Cook's Camden:
The Making of Modern Housing 2018
- Mark Swenarton
Oxford Brookes JHB Lecture Theatre 20/11/18
Yesterday I went to a talk on Sydney Cook and his impact on modern social housing in Camden London. Sydney Cook was the Borough architect for Camden, which, in the 1960s, had a housing shortage of 10,000. At the time, boroughs in London were being reorganised, and Camden became one of the new boroughs which was a combination of Hoburn, St. Pancras and Hampstead. It became one of the richest boroughs in the country due to Hoburn's high income per capita. Seizing this opportunity, Borough architect Sydney Cook said that the currently climate was:
"Geared to producing ideas, and the emphasis was on the youth"
Who were Cook & Brown?
Mark described Sydney Cook as a poker-faced man who knew exactly how the system operated, and he was well rehearsed in understanding the local authority, rules, regulations and how the borough functions. He also critically highly valued the opinion of young architects, and he managed to get their thinking through the systems.
Neave Brown studied at the AA, and he taught in Cambridge, eventually going to the East Coast of the USA and teaching at Cornell. He knew all of the people worth knowing within architecture, both in the UK and also the US including the famous New York 5.
Cook provided the delivery, whilst Brown brought the latest thinking. They made a killer combination.
Architecture Projects by Brown & Cook
Neave Brown - Winscombe Street, 5 Houses (1963 - 1966)
Neave Brown was clever and cunning in finding a way to begin his architectural career through constructing his own home. At the time, there were co-operative funding schemes available in which the local authority lended 100% of the construction cost and also building fees associated with it. So, Neave got together with 4 other friends to buy a plot and begin the 5 houses project in Camden. One of them is Neaves' own home. Each of the houses are identical except from the house at the right end of the terrace which had an artist studio.
Key Points in the project:
Three level housing system. The bottom floor was designed for children, the top floor for the adults, and the middle floor for the interaction space. This allowed for the children to be able to spill out into the garden and play with their friends.
He managed to navigate the boundary of community & privacy sensitively by having each dwelling as a private residence, with its own garden spaces, but a communal garden at the end as well, shared by all 5 properties. He took a principle from Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander's book entitled Community and privacy : toward a new architecture of humanism.
The use of sliding partitions allowed for the bottom floor to transform between bedrooms and children's play areas
Maximum efficiency of the floor plan. Neave managed to make the house achieve the Parker Morrison standards of the time for housing, by eliminating wasted space and creating an extra bedroom and bathroom, through removing the lobby and using spiral staircases.
Neave Brown - Fleet Road (1971-75)
The boroughs of London were requesting that new housing schemes for the council would have to satisfy the requirements of 160 persons per acre. The expectation from Sydney Cook and others from Brown was that he would design a tower block. However, Brown managed to achieve the same density of dwellings by rolling out the dwellings, instead of stacking them one on top of the other.
Key Points:
The project was built right to the edge of the site
Inversion - Brown took the dwelling and inverted it, in terms of the building and the built environment also being the ground and a platform. Creating streets in the sky.
Separation between pedestrians & vehicles - the scheme had an underground car park in order to tackle the issue of the rise of ownership of personal vehicles.
Each front door goes straight to the street. By avoiding constructing a tower block, Brown managed to eliminate the whole lift - lobby route that would be present otherwise. Creating a more efficient scheme, and a better home for residents who could immediately have a sense of the outdoors when they open their front door.
Sliding screens, these provided flexibility for the rooms in the dwellings and the ability to live as open plan as one would like to. Brown applied the same thinking for his own home as he did for council houses.
Materiality - Dark stained wood and white sliding doors referenced Japanese architecture and he used many features and details which added a pleasing aesthetic to the scheme.
Neave Brown - Alexandra Road Estate (1967-1978)
This was Neve's largest and most complex project and brief. There were 520 dwellings, aschool, shops and other uses needed to be incorporated into the scheme. The section is key to understanding the whole project. Brown wanted the project to communicate London's tradition of urbanism. Whereas the urban fabric is incorporated through streets which lead to squared. The project is defined by two long rows of housing and it is a reworking of the street and the square.
Key Points in the project:
The park is at the centre of the scheme. The park is treated as the soft scape whilst the building is the hard scape.
Each unit has its own private open to the sky external space. This definition means that each dwelling has its own view up without seeing an overhanging balcony or a roof.
Internally full height glazing is used in some of the rooms as well as sliding doors.
Brown used a careful design language and details for a council housing project, and took as much care as the design for his own home and other projects.
Other Projects
Peter Tabori -
Highgate New Town
(1968-1980)
This project is particularly successful in integrating the project into the city. The scheme also used clusters where houses were group in a certain manner to encourage people to get to know each other. Rather than a linear form of neighbourhood, the planning accommodate for a clustered approach. All the homes overlook the public space, applying the quote that says:
"Make streets safe by ensuring they are overlooked"
Benson & Forsyth -
Branch Hill
(1968-1980)
Benson & Forsyth were ambitious architects that completed many successful architecture projects. Their Branch Hill project had many restrictions, the borough said that houses should not be more than 2 storeys, they should be houses not flats, and only semi-detached or detached dwellings. In order to achieve a successful scheme with these constraints they built in rows of 3 hourses, 2 semi-detached and one detached. Internally they also applied a Mackintosh principle of spatial juxtaposition where a low dark space is used in contrast to a bright high space for creating a sense of awe and wonder within the home.
Conclusion
All of these projects were completed in Camden whilst Sydney Cook was the borough architect. At the end of the talk I asked Mark two questions:
What did Cook / Brown define as wasted space when you said they eliminated wasted space?
Were there any negative social consequences to any of the projects?
With regards to these questions, Mark answered stating that he eliminated lobbies and corridors, which is now something that we cannot do. But he stated that they were innovative with the restrictions they had then, and we can still be innovative now but in a different way. He also stated some of the negative consequences in the projects, such as car parks shutting down and issues around maintenance. It was refreshing to hear that there were still issues and it further made me realise how much architects can't dictate the way that a space will be lived in fully.
Mark pointed out three key points that we could learn from these projects:
Housing based on streets - a lot can be said for this. It creates a social space which would otherwise not exist and there aren't many strong reasons not to consider them for large housing schemes.
Neave Brown did not recreate projects or previous ideas, but he learned to abstract key principles from architecture and other things he learned and applied them to a traditional urban setting. It is hard work.
Making the best housing you possibly can no matter who the client is and who is using the dwelling.
The interesting thing at the end of the talk was also finding out about the current social composition of the schemes. 24% of the properties are owned by leaseholders in Alexndra Road and it is just over 30% in Highgate New Town. Therefore, the majority of the dwellings are still council housing. He stated that actually, mortgage lenders give people a difficult time to borrow money for a brutalist concrete building, and usually you would only be able to purchase them with the cash in hand unless you wanted to cause yourself lots of headaches. This has meant that the leaseholders would be richer than your average London homeowner. But one of the interesting things about it is that quite a few architects live in some of these estates and they have been able to be a voice in maintaining and ensuring that these projects are kept to the best possible standard that they can be.
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