Home and Community

Lessons from a Modernist Housing Scheme

Sandra Costa Santos, Nadia Bertolino, Stephen Hicks, Camilla Lewis, Vanessa May

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351041683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Examining the relationships between architecture, home and community in the Claremont Court housing scheme in Edinburgh, Home and Community provides a novel perspective on the enabling potential of architecture that encompasses physical, spatial, relational and temporal phenomena.

Based on the AHRC funded project "Place and Belonging", the chapters draw on innovative spatial layouts amid Scottish policymakers'concerns ofsocial change in the 1960s, to develop theoretical understandings between architecture, home, and community. By approaching the discourse on home, and by positioning the home at the confluence of a network of sociocultural identities bound by spatialawareness and design, the writers draw on sociological interpretations of cultural negotiation as well as theoretical underpinnings in architectural design. In so doing, they suggest a reinterpretation of thefacilitating role of architecture as sensitive to physical and socio-cultural reconstruction.

Drawn from interviews with residents, architectural surveys, contextual mapping and other visual methods, Home and Community explores home as a construct that is enmeshed with the architectural affordances that the housing scheme represents, that is useful to both architecture and sociology students, as well as practitioners and urban planners.

Part I

1
Home and community

Issues of public concern at the turn of the 1960s in Scotland

Introduction

In this first chapter, we introduce the coalescing facts that turn Basil Spence’s Claremont Court housing scheme in Edinburgh (1959–1962) into a relevant case study to explore connections between architecture, home and community.

The design of domestic architecture embodies a hierarchy of values that represent a particular notion of what home and community mean. Generally, such notions of home and community are socioculturally embedded as the result of long evolutionary processes (Ravetz and Turkington, 1995). But sometimes, the dominant architectural discourse can produce unusual housing designs that embody different understandings of what home should be, or in other words, housing designs which embody “reformed” home values. At times of societal change, the instrumental role of architecture in the reconceptualization of home (Morley, 2000) should not be overlooked.

However, we propose that the relationship between architecture, home and community is not deterministic, but enabling. Through the case study of Claremont Court, a housing scheme which addressed the demand for new understandings of home and community, this book explores how the making of home and community is enmeshed with the architectural affordances that the dwelling represents. The pivotal character of the case study relies on the fact that its design addressed two issues of public concern at the turn of the 1960s: the contemporary demand for a modern meaning of home and the concern for the disintegration of communities.

The dream of the ideal modern home

Claremont Court housing scheme (See Figure 1.1) has to be understood within the context of the intense debate, which had begun in Britain immediately after the end of the Second World War, over how to build a brighter future, and the determination to build a better society (Bullock, 2002). This resolution featured at the centre of a substantial number of articles, pamphlets, films and exhibitions calling for a Government-led reconstruction plan which should establish an effective social agenda (Addison, 1975). Although new housing provision and improving existing homes were nationwide concerns of the post-war housing drive in Britain, the Scottish response to the housing drive was radically different in its approach and outputs from what happened in England and Wales. This was due to the different domestic practices involved in Scotland, which were the direct consequence of the remarkable increase of population created by the rapid and widespread industrialisation which took place in Scottish cities in the nineteenth century (Scottish Housing Advisory Committee, 1944).

Figure 1.1 Members of the Housing Committee of Edinburgh City Council visit Claremont Court under construction.

Source: Historic Environment Scotland (Sir Basil Spence Archive)

The housing typology provided to cope with the remarkable increase of population in big Scottish cities (Glasgow in particular) during the Industrial Revolution was the tenement, a high-density building rooted on the Scottish feudal system of land ownership. Tenements had an established tradition in the imagery of home in Scotland, and they were built in most Scottish cities to accommodate all social classes (Clark and Carnegie, 2003). However, the experience of living in a tenement varied according to income: while the affluent classes could afford to live in tenement flats with seven or more apartments, the poor could only afford the rent of small tenement flats. Of note is that the tenements that brought condemnation and clearance by policymakers were the obsolete, insanitary and overcrowded tenements, also called “slums,” which were inhabited by the less affluent social classes.

Working-class tenements played a crucial role in establishing urban industrial domestic practices between the poor. The overcrowding that sustained domestic life in the working-class tenement was officially recognised as a problem by the 1917 Housing Commission. The Commission’s report showed that housing shortages had forced large families to live in “single ends” and “room-and-kitchens” (one-apartment and two-apartment tenement flats, respectively) (McCrone, 1995, p. 1268; Clark and Carnegie, 2003; Faley, 1990). The housing demand was such, that although overcrowding became a matter of public and official concern, it was only in 1944 that the Scottish policymakers were in a position to advise local authorities not to consider the living room as a sleeping apartment when assessing the accommodation capacity of new social housing (Scottish Housing Advisory Committee, 1944). The Committee’s recommendation also challenged the prevailing distinction between adults and children, which allowed two children under twelve to be counted as one person and infants to be discounted.

Working-class tenements were typically made up of “three-or-four storey buildings featuring a communal stairwell, with two or more flats on each landing, communal toilets and each unit consisting of one or two rooms” (Doucet, 2009, p. 306). The flats in the tenement were accessed through a communal “close,” which also opened into a shared back court (usually including a drying green). Overall, not just overcrowding, but also lack of sanitary facilities were usual problems in working-class tenements, alongside the administrative difficulties of communal (rather than individual) building improvements. Since decayed and overcrowded tenements represented long established industrial domestic practices, social and political attitudes towards tenements and tenement landlordism were highly critical (Robertson, 1992). The tenure was “regarded with hostility” (McCrone, 1995, p. 1275), and the public urged “slums” to be demolished and replaced with modern low-income housing owned by the local authorities (Robertson, 1992).

Since housing was delivered by the authorities as one of the fundamental pillars of the welfare state (Swenarton, Avermaete and Van den Heuvel, 2015), policymakers saw the housing drive as an opportunity to implement a housing reform with a social agenda. Scottish housing policy encouraged architectural exploration of new housing typologies, aiming to define modern “homes” and eradicate those industrial domestic practices endured for so long in the “slums.” Thus, the housing programme in Scotland became the ideal testing ground for a shared confidence in technological progress and architectural rationality (Glendinning, 1997) in order to achieve better domestic practices. But the betterment of established practices in the domestic realm was more ambitious than offering the working-class better living standards. Ultimately, the architectural exploration of new typologies that could define modern homes was aimed to set forth the ideal modern home.

The architectural conceptualisation of the ideal modern home has to be discussed as part of a wider question than the inadequate housing of the poor. In the post-war, societal changes made aspirations for domestic privacy rise rapidly (Crow, 1989) between both the working-class and the middle-class households. Even within overcrowded working-class tenements, there was an attempt to achieve some degree of privacy in everyday life. And even for more prosperous households at the turn of the 1960s, neither self-containment nor the privacy of a home for married couples, for example, were universal experiences, as many newly married couples had to set up their home with either set of parents.

Alongside privacy and self-containment, modern home appliances or “mod-cons” were central aspects of the ideal modern home. Modern domestic appliances reduced the drudgery of traditional housework, thus allegedly freeing time and space for domestic leisure. Parallel to “modcons,” the widening ownership of consumer goods allowed creative homemaking to thrive as part of the trend towards more domestic consumption and leisure in the post-war period. Alongside the convergent size of middle-class and working-class homes, due to the overall gain of space for council tenants and the decreasing buying power of the middle classes (Ravetz and Turkington, 1995), strict divisions between working-class and middle-class homes began to dissolve as middle-class households were losing their servants and working-class families were acquiring new homes (Ravetz, 1984). In response to the blurring (although not disappearance) of class distinctions within the domestic domain, the role of creative home-making became essential to assert the class identity of the home through a choice of built-in cupboards and shelves, boxed-in fireplaces or colour schemes that were designed to create optical effects (Partington, 1995).

Parallel to the blurring of class distinctions, the increasing presence of leisure within the domestic was changing the geography of homes across Britain, as the need for different family members to have their own space increased. Such change was officially acknowledged in 1961, when the Parker Morris Report stated that contemporary domestic life was fragmented into a series of individuated activities (Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1961), and moving away from the fireplace as the centre of home. The new geographies of the home also reflected new family types that were appearing as the result of societal changes: more single people who lived on their own, including the increasing proportion of working women; elderly people who lived independently; and young couples without children. As a result, Scottish policymakers urged the need to rethink housing typologies in order to address these changing geographies of the home (Scottish Housing Advisory Committee, 1944; Department of Health for Scotland, 1956). For example, they advised local authorities to provide single-storey cottages for the elderly; as they were now allowed to live independently from their children due to extended social benefits, they should not be “cut off from the mainstream community life” (Scottish Housing Advisory Committee, 1944, p. 13). Alongside different household types, demographic shifts also decreased the average household size, establishing the two-children family as common by the end of the war (Langhamer, 2005).

Societal changes, demographic shifts, rising affluence and availability of goods of consumption had significantly changed the nature of home and fuelled the “cross-class” aspiration for obtaining a home of one’s own (Langhamer, 2005, p. 347). At the turn of the 1960s, home design exhibitions not only echoed the evident sense of aspiration for a different type of domestic life, but they also offered architects the opportunity to explore contemporary conceptualisations of home through design. It was in the 1946 Britain Can Make It exhibition, led by architect Basil Spence, where the spatial distinction between the working-class and the middle-class home was challenged. Following the introduction of the middle-class term “kitchen” when referring to working-class dwellings in Housing Manuals (Ministry of Health, 1944b), Spence presented the modern “working kitchen” as a space for family living. The introduction of this multifunctional space (accommodating food preparation, home laundry and food consumption) explicitly criticised the social stigma attached to cooking and eating in the same room (Jeremiah, 2000), which originated in the working-class tenemental practice of eating, cooking, washing food, dishes, clothes and even oneself in the same room (White, 1980; Burnett, 1978). With this social stigma coming to an end, the modern multifunctional kitchen could achieve a “cross-class” character.

The changing geographies of home were a key element of the 1956 Ideal Home Exhibition, where mid-rise blocks of one- and two-bedroom flats were featured. The following year, the 1957 Design for Viewing exhibition introduced the television as focal point in the living room, indicating its role as part of domestic leisure, and the end of the fireplace as the centre of home (Jeremiah, 2000). The spatial exploration of the domestic sphere was therefore engaging with a wider theoretical discourse around home and community. Alongside contemporary socialist planning ideals which maintained that different classes should live together (Woodham, 2004), designers proposed inner-city flats as appropriate housing for all social classes in response to the spread of the community-alienating suburbs (Powers, 2005).

The growing concern for community disintegration

So far, this chapter has focused on the growing demand for a modern conceptualisation of home. We will now move on to discuss community as a pressing issue of public concern at the turn of the 1960s in Scotland. Architectural historians have defined the turn of the decade as the time when the architectural profession confronted the need to re-engage with the changing British society (Hughes, 2000). According to the official statistics gathered in the Parker Morris (1961) report, the modernized society had an increasing number of working-class households accessing middle-class commodities. However, with the country’s modernization and the blurred class boundaries, the fear of social disintegration became apparent. Reinforced by Sartre’s (1948) existentialism, social alienation and marginality developed as sources of anxiety during the 1950s.

The principle of social equality that had supported the Modernist egalitarian reconceptualization of urban space in the 1920s and 1930s had produced suburban housing estates in the post-war, with the promise of greater access to green outdoor spaces for all classes. However, by the end of the 1950s, the movement of population away from established urban centres was seen as a social threat. Despite the fact that the appalling living conditions of the “slums” were still considered undesirable, the experience of the post-war housing estates had damaged the belief that better housing would necessarily result in a better society (Gold, 2007). This was due to the fact that sociological research in the United States (Jacobs, 1961) and Britain challenged low-density suburban planning and functional zoning on the grounds of being void of the community life that was normal in working-class urban districts.

Sociologists Young and Willmott (1957) published their community study of the East End of London only two years before the design of Claremont Court began. Their book offered an influential assessment of post-war housing estates. Young and Willmott argued that informal networks of support, which had once been the pillar of community life in working-class communities, ha...