Architecture
Is Disneyland builded here?
Alan Powers raises a subject unfashionable with architects: housing developments Building houses might be thought to be a major part of any architect's work, but it is no way to fame and fortune. Some of the great names in contemporary architecture have tried it, but their housing develop- ments are often episodes that they would rather forget, while the developers and `volume builders' of houses know just how little architectural involvement they can get away with. Although planners now require some gestures towards what is understood as traditional and regional character, these are usually misapplied, with results that look superficial, whether it is use of stone in the Cotswolds or brick in East Anglia.
If regional character is desirable in new building, are there ways of achieving it on a more profound level? The concern for the quality of places was, strange though it may seem, one of the ideas behind the modern architecture of the 1930s in England, in reaction against the invariable composite style of the speculative builder's semi- detached or bungalow. After the war, amid miles of desolate new housing, a few schemes offered a better way of doing things. The rural district of Loddon, between Great Yarmouth and Norwich, employed the young practice of Herbert Tayler and David Green, who had been Corbusian hot-shots in the late 1930s but had rusticated away from London.
From 1947 to 1960, they built terraces of houses on the edge of villages which still look absolutely right, with well-tended gar- dens front and back, occasional ornamental barge-boards and trellises, and none of the gawkiness of rural council housing. They understood how to plan a house for coun- try living, and were not afraid of a little prettiness. They still kept their modernist sense of abstract composition to pull it all together.
It is instructive to contrast this with a development in West Suffolk of the 1950s: the estate village of Rushbrooke built for Lord Rothschild by Llewelyn-Davies and Weeks with white-painted brick cottages in the best architects' good taste of the time. These photographed nicely for magazines, and have now been listed, but they convey little sense that anyone enjoys living in them. In the conventional framework of ideas, Rushbrooke was more 'modern' than Tayler and Green, whose work was often
regarded with suspicion because it was so attractive.
Thirty-five years later, the discussion has hardly advanced. Deference to locality has become a bargaining counter in the tricky game of getting planning permission to build in rural areas and also counts as a selling point. Outside the town of Alde- burgh in Suffolk, with its disproportionate population of retired modern architects liv- ing in minimalist austerity, the site of the old railway station has been developed for housing, so that midway along the approach to the town centre by the sea one glimpses a cluster of old cottages, farm- houses and Regency rectories. Designed by Anthony Bloomfield Associates, these are a piece of instant heritage. It is not enough to scoff, for they are done with some skill, although the authenticity breaks down in the planning layouts. Each facing slightly away from its neighbour, these houses offer neither community nor privacy. The 'local character' generates no feeling of locality, unlike the charming and bizarre neo-Tudor of Thorpeness, visible across marsh and meadow.
The problem of how to .clo this sort of thing better seldom gets discussed, although two valuable conferences have been held at the Institute for Advanced Architectural Study in York under the title `Invention in the Vernacular Tradition', testing illusion against reality. Common Ground, the admirable organisation for environment and the arts, has a project called 'Local Distinctiveness', which exam- ines all the elements which go towards making the character of a place and cam- paigns against the mass-produced phoney and twee. They are holding a conference on this at Church House, Westminster on 28 September.
From the car window or the sales brochure, one cannot see the whole truth about a new housing development. Contin- uing the series of Suffolk examples, a new development in the centre of Sudbury, Nonsuch Close, shows how the modernist ideas about handling living space can still operate without the need for flat roofs or concrete.
Nearly all the 20 or so houses are differ- ently planned. Even unfurnished, they are pleasantly unboxy in spite of quite small sites. The architects were Medici of Bury St Edmunds, although much of the success of the development is owing to Margaret Lainson, who started building her own house and then acquired more land and became a developer. Her experience shows that banks, lawyers and, regrettably, archi- tects do not smooth the path of individual enterprise of this kind, although it is just such local initiatives that promise to raise the standard of new housing.
Nonsuch Close, with walls of Bedford- shire Gault brick and slate roofs, might just qualify as modern in the strange way that the continuum of building activity gets cut into two parts. In architect-speak, there is a point where 'decent' degenerates into 'Dis- neyland'. Neither is a precise critical cate- gory, and it appears that housing gets separated from the mainstream of architec- tural discussion because the wrong criteria are being used. It is hard to imagine that what is fashionably referred to as 'the pro- ject of modernism' can contribute much more to the needs of people's dwellings. All that remains is to decide what makes a place pleasant to live in, and use it, whether it is 'traditional' or not.
With an architectural culture so divided, this is easier said than done. Try saying `Essex Design Guide' to your architect friends and wait for the explosion, yet this document of 1973 was but the first step on a long road to mending the shattered conti- nuity of country building. Since economics and fate have decreed that so much new housing will be dumped on green-field sites, the subject demands more attention from urban-minded stylists than it has gen- erally received. If Disneyland gets builded here, they have only themselves to blame.
Instant heritage: The Kingfishers development, Church Farm, Aldeburgh
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