1950s point block in Vällingby. Image from ERA Sweden
This is the third part of a series of posts about flat design from the 1950s.
Part one looked at examples from England.
Part two looked at examples from Belgium, Denmark, Holland, and Switzerland.
This post looks at examples from Sweden.
1950s point block in Letzigraben, Zurich. Photo from Wikipedia.
This is the second post in a series looking at flat design from the 1950s. The first post looked at flats in England; this post looks at examples of flat layouts from Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
The 1950s Hallfied Estate in Paddington, London. (Cropped version of a photo from Flickr by Nicobobinus)
This is the first in a series of posts looking at examples of flat design from the 1950s, in particular floor plans and layout. In this post I’ll look at examples from England and in the next set of posts I’ll look at examples from continental Europe.
The purpose of posting these floor plans is as an aid to the study of flat layout and configuration. Are there ideas and inspiration we can take from these 1950s designs for housing today?
Every September in London, hundreds of buildings normally closed to the public open their doors for a weekend to let everyone take a free peek inside. The event is London Open House and numerous talks, walks and guided tours also form part of the Open House programme.
This year’s Open House event took place on the weekend of 17-18th September 2011 and I went to to see an award-winning housing development in Claredale Street in Bethnal Green, London E2.
Claredale Street housing, London E2. Photo copyright: Tim Crocker
I think it’s fair to say that a lot of new-build housing in Britain is dominated by standardised floor plans. This is particularly true of new-build flats. For the volume homebuilders, standardised floor plans have a clear cost advantage.
Some people might argue that sites for building homes are so different from one another that standardised floor plans can’t provide the variation and flexibility needed to fit the unique characteristics of each site.
The need to build houses economically and at high density has led many architects to re-consider the layout of the terraced house. For example, in Britain in the 1950s, three architects – Stanley Amis, William Howell and Gilliam Howell – designed six terraced houses in Hampstead in London with a very narrow frontage of just 3.65 metres each.
The Secret Life of Buildings is a three-part series on Channel 4 looking at how buildings affect our mood, our health, our comfort and wellbeing. Presented by Tom Dyckhoff, the architecture critic of The Times, episode one was shown on Monday 1 August 2011 and looked at the design of our homes. Here’s the episode description from Channel 4:
“Dyckhoff explores how the design of our homes works secretly to influence our behaviour. Light, room size, layout, proportion and materials all have measurable effects on our lives. So why do we accept the smallest windows and the smallest room sizes in Europe? And what can we do about it?”
Housing makes up the majority of the built environment, even in large cities, and the way housing is laid out shapes public space. The quality of our urban environment is therefore very much tied up with how well we design housing that stimulates our visual interest and provides variety and contrast in the shapes it forms and encloses.
The importance of these external aspects of housing (as opposed to internal layout) were explored in a book published in 1978 called An Introduction to Housing Layout: A GLC study. The book is based on the experience of the Greater London Council (GLC), and before it the London County Council (LCC), both of whom designed and built many housing estates.
The book deals with the following four topics:
These aspects are analysed in terms of scale, territory, visual interest and order. In this post, I’ll look mainly at the organisation of space.
A few weeks ago (February 2011), the Education Secretary Michael Gove proposed that new schools be built from a few half-dozen templates in order to save on building costs. When Building Design magazine reported the news on their website, many readers decried such an approach, fearing low-quality designs oblivious to local needs.
During the 1950s and 60s, there was a growing interest in high-rise, high-density housing as a solution to Britain’s housing problems and the need to build more new homes. The 1956 Housing Act also provided subsidies to Local Councils that encouraged the development of high-rise housing: the higher the block, the greater the subsidy. In 1958, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government published a guide to the design of high-rise housing called Flats and Houses, 1958: Design and Economy.
