Archinect - News

Tate Modern resolves viewing platform privacy dispute with Neo Bankside residents

2023-10-23T13:48:00-04:00

The Tate Modern in London has announced its compliance with the UK High Court’s February ruling regarding a privacy case that involved its 10th-floor viewing gallery and five residents of the adjacent Neo Bankside apartments.

The museum will now restrict visitors' access to the platform, which was constructed in 2016 as part of a Herzog & de Meuron-led $318 million Blavatnik Building expansion. The remedy will help the Tate avoid paying any monetary damages, as was the will of the plaintiffs. Their decision puts an end to a saga that has touched on Inner London’s class conflicts over housing and could potentially carry future ramifications in regards to design and the public realm, according to Guardian critic Oliver Wainwright and other observers.

Natasha Rees, a senior partner at the law firm Forsters, which represented the five Neo Bankside residents, said: “An award of damages was never our clients’ aim and they are grateful for the Tate’s recent willingness, instead, to agree t...

Rowan Moore wants a ‘truce’ between King Charles' traditionalists and the avant-garde

2023-05-09T12:08:00-04:00

The incurable optimist in me still wonders: could his yearnings about the built environment be more beneficially directed? Charles may have been at war with much of the architectural world for nearly 40 years, but might they not unite over what they have in common? They all want sustainable communities and good design. Architects and the monarch also have a shared enemy: the sacrifice of positive architectural qualities to housebuilders’ pursuit of profit.

Moore’s calls echo in some regard the statements made by housing secretary Michael Gove last year, in which he called for an openness to classicism given there is “no silver bullet to solve the housing crisis” domestically. Stirling Prize winners Mikhail Riches and Alison Brooks Architects are brought in as examples of those left out in the fray he created by virtue of his comments and status as an “unofficial addition” to the country's planning system.

“If he were to do anything more in the realm of architecture,” Moore writes, “it should be generous: He could praise those architects who, even if their style is not to his personal taste, dedicate energy and skill to making British towns and cities better places to live.”

Elsewhere, the Architects’ Journal reported that Norman Foster would also like a word with his new king.

UK Housing Secretary Michael Gove throws his hat behind the country's traditionalism movement

2023-01-05T15:50:00-05:00

The UK’s housing chief is throwing his name into the contentious ongoing debate surrounding the role and perception of traditionalism and classical architecture in the country’s design culture and academia.

The Architects’ Journal has details on Secretary Michael Gove’s foreword to a report authored by critic Ike Ijeh for a right-wing think tank that calls for the establishment of a “School of Place” and other educational changes that would “revive” traditionalism “from the annals of obscurity to which contemporary architecture education has unfairly consigned it.”

Gove tied the cause to the country’s housing crisis while also welcoming calls for the elevation of classicism in university curricula without expressly stating that it should be mandated in either educational Part of the RIBA-administered licensure process, stating: “There is no silver bullet to solve the housing crisis, nor to transform British towns and cities overnight or instantaneously deliver a workforce imbued wit...

Soane Medalist Peter Barber on some possible fixes to the UK's housing crisis

2022-11-11T11:22:00-05:00

There is no housing shortage. There are over 400,000 empty homes in the UK, and about 200,000 homeless people. The vast majority of empty homes are in parts of the country which have become depopulated because of economic decline – in the Midlands, the north, and coastal cities. So the solution to the housing crisis isn’t building tons of homes. It’s about reviving the economy in those places, launching a massive retrofit campaign, and bringing people back.”

“We could end the housing crisis overnight, if we wanted to,” Barber told Oliver Wainwright in a recent interview, referring to the private grab on council housing that has developed unabated since the Thatcher administration's Right-to-Buy laws came into effect in 1980. “We should introduce private sector rent controls, halt the selling of council houses under right to buy, and build 150,000 council homes a year funded by direct taxation."

A brutalist fragment displayed at the Venice Biennale speaks to our current housing crisis

2018-05-15T18:41:00-04:00

While some were delighted that at least a small part of the architectural heritage of Robin Hood Gardens was being preserved for posterity, others were furious that the V&A – a so-called ‘arms-length’ body, governed by a Board of Trustees appointed by the Prime Minister – considered the estate valuable enough to collect, but not valuable enough to help save from demolition in the first instance.

The story behind London's brutalist Robin Hood Gardens reveals issues pertinent to our current housing crisis. Crystal Bennes unpacks the V&A's decision to preserve and display a section of demolished housing in this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, revealing condemnation of the building before it was even completed.

Couple fined for using a fake garage door to disguise a residential property

2018-02-13T13:16:00-05:00

At Leicester magistrates court, Herzallah and Almasri, of Enderby, Leicestershire, were each ordered to pay a £770 fine, legal costs of £1,252 and a £77 victim surcharge.

A couple, who had disguised housing on their property with a fake garage door, has been fined by Leicester Magistrates Court. The case was brought about by the Blaby district council after they were notified about unauthorized work being carried out at the couple's home and discovered the hoax garage.

The couple, Reeta Herzallah and Hamdi Almasri, had wanted to bypass planning regulations. In 2007, the duo had been granted permission to develop the property under the condition that car-parking facilities, including the now converted garage, remain permanently available. Beyond the illegal living quarters, the couple had also undertook illegal works within the highway and created an unauthorized vehicle access onto the busy B4114 dual carriageway.

Beyond the legal costs, the court has also ordered that the garage be restored to its former use. Blaby district councillor Sheila Scott spoke of the case, sending a strong warning. "The message from this case is clear. If you breach planni...

UK's Government spends big on subsidized housing rather than building affordable housing

2017-09-19T04:06:00-04:00

The Government is spending four times as much – some £32bn—subsidizing private housing as it is building affordable homes for low income families, a report has revealed. The study showed 79 per cent of the total housing budget is currently spent on higher-cost homes for sale, including through the controversial Help to Buy scheme, but just 21 per cent, around £8bn, goes to affordable homes for rent.

Carried out the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH), the annual review shows a significant shift away from programs that build new affordable housing in favor of subsidization. The amount of government funding granted to the Affordable Homes Program has fallen to just £285 million, down from £2.5 billion in 2010-2011. In total, public funding to help housing associations build new homes has dropped from £3.5 billion in 2010-2011 to £1.3.

In contrast, public money going towards subsidized housing has increased substantially. Government money is being diverted to help middle- and high-income households get on the property ladder through programs like the controversial Help to Buy Scheme—established by Conservative politician, George Osborne, in 2013—which guarantees for mortgages worth up to 95 percent of the value of a property. Despite being billed as a way of helping "Generation Rent" become home owners, the scheme has been criticized as useless due to the fact that first-time buy...

Sadiq Khan to invest £25m to bring 1,000 'Pocket Homes' to London

2017-08-24T04:00:00-04:00

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has announced that the city will be investing £25 million into constructing over 1,000 affordable prefab apartments. Funding from the city will go into purchasing small brownfield sites that will then be built on by Pocket Living, a developer specializing in 400-square-foot modular apartments. The apartments will go to first-time home buyers, already living in the relevant borough, and will be sold roughly 20% below market rate. The initiative also ensures that the Pocket homes remain affordable for the lifetime of the building. The new homes are expected for completion by 2021.

Upon making the announcement, the Mayor acknowledged his commitment to helping solve London's housing crisis: "The housing crisis is the biggest challenge facing Londoners today and I have been honest from the start that we won’t be able to turn things round overnight. For decades, we have simply not built enough new and affordable homes in the capital, meaning that for too m...

Overcrowding on London's canals

2016-07-04T11:39:00-04:00

I’m no longer a boater, and when I took a walk around the canal recently, I discovered that London’s canals have hundreds more boats than before, many in temporary moorings – constant cruisers that have to move every two weeks. Twenty years ago, you could walk from Little Venice to the Sainsbury’s at Kensal Green and barely see a moored boat. Now, they are two abreast almost the entire way, on both sides of the canal.

Find out more about how the housing crisis is affecting London:

To live in London you can't be a Londoner

2016-05-27T01:00:00-04:00

Almost two-thirds of homes in the Tower, a 50-storey apartment complex in London, are in foreign ownership, with a quarter held through secretive offshore companies based in tax havens, a Guardian investigation has revealed. The first residents of the landmark development arrived in October 2013, but many of the homes are barely occupied, with some residents saying they only use them for a fraction of the year.

The kind of wealth that turns a home into a status symbol—and an underused status symbol at that, with occupancy rates of only a few weeks a year—is not easing London's housing crisis. As the city's housing rates push actual citizens to decamp to cheaper suburbs or simply leave the area altogether, London can look forward to being transformed into an empty stage set of a once thriving metropolis.

For a fuller perspective on London's housing problems:

London fails to achieve any targets for affordable housing

2016-05-25T17:32:00-04:00

Private property developers are outmanoeuvring councils in housing negotiations and routinely delivering fewer affordable homes than town halls want, an industry analysis has revealed. Amid growing anger at the sale to foreign buyers of almost two-thirds of London’s tallest residential skyscraper, which includes no affordable housing, it has emerged that not one London borough which set targets met them in the last six years.

For more on the increasingly dire state of housing in London, take a look at some past coverage:

Architects advice to London's new mayor Sadiq Khan

2016-05-09T11:13:00-04:00

As Sadiq Khan arrived for his first day at work as London’s new mayor, architects urged him to be bold in tackling the city’s housing crisis. They warned that his policies alone won’t be enough to solve the problems and advised him to widen his approach. “Bold strategic moves are what’s required, and I therefore hope the new mayor has the stomach for a fight,” said Russell Curtis of RCKa.

There are high hopes for Khan, find out more about some of the issues he will have to tackle in his new position:

The root of London's housing crisis lies beyond its borders

2016-04-20T20:05:00-04:00

In 2008 the financial crisis was caused by the sub-prime property crash in the US. Today London is facing a super-prime crisis. [...] the market in London and parts of the south-east does not respond to local demand, because it is fuelled by the demands of global capital flooding into London, much of it from highly dubious sources, as the Panama Papers reveal. If London has been shown to be a hub of global money laundering, the property market is its driving force.

London's housing crisis is creating a chasm between the rich and poor

2016-04-06T19:20:00-04:00

London’s red-hot housing market of late is by now an international legend, drip-feeding the media with tragicomic stories of insane pricing on a weekly basis—from the $710 cupboard to the one-bedroom flat on sale for $37 million. Now a new report out this week details some of the harmful social effects that this boom in housing costs has wrought. Unsurprisingly, they are many.

This research, conducted by the think tank Centre for London, shows that the city's housing crisis is creating a massive gulf between the city's rich and poor. It's also creating an "inequality chasm" between London and the rest of the United Kingdom.

The report identifies three major trends. First, privately-rented homes outnumber owner-occupied ones, with the former growing increasingly poor. Second, while the top ten percent of British citizen are growing exponentially more wealthy, the rest of the country is getting much poorer. Third, in a reverse of historic models, poverty is becoming "suburbanized."

Read the linked article for more information on the study and what it says about life in London today.

For related Archinect coverage, check out these articles:

A guide to London mayoral candidates and their housing policies

2016-03-30T20:56:00-04:00

Which London mayor candidate will fix the capital's housing crisis? There’s a short answer to [that] question. It is that none of them will. There are two big reasons for that: one, there’s only so much any mayor has the power to do about the city’s various housing problems; two, none of the front line candidates are willing to do everything they actually could do. Housing policy is difficult stuff...

For more on London's housing woes, check out these links:

Encroaching on the green belt: UK loosens protections on rural land

2015-12-16T17:46:00-05:00

If there is one thing Britons dislike more than their country’s housing shortage, it is the idea of building more houses. Even as a lack of homes has sent prices through the roof... cities have remained ringed by protected “green belts” of land that are off-limits to developers. Attempts to build on them provoke outcry. But on December 7th the government published a consultation on letting councils allocate “appropriate small-scale sites in the green belt specifically for starter homes”...

Up to 50% of all renting London households are living in poverty

2015-10-02T05:26:00-04:00

According to an insight study performed by the think tank New London Architecture, the dimensions of the London housing crisis are spectacularly bad: 80 percent of all new homes are only affordable to 20 percent of residents, while a near majority of all renting households are living in poverty. The study predicts that the city will add 70,000 residents per year, resulting in a total population of 11 million by 2050 (an increase of 2.4 million from this year's population of 8.6 million).

Billionaire investors aren't helping the housing shortage: 61 percent of all new homes are bought as investments, without any intention of being occupied by the owners. However, not all is lost: London's relatively low urban density makes it an ideal place for increased housing development, provided that the housing can actually be afforded by the people who intend to live in it.

100 renderings of ideas to solve London's housing crisis released

2015-09-17T07:12:00-04:00

The international competition organized by think-tank New London Architecture and the Mayor of London has released 100 renderings of proposed solutions to London's housing crisis. Attracting over 200 entries from 16 countries around the world, the competition includes submissions from respected London-based architectural firms including dRMM, Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, and Grimshaw Architects.

The ideas cover a variety of conceptual ground, although the innovative use and repurposing/modification of existing spaces appears in numerous renderings, as shown in the entries of Akira Yamanaka and Hal Architects:

Several proposals make use of the Thames and other waterways to create floating housing, such as these renderings from Baca Architects and dRMM:

Starting on October 15th, the 100 shortlisted entries will be on public display for free at the NLA galleries in The Building Centre near Russell Square, and ten winners will be announced by the end of October. Those winners will be...