Will a new Labour government let architects reshape housing?

00:00 08:43

Calvin Po has narrated this article for you to listen to.

‘We make our buildings, and afterwards they make us,’ Winston Churchill said in 1924 in a speech to the Architectural Association. This was flattery of the highest order, designed to butter up the audience of budding architects and inflate their sense of how much power they had to shape society. It’s remarkable then, 100 years later, how powerless architects have become when it comes to the biggest architectural crisis of our time: housing. According to the Royal Institute of British Architects, only 6 per cent of new homes in the UK are designed by architects. Everything else is dealt with by volume housebuilders, with the top three alone building 25 per cent of them, churned out from identikit designs.

In the niche architects are left with, making houses affordable has become the key focus. And architects are becoming cleverer at cutting corners to address this. One firm, OMMX, is working with developers to make home ownership cheaper by stripping houses down to the bare essentials. They’ll build out the basics – electricity, heating, a basic bathroom – and leave the residents to install the partitions, fixtures and fittings, according to their needs and tastes over time.

This is not a new approach, however. It’s almost become an architectural trope. In the 2000s, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, faced with tight public housing budgets, would boast of building ‘half a good house’ that would be expanded by residents themselves (see below). Even as far back as the 1930s, Berlin’s chief city planner Martin Wagner proposed the ‘growing house’ in the wake of the Great Depression.

While superficially compelling, these semi-self-build routes feel like the architects admitting defeat, accepting their limited agency in the face of crushing economic forces and, under the cover of a feel-good marketing spin, selling what, in the end, are simply unfinished homes.

Some architects have retreated into the realm of speculation, with the green belt remaining an object of fantasy.