Rethinking Home

Despite being four letters, we become accustomed to from a young age – ‘Are we home yet?’ – home is not as simple to define as it first seems. Is it a room, house, street or neighbourhood? A number, some words and a code on an envelope? Or is it a space, a feeling, a group of people? Even if we accept the multitude of definitions, the intrinsic link between architecture, architects, and the creation of home is undeniable.

This has been seen in dialogue around the UK’s recent General Election, with architects pushing the prospects of what home could be, as the new government pledged 1.5million new homes, numbers not seen for decades. This is further to the increase in alternative modes of living, such as live/workspaces, and the nationwide rise of co-living developments.

However, the delivery of this version of home – the physical ‘bricks and mortar’ – presents a conflict for the contemporary profession, recognising the need to do so but also the depleting global resources with which to do it. To deliver the scale of new homes will lead to significant carbon expenditure, furthering the climate emergency. As architects we have an opportunity – and a professional duty – to think imaginatively and for the future.

This is the starting point where Alexandra Francis, now at Bennetts Associates, and I positioned our award-winning thesis project in our final year of study at the Sheffield School of Architecture. ‘Re-housing Manchester’ explores the creative reuse of redundant inner-city building stock into housing which responds to the innate search for the individuality of home, and its relationship with building a sustainable lifestyle.

Manchester is targeting carbon neutrality by 2038, 12 years ahead of the UK’s 2050 target. Yet in the past decade has seen a significant growth in inner city development of tall, carbon-heavy buildings, housing luxury homes with a lack of affordable offer provided on site. The city offers a live case study of the potential failures of sustained and rapid growth in the housing sector, when opting for demolition and new build.

At the start of the project we used industry developed, freely accessible, carbon tools to estimate the carbon expenditure of some of the area’s more substantial concrete and glass towers, as part of a collective studio effort led by tutor Jo Sharples. This not only offered a picture of the city’s depleting carbon budget but also a benchmark to compare the environmental cost of building reuse, as an alternative.

Our test site for comparison was the UMIST Campus, a collection of 1960s teaching buildings within the city’s inner ring road and adjacent to Manchester Piccadilly Train Station. This campus – the University of Manchester’s former home of science and technology – provided an inherently sustainable location for a contemporary community, with existing key infrastructure and services within reach.

At the time of the project, there were plans surfacing for significant demolition of the campus to make way for an ‘innovation district’. This was despite the fact the existing buildings possessed many of the attributes to support reuse, including robust concrete frames, generous floor to ceiling heights and open floor plates, over-designed for the loads of 1970s teaching equipment.

With this in mind we looked to develop a strategy for one typical campus building – comprising an eight- storey tower atop a two-storey podium – to illustrate the applicability of building re-use across the UMIST campus, translatable to other universities and cities with similar, ‘undesirable’ typologies.

Early carbon analysis considered the environmental impact of materials and components in terms of both their embodied carbon and performance. With the help of archival drawings, we were able to estimate the embodied carbon of the site as built as well as develop a traffic light system to guide the removal, upgrade or reuse of the existing materials. Such a forensic study provided estimated quantities and data which would feasibly support qualitative information in developing a system of material passporting.

Although this rigorous study provided understanding of the context, it could not answer the question of how you make home in somewhere not designed to be a home?

We conducted a series of interviews with peers, friends and family representing a broad pool of housing situations, to explore this question further. As expected, the responses were varied, complex and even contradictory; for example, expressing a desire to look out but not to be looked in on. The sense of ownership – whether it be a homeowner, student, social housing tenant – was universal. This led us to confront the reality of living in the 21st century – the need for adaptable homes which can support different cultures and residents, from the transient individual through to the multi-generation family to the retired duo.

Inspired by the Segal houses and Studio Bark’s U-Build as means of creating agency in the construction process, we proposed a self-build cassette strategy which would tie into the potential for material circularity. Around ‘fixed’ design elements, such as servicing points, communal spaces and winter gardens, the cassette system could be used to divide the tower floor plates to provide more adaptable homes, able to change with the circumstances of life. The project was pitched as a housing co-operative, whereby homes would allow for resident longevity in the community, and a natural development of collective low-impact living.

The podium, containing a primary school, nursery and community amenities, could similarly adopt the system, integrating in new structural interventions made with low-impact materials of rammed earth and timber to modify the existing spatial programme of former lecture theatres and lobbies.

The project has been acclaimed for its scales of thinking, its balance of an analytical environmental approach and the consideration for people, and its ingenuity. For me, it shows where the creative freedom available as a student, and escalated in a collaborative relationship, can take you in starting to confront some of the critical issues faced in the built environment. With a new political landscape in its infancy there is a similar opportunity to take the collective energy experienced as students into collaboration with practices – as seen by Architects’ Action for Affordable Housing group – industry groups, and communities to the forefront of what’s next for UK housing.