The Grand Designs presenter and Design Council speaker Kevin McCloud is passionate about sustainable housing and community builds. But are they still tenable today?
Yesterday, Housing Minister Grant Shapps announced plans to sell off sufficient government-owned land to enable the building of 100,000 new homes. The day before, a rather more low-key, but possibly just as significant, housing announcement had been made.
On Tuesday, 7 June, a small news item was posted on the website of
Hab Oakus, a joint venture between Grand Designs presenter and architectural guru Kevin McCloud and housing developer GreenSquare. It explained that all the houses in the Swindon Triangle -- Hab Oakus' first realised project, of which McCloud will speak at Design for Growth -- had been snapped up by locals.
Not rich ones either. The Swindon Triangle, which comprises 42 homes offered for rent-to-buy and sale through the local council, is the kind of project Shapps champions when he talks about Britain's housing crisis, and when clarifying the government's commitment to make all new houses built after 2016 carbon neutral. Indeed, his very first engagement as a minister, in May 2010, was to visit the site of the Triangle.
There, the newly sanctioned sustainable material from which the walls would be made, 300mm-thick hemp fibre-based Tradical Hemcrete, enabled Shapps to quip that he "never thought my first photo call would be hemp."
Hab Oakus aren't conspicuously radical in their architecture (it's hard to imagine even famously forthright architecture-observing royals getting upset at their uncontroversial evocations of suburban bliss), but they are in their use of materials such as Hemcrete, and in their adherence to the One Planet Living principles set out by the World Wildlife Fund and eco-entrepreneurial charity BioRegional. They also make manifest McCloud's conviction that good architecture is as much about designing for a happy, fulfilling existence as it is about structural spectacle.
A few months ago, when he was promoting the latest series of Grand Designs we spoke to McCloud and asked him whether this recession and the slump in the housing market had relegated people's boom-years aspirations about sustainability to the back burner, as the bottom line became all-important, and ecological awareness was in danger of being recast as a luxury.
"I think what we've seen is that, over the years, the core interest has grown and grown," he said. "Ten years ago, it was the odd show, and five years ago people were saying, 'You know, I wanted to put in solar panels, make it super-insulated, but in the end we couldn't afford any of those eco things and we had to put in a gas boiler' Now, people are saying, 'We couldn't afford the solar panels but we did put in the super-insulation, the mechanical ventilation... So the core values are becoming more mainstream.
Before, we used to look for ecological projects within a series.
Now, most projects are incorporating these things, so if one isn't, we ask why. And as we move towards 2016, when, theoretically, all new projects will be zero carbon, GD needs to be ahead of the game.
"It would be lovely to think that Grand Designs could evolve to include more community stuff," he went on. "We have done it -- series one and two had them -- I was hoping every series could include community self-builds but they're very rare, they're very difficult to orchestrate and organise, and they often collapse. It would be lovely to think we could temper those very, very big expensive top-end projects with those low-cost eco ones and the community-led stuff. One thing I'm looking forward to as a result of Grant Shapps saying we're headed for this self-build revolution is seeing more community-led regeneration projects involving self-builds."
*McCloud will be speaking at Design for Growth on 23 June.
Have your thoughts heard on the matter -- will self-builds and sustainable projects act as a catalyst for economic recover, or are they over-idealist in a time when austerity is required? The best comments could be posed to McCloud on the day, so get in touch in the comments below.*
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
