Emerging themes from the Housing Design Awards 2021

In this article, I share some personal reflections on the schemes shortlisted for the 2021 Housing Design Awards.?https://hdawards.org/schemes/?_sft_scheme_year=2021

The shortlist has been published for the 2021 Housing Design Awards.?Every year I follow the awards, looking for emerging themes in the shortlisted schemes. I often refer to the website in discussions with clients and planning authorities in search of useful precedents of design principles.?We also review it as a team of urban designers, architects and planners, discussing our likes and dislikes.

Nash Partnership doesn’t have an entry this year although we are mentioned for designing the Ensleigh masterplan on the edge of Bath, as part of PRP’s elderly housing scheme.

Nash generally operates in the South West, which means I tend to look at the shortlisted schemes that are outside London.?This Year, 37 ‘Projects’ (i.e. not yet built) (57% in London) and 26 ‘Completed Schemes’ (69% in London) have been selected.?When designing new communities outside the city, one of the things I grapple most with is accommodating parking whilst achieving good placemaking.?In that sense, the car-free London schemes are less useful as precedents and they are able to devote more of the public realm to people and wildlife than to the car.?The densities achieved in London are also hard to replicate out of town, so I’m drawn less to projects with tall towers.

The Housing Design Awards last year took place virtually due to lockdown. Perhaps not surprisingly, these awards focussed on health and wellbeing and the role the public realm and the built environment play in influencing that.?This coincided with the launch of the design guide ‘Building for a Healthy Life’ (BHL), updating the previous ‘Building for Life 12’.?Innovative ways of achieving high densities with lower buildings, including back-to-back typologies with roof gardens and lightwells, were seen in schemes that won awards.?

From the project shortlist this year I could see the following emerging themes:

·???????Amenity space: Provision of smaller private gardens or rear yards alongside generous communal gardens, some incorporating swales.

·???????Energy: Increased emphasis on energy use and carbon reduction in the project schemes (unbuilt) – proposed primarily through a fabric first approach and air source heat pumps.

·???????Modular: The prevalence of modular construction in housing; with some schemes facilitating street scene variety by providing elements of resident choice.?These are elevated either to be unmistakably modular whilst others are softened in brick.?As the need for housing numbers drives up the speed of delivery I wondered if masterplans will also start to look ‘factory produced’??Will the role of architects and urban designers and the emphasis on place making still be valued?

·???????Materials: There is a predominance of brick, be it patterned brick, multiple types or colours of brick in a building or along a terrace, arched bricks, recessed brick, deeply set window reveals or brick framing to reduce the scale of an elevation, the trend for brick - especially grey or pale colours - continues.?Is this a British, ‘three little pigs’ obsession reflecting the need for homes to feel sturdy, a ‘being beautiful’ response, or a post Grenfell reaction to avoid all types of cladding? Across the country, monotonous brick housing estates are covering the countryside.?The Housing Design Awards prove how careful detailing using brick can create high quality and characterful neighbourhoods.

·???????Other trends include ‘wedgies’, ‘innies/outies’ and ‘pinch-an-inch’ buildings:?Wedgies, are unusual shapes in plans and elevation, sometimes I find it hard to understand the rationale behind these.?Innies and outies are facades which incorporate deeply recessed fenestration or projecting balconies (it’s interesting to consider how these deal with air tightness and thermal performance).?Pinch-an-inch plan types are homes below Nationally Described Space Standards (NDSS), down to less than 35sqm (it will be interesting to see if future homes areas increase to accommodate homeworking desk space).

As an architect, working on masterplans for mixed use and housing neighbourhoods, my role seems to be less about designing buildings and more thinking about the spaces in between buildings.?This year I looked to the awards for inspiration about the following:

1.?????Thresholds: How have proposals accommodated the ‘Building for a Healthy Life’ and ‘Streets for All’ criteria to minimise the dominance of the car and design the space between the pavement and the home?

2.?????How have proposals responded to local context?

Thresholds

We aim to deliver neighbourhoods which are not harmful to the environment, that residents take pride in, and where people can feel safe. So, what is the best way to create the transition between public and private space and how can this accommodate everyday requirements such as parking, bins and meter cupboards so that they don’t dominate the street????????

Parking

The ‘Building for a Healthy Life’, Streets for All’ criteria encourage housing design to minimise the dominance of the car.?In-curtilage parking, preferred by tenants and valued by developers, is probably the most common and easily delivered parking approach.?It can provide two parking spaces perpendicular in front of a house which can be allocated, reducing management issues and the spaces don’t need to be adopted or lit by the highway authority, therefore reducing costs.??Unfortunately, done badly, this arrangement can result in large areas of ugly hardstanding where there is insufficient space to open the car doors, walk to the front of the house or look out of a window without directly facing a car.?This parking approach is often one of the ways affordable housing can be identified on a masterplan.?The HDA shortlist includes examples of this parking strategy with varying degrees of success depending on the management strategy of the street.?Some examples are softened by incorporating a tree or a hedge between drives or planting and seating to blur the lines between private and shared space.?The disadvantages with in-curtilage parking is that it requires pedestrians to walk behind reversing cars and it is harder to talk to passers-by. The more successful HDA schemes incorporate a range of alternative parking solutions.?These include rear courtyard parking (often not acceptable to planning officers), perpendicular or parallel on-street parking with pavements parallel to front gardens.?Technically these are harder to deliver and possibly a harder sell with highway authorities but these strategies add value in terms of streetscape and are therefore worth seeking out as precedents from the HDA. The emerging requirement to accommodate electric vehicle charging points is likely to add further complexity to a more shared, communal approach.

Entrances, bins and meters

Front doors, and having the ability to personalise the space around, is important to creating a sense of home and belonging.?Entrance canopies, a requirement for many affordable housing providers, are often attached as an after thought when they could be part of the architecture and character of a place.?Recently, to avoid the addition of GRP entrance canopies, we have been designing homes with inset entrances.?These provide relief to the fa?ade, create privacy and shelter and are a discreet way of hiding the inevitable plastic meter box. The HDA include other examples such as bringing the entrance canopy right out to the boundary wall and incorporating a balcony, adding another layer of detail and privacy to a house.?

Terraced housing remains a common, high density typology in the HDA, particularly for modular schemes.?Dwellings today require a plethora of bins and recycling containers which come with regulations over carrying and collecting distances.?My preferred examples this year are those which integrate the entrances into the boundary treatment or bays, accommodating bins and bike stores.?Front garden boundaries that organise and enclose the bins are often a target to be value engineered.?However, unless alternative communal strategies can be agreed, I think these are essential.??

Responding to local context

First impressions of the HDA are that the projects/schemes all look very similar: on trend, pale bricks, with zig-zag frontages and roofs.?Some of the completed shortlisted schemes do describe how the local context influenced their layout or fenestration.?This can be through making connections beyond the boundary of the site, in the street hierarchy, or through scale, form or materials.?The formal industrial nature of some sites has produced some interesting denser schemes constructed in red brick, with some incorporating arches and decorative brick detailing.?The aim to rebuild a bit of town scape has also produced schemes with a narrow network of streets and interconnecting public spaces, achievable due to close proximity to transport networks and therefore able to design for fewer cars.

I look forward to the publication of the shortlist of the Housing Design Awards every year.??I find it a useful source of precedents for solving placemaking problems and inspiration for innovative house types.?I search for directions that housing architecture has moved in as drivers change over the years.?Last year’s focus was wellbeing and achieving higher densities amidst Covid concerns.?This year we are seeing innovative ways to deliver homes such as reusing former office buildings or modular housing.?Strategies to respond to climate change are starting to emerge but don’t yet seem to be shaping dwelling or master planning ideas.?A number of schemes caught my eye and?I certainly have some favourites:

Project schemes shortlisted

·???????Manox, Manchester by Levitt Bernstein.?I like the diagrams showing a clear street hierarchy and the solutions to parking and amenity space that result from this.?I like the rational behind the housing mix and how this is organised to create interesting elevations and corners.?One observation is that some of the houses are very narrow with windowless internal rooms, despite achieving NDSS areas.

·???????Eden Manor, Surrey by Ayre Chamberlain Gaunt.?Innovative reuse of former Ted Cullinan office development in the grounds of a listed building.

Completed schemes shortlisted

·???????North Wingfield Road, Derbyshire by DK Architects.?Garden wall used as a sculptural and organising element to frame the entrances and organise the car.

·???????Old Ford Road, London by pH+ Architects.?Innovative and sculptural regeneration of a small site, responding to local context.

·???????Hawley Wharf, London by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.?Large regeneration project creating a network of streets and public spaces with contextually driven buildings.

I will be eagerly looking out for the results when they are announced later this year.