 small wonders and big deals that revolutionized the lives of consumers, New York: Consumers Union of the United States .

Cox, W., and Cooke,E. (1970), "Other Dimensions Involved In Shopping Center Preference," Journal of Marketing, 34, 12-17.

Crask, M. (1979), "A Simulation Model of Patronage Behavior Within Shopping Centers," Decision Sciences, 10, 1 -15.

Dawson, J. (1982), Shopping Centers: A Bibliography, Il: Council of Planning Librarians.

Feinberg, R., Meoli, J., dc Sheffler, B (1989), "There's Something Social Happening At The Mall," Journal of Business and Psychology, 4, 44-63.

Feinberg, S (1960), What Makes Shopping Malls Tick, New York: Fairchild Publications.

Gentry, J., and Burns, A. (1977-1978), "How Important Are Evaluative Criteria In Shopping Center Patronage," Journal of Retailing, 53, 7386.

Gruen, V., and Smith, L. (1960), Shopping Towns, U.SA.: The Planning of Shopping Centers. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Howell, R., and Rogers, J. (1981), "Research Into Shopping Mall Choice Behavior,", In K. Monroe (Ed.), Advances In Consumer Research, 8, MI: Association for Consumer Research, 671-676.

Jacobs, J. (1986), The Mall: An Attempted Escape From Everyday Life, IL: Waveland Press.

Keinfeld, N. (1986), "Why Everyone Goes To The Mall," The New York Times, December 21, Sec 3, F1, F33.

Kowinski, W (1985) The Malling Of America: An Inside Look At The Great Consumer Paradise, New York: W. Morrow.

Martin, D. (1987), "Behemoth On The Prairie: In Edmonton The World's Largest Mall Mixes Shopping And Show Business," The New York Times, January 4, 19-20, 29.

Nevin, J., and Houston, M. (1980), ''Image As A Component Of Attraction to Intra-urban Shopping Areas," Journal of Retailing, 56, 77-93.

"Overbuilding: A Real or Imagined Issue" (1987), Chain Store Age Executive, 63, 48-50.

Rouse, J. (1962), "Must Shopping Centers Be Inhuman," Architectural Forum, 116, 105-119.

Sternlieb, G., and Hughs, J. (1981), Shopping Centers: USA, New Jersey: State University of New Jersey, Center For Urban Policy Research.

Turchiana, F. (1990), "The Unmalling of America," American Demographics, April, 36-39.

Weisbrod, G., Parcells, R., and Kern, C. (1984), "A Disaggregate Model For Predicting Shopping Area Market Attraction," Journal of Retailing, 60, 65-83.

Nikken Space Design's office in Osaka features a bleacher-style bookcase

      

The Osaka office of Nikken Sekkei's interior design studio features a bookcase conceived as a "stand in a stadium" – the latest example of the trend for bookshelf staircases in both home and office interiors (+ slideshow).

Nikken Sekkei –  the Tokyo-based architecture firm best known for designing the world's largest television tower, Tokyo Skytree – established Nikken Space Design in 1994 as its interior design department.
The studio already has offices in Tokyo, Nagoya and Shanghai. For its fourth office, in Osaka, the team decided to install a bleacher-style seating structure that faces floor-to-ceiling windows to offer views out over the city skyline.

"We set the bookshelf at the centre of the office, and aimed to create an environment where anyone can pick up a book at any time," the designers told Dezeen.
"The staff can sit there to read, with the view from the high position making a change to their mood."

Constructed from recycled scaffolding planks, the steps are hollow to store books and magazines. When looking for a publication, staff members are encouraged to clamber up the five-level structure.

"We realised the convenience of integrating bookshelves and seats to form stairs," the designers explained. "The bookcase has been designed like a stand in a stadium. It is necessary to climb the bookshelf to find the book you want."

Bleachers – high, deep steps suitable for sitting on that are more typically found in sports stadiums – are becoming popular in offices. Other staircases you can sit on can be found in the workspaces of Evernote, Fairphone and Eventbrite

Cement-Based Materials (concrete)

Concrete is the most prevalent building material used in our society today. Its universal use in a variety of civil engineering applications is due to its widespread availability, cost-effectiveness, structural characteristics, and ability to be molded into limitless geometries. Yet, variables in design, production, material compatibility, construction, and exposure can compromise concrete’s structural integrity, durability, and aesthetics.
Exponent provides a wide range of consulting services to help owners, government agencies and municipalities, insurance carriers, general contractors, product manufacturers and suppliers, and construction attorneys solve complex issues involving the use of concrete and cement-based materials.

Capabilities
Exponent takes advantage of combined resources in many scientific and engineering disciplines including material science, civil engineering, metallurgy, and geology. Coupled with state-of-the-art laboratory testing capabilities and over forty years experience investigating failures, Exponent is uniquely qualified to evaluate the cause(s) of and appropriate solutions to poorly performing concrete construction.

Exponent’s services in the area of concrete and cement-based materials include:

Failure Investigation Root cause analysis Site inspection and field evaluation Material deterioration examination Construction, design and material defect evaluation Non-destructive testing and petrographic examination Concrete mix design analysis Strength and material properties testing Finishing and appearance assessment Litigation Support and Expert Witness Testimony

Research and Development Support Product performance evaluation Standard and custom laboratory testing Construction and pre-construction materials consulting Green/sustainable concrete research Condition Assessment Structural integrity evaluation Failure risk assessment Service life prediction Repair design and recommendations Historic preservation Building code conformance

Expertise Related to Concrete and Cement-Based Materials
Exponent has experience investigating a variety of problems associated with concrete and cement-based materials including the following:

Cracking: Due to its brittle nature and relatively low tensile strength, concrete is susceptible to cracking. While some cracking is expected in virtually all concrete construction, cracking may have detrimental effects on concrete performance and longevity of a structure. Concrete cracking is often caused by one or more of the following: excessive loading, shrinkage, thermal contraction, corrosion of embedded reinforcement, chemical attack, freeze-thaw action, insufficient consolidation, inadequate jointing, improper support, and other factors.

Surface Problems: Scaling, delamination and excessive wear affect slab performance and are often the result of improper construction practices and/or inadequate concrete mix design for the service environment. If not finished properly, flatness, levelness, and surface quality may not meet the needs of other trades or the end user.

Reinforcement Corrosion: The expansive nature of reinforcement corrosion leads to cracking and spalling of concrete. Factors contributing to corrosion include insufficient protective cover, poor quality concrete, chloride ion penetration, and concrete carbonation.

Frost Damage: Environmental exposure to harsh weather conditions, such as cyclical freezing and thawing (F-T), may result in severe deterioration if concrete is not adequately designed, mixed and constructed. The problem can be exacerbated by the use of deicing salts.

Chemical Degradation: While concrete is non-reactive in most environments, degradation can occur due to acid attack, alkali-silica reaction (ASR), alkali-carbonate reaction (ACR), sulfate attack and exposure to corrosive chemicals.

Surface Coating Failure: Excessive moisture vapor emission, inadequate surface preparation and material incompatibility can cause coating failures. Failure is typically manifested in the form of blistering, debonding, discoloration and peeling of coatings.

Stone Veneer/Tile Distress: Debonding of adhered veneer from building façades may be the result of inadequate installation practices or material defects and can create a life safety hazard. Other common problems with performance of tile include discoloration and cracking.

Stucco Distress: Excessive cracking, warping and delamination of portland cement plaster (stucco) can be caused by structural movement, inadequate application, improper curing or inadequate proportioning of the plaster mix.

Fiber-Cement Materials Degradation: Fiber-cement products used as exterior cladding occasionally experience problems in the form of warping, cracking, and deterioration. Causes can be inadequate installation, thermal and moisture effects, or manufacturing errors.

Asbestos-Cement Pipe Deterioration: Asbestos-cement (AC) pipe which was extensively used in water distribution systems in the U.S. is nearing the end of useful service life. Gradual degradation due to leaching of calcium from cement matrix occurs in the pipe wall due to service environment.
Slab Moisture Vapor Emission: Excessive transmission of water vapor through concrete slabs can result in problems such as failures of moisture sensitive floor coverings, biological growth and construction delays. Slab moisture vapor emission rate is affected by slab thickness, slab age, slab exposure conditions, concrete mix design, sub-surface conditions and other factors.

What Can Music Videos Teach Us about Architecture? by Dario Goodwin

When it comes to the confluence of music and architecture, maybe the first thing that comes to mind is Goethe's claim that "music is liquid architecture." Goethe, however, was writing before the advent of MTV: music videos have become miniature films, attempting to capture all the tone, undercurrents and context of a particular song and translate them visually. Even better, the way music videos use architecture isn't the same as any documentary or film location; the camera attempts to mimic the way people listen to music by cutting and weaving around, designed for listeners as much as they are designed for viewers. Hence we see protagonists turning to the side, important elements placed away from the center and shots that both explore and disguise spaces in an attempt to fit the songs' acoustics to the setting.
What this means for us is that music videos can relate to architecture and capture its underlying tones in a way that a film might struggle to. For an architect wondering how the public truly understand and interact with a piece of architecture or remember a style, music videos are an untapped goldmine, since every setting location and filming choice show off how our wider culture relates to a building. Read on after the break for seven music videos that tell us a surprising amount about the architecture they feature.
Chemical Brothers - Go

Following a group of women dressed in monochromatic lederhosen, the video for the Chemical Brothers' Go takes modernism to a conclusion. Set in Paris' Front-de-Seine, the choreography and costume design take cues from constructivism, using movements to suggest machinery. The camerawork uses multiple angles and reflections to focus the attention onto form and movement, a focus that is shared with the modernist towers that form the video's backdrop.
The addition of futurist elements and constructivist cues prevent this video from being another exploration of modernist architecture's alienating side. The angles and detail shots are attempts to create a sense of place more than an attempt to feature architecture, similar to the way the choreography suggests machinery rather than featuring it. As such, Go is approaching this architecture on its own terms; retro as much as it is futuristic, this video seems to suggest that the conditions that gave rise to modernism have not entirely been lost from our collective consciousness.
Omi Palome - Architecture

Static, black and white shots of London's brutalist constructions set up the simple concept of this video. The song is, after all, called Architecture, and the video treats these buildings as "pure" architecture, rather than buildings to be lived in, used or related to. Thus we see long-distance, artfully-composed shots that mimic the way art photography seeks out angles and details that attempt to elevate these buildings to Architecture.
What was behind the choice to feature brutalism? This video seems to make the case that of all the styles Omi Palome live with, brutalism is the most "architectural." The fact that the buildings are so stark and recognizable means that when this post-punk band wanted a style that seemed artistically detached, they went for brutalism.
Art Department - Walls

This animated video for techno song Walls takes Miami Beach pastels, an imagined Babylon of ziggurats and a retro-futuristic take on mid-century modern. These disparate elements combine surprisingly well, creating a visually striking utopian environment, using the imagined leisure of the Gardens of Babylon and the publicly understood aspirations of the 1950s modernism embodied by the houses of designers such as Richard Neutra.
The pink and turquoise color wash unifies everything beautifully, but also allows the video to explore the other aspects of mid-century modernism. The largely static shots with just one or two moving elements create a slightly unsettling, otherwordly feel matching the general tone of the song, while the color palette taken from postcards only adds to the artificiality. In this video, Neutra's style and his influence is understood as alienating, even a little decadent, a theme encapsulated in the video's climax as this imaginary city is quite literally engulfed in blackness.
Unit 4 + 2 - Concrete and Clay

At the beginning of the 21st century, brutalism's appearances in music videos have of course been colored by the 40 years of architectural discussion and both conscious and unconscious judgments of the style's worth. But stepping back to 1965, we have Unit 4 + 2's short video set in the growing foundations of what would become the Barbican in London. Setting the group in a construction site under an increasingly modern cityscape, the message of love eternal alongside references to crumbling concrete seems like a foresight now - certainly it seems odd to contemporary eyes to have such a romantic song set in a brutalist environment.
But the whole song is optimistic and upbeat. Framing eternal love against the construction of London may make a point about modernism's lifespan, but the video is nevertheless casting brutalism as the city's bright future - making it an interesting reminder for present-day viewers of the cultural conditions of five decades ago.
Leonard Cohen - In My Secret Life

Set in Moshe Safdie's Habitat 67, Cohen's exploration of the sprawling site is set among shots of people with oddly-shaped heads mimicking domestic life with varying degrees of success. This extends to mocking commercialism, something Safdie's radical building is only too eager to enable, as the complex geometry of Habitat 67 is used to make familiar routines appear confusing and convoluted.
Cohen wanders through all this as an outsider, framed against and below some of the most imposing angles of Safdie's construction. This video uses Habitat 67 to suggest some kind of procedurally-generated collective unconscious, and often projects some of the more surreal scenes onto the building's surfaces, making the eggs eating eggs part of the structure itself. There's intimacy here too: more than many videos featuring brutalism, this one actually uses the spaces as habitable spaces.
Ryan Adams - New York, New York

This celebration of New York was filmed only a few days before 9/11 in 2001. The World Trade Centre Towers were, of course, used heavily, and feature as the main element of the skyline backdrop from scenes focusing on Adams. Instead of pulling the video or reshooting it, the label chose to begin the video with the simple text "This video was shot on Friday 7th, 2001."
Unintentionally, this little message totally changes how the video relates to architecture. What had been a relatively inconsequential thematic backdrop suddenly becomes nostalgic in feel, despite being filmed only a few days before. The way the towers appear in the skyline - not looming, but dominating, a central feature of it - is one that could never be recreated now without the towers being too consciously placed there.
Cold Mailman - Time is of the Essence

A time-lapse video that uses architecture as a backdrop for an enormous light show, Time is of the Essence turns Oslo into a canvas. By simply turning lights in individual buildings on and off, the video visualizes the music across the cityscape. It's a simple idea, but using the domestic lighting of each apartment keeps the video grounded in habitable space rather than simply using the buildings as a background element, and emphasizes the connectedness of the city as a whole.
The lights are colorful and playful, and inherently tied in with the rest of Oslo's landscape by virtue of using the buildings' built-in lighting - the same as every other building in shot - except in a stylized fashion. Other videos that attempt to suggest life often end up too static, but this one makes the austere towers blocks seem loved and lived in, and playful in a way that almost brings adverts to mind.

Selected Projects

Cite:Dario Goodwin. "What Can Music Videos Teach Us about Architecture?"

AR Issues: Architects Used to Design Homes for People, Not Investment

Courtesy of The Architectural Review

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.

 

Courtesy of The Architectural Review

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’.

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Courtesy of The Architectural Review

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.

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Courtesy of The Architectural Review

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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Cite:Christine Murray. "AR Issues: Architects Used to Design Homes for People, Not Investment"