Housing Fit For Purpose

Performance, Feedback and Learning

Fionn Stevenson

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000705287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture générale

Housing Fit for Purpose sets out a research-focused approach to looking at the challenges facing the built environment in approaching the design, construction and management of housing. This book uses original research by the author on housing performance evaluation and distils it for built environment professionals, arguing that learning from feedback should be taking place at every stage of the housing project lifecycle, improving outcomes for end users. Drawing on active research, this book shows why and how the design, construction and management of housing can be linked to feedback and actual evidence of how people choose, and learn, to use their homes. It examines the key concepts which underlie participatory design, occupancy feedback and learning, and includes a practical primer on how to undertake housing occupancy feedback.

SECTION 1
BACKGROUND

ONE
A SHORT HISTORY OF HOUSING EVALUATION

"You cannot deal with the people and their houses separately."

Octavia Hill in Macmillan's Magazine, XXIV October 1871, p 464

This chapter outlines a brief history which charts the international development of housing performance evaluation over the last century - from public health work in the 19th century, via building science departments in the 1960s, through its exploration in the social sciences, right up to the latest interdisciplinary ventures.

The following aspects are included in this chapter:

• Victorian housing: a public health warning
• Building science and housing monitoring
• The occupant survey
• Environment behaviour and post-occupancy evaluation
• Participatory design
• Building performance evaluation
• The relevance of feedback for housing performance evaluation
• Towards a hybridity of evaluation: interdisciplinary collaboration

Victorian housing: a public health warning

Early housing performance legislation in the UK

The ancient Vitruvian building principles¹ of firmitas (being durable), utilitas (functioning well) and venustas (being delightful) remain key design goals for housing. Despite this, numerous housing disasters have occurred over the centuries. The Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed the homes of 70,000 inhabitants² and resulted in the London Rebuilding Act of 1667. This was the first attempt in the UK to legally limit the spread of fire and prevent the building of dangerous structures, later consolidated in the Building Act of 1774, which influenced housing standards for the next two centuries. In the 19th century, local medical authorities realised that there was a connection between the insanitary physical conditions of homes and the poor health of inhabitants, through the evldenced-based approach of the leading British physician John Snow (1813-58) and others. These conditions related to dampness, overcrowding, poor heating, sanitation, light, water and air quality. Adequate sewage drainage was required to prevent disease, and this was enshrined in the Metropolis Management Act of 1855. The Sanitary Act (1866) then made overcrowding in housing an offence, while the Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Improvement Act of 1868 enabled the demolition of insanitary housing to prevent the spread of disease from poorer neighbourhoods through wider society.³ Finally, the Public Health Act of 1875 required local authorities to provide sanitary housing through a series of by-laws. Ironically, this early performance-based legislation was the precursor to a long line of regulation to improve housing design, but not necessarily its performance in reality, as there was no provision for performance evaluation.

Housing feedback and inhabitants' behaviour

With Victorian housing for poorer inhabitants in the UK increasingly regarded as a public health hazard (see Figure 1.1), philanthropic model dwelling companies developed in the second half of the 19th century to re-house inner-city slum inhabitants. The secretary of one company based in London, the Metropolitan Association, even went so far as to advertise the evidential healthiness of their housing estates in terms of sanitary provision in an attempt to break down prejudice against the novel housing design of high-density housing blocks⁴. This was an early form of ad-hoc housing feedback procured to help the owner promote their product. Victorian housing reformers such as Octavia Hill also made a connection between the quality of houses and the character and habits of the people living in them. They believed that housing would soon fall into disrepair and ruin if the inhabitants were not 'reformed'.⁵ Interestingly, some contemporary housing performance evaluation now also aims to understand inhabitants' motivations, expectations and behaviours in relation to housing occupancy, making a similar connection between housing and behaviour, but sometimes falling into the same rhetoric of inhabitant 'reform'/blaming as discussed in Chapter 4.

Figure 1.1 Victorian housing reformers linked inhabitants' health to good sanitation

Building science and housing monitoring

Modernism meets measurement

After the devastation of the First World War, there was a renewed interest in healthy housing led by the modern movement In architecture. This was evidenced through Richard Neutra's Health House for Dr Lövell in the USA, Le Corbusier's manifesto Towards a New Architecture in France, and demonstrated in the Weissenhofsiedlung housing settlement in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1927.⁶ The world's first organisation to undertake evidence-based building research, the UK Building Research Station (BRS), was set up in 1921 in West London, and by 1926 had grown to over a 100 staff.⁷ Experimenting and testing of materials at this time provided some random empirical evidence of housing performance in terms of its fabric, but little systemic study to show how the housing was performing overall and what the inhabitants thought of it. One exception was 358 measurements of the air change rate in six homes in London using the decay of coal-gas released into the home, in 1943.⁸ This study concluded that liberal window openings could provide enough ventilation in these homes, given all the flues, gratings and cracks present.

Following the huge destruction of the Second World War there was a need to produce mass housing quickly in Europe. The UK Housing Act In 1949 enabled local authorities to build homes for all classes. Local authority architects were also highly influenced by Le Corbusier's call for a new 'science of housing'⁹ and an extensive drive for préfabrication, with government subsidies given to encourage new types of non-traditional housing. This was exemplified in Sheffield's famous Park Hill development, where 'Dimensions, light and layout were all measured so as to ensure that each resident received a regulation flat to provide for their basic needs.'¹⁰ However, UK housing was still not fit for purpose, with the government's Fuel and Power Advisory Committee reporting in 1946 that heat insulation in the construction of homes was neglected given that '... in our inconsistent climate, space heating is required at most times of the year'.¹¹ Postwar studies carried out by the BRS developed the first mathematical models for measuring lighting, acoustics, and thermal and ventilation performance in housing, backed up with testing in experimental houses.¹² This informed design guidance in UK government housing manuals in the 1940s, and eventually informed housing standards in the UK from the 1960s onwards.

Monitoring in housing comes of age

The first 'English House Condition Survey' took place in 1967, examining fitness for purpose, disrepair, and the availability of basic amenities such as sanitation and heating. This was perhaps the first routine evaluation of the existing building stock in the UK. The RIBA also called on Its architect members to undertake performance feedback on completed building projects in Part M of its first detailed Plan of Work, published in 1964. The Building Performance Research Unit led by Torn Markus in Strathclyde University, Glasgow, then produced the first definitive text on Building Performance in 1972, which presciently included a model of how to potentially undertake systematic housing performance evaluation showing technical and cost components alongside environmental and behavioural perspectives¹³ (see Figure 1.2). This was quite radical at the time.

Figure 1.2: Early model of housing performance evaluation

Following the global oil crisis of 1973-4, the UK government started to systematically document how much energy was being used in homes, with the renamed Building Research Establishment (BRE, formerly BRS) expanding to 1350 staff by 1975 to carry out work on housing energy conservation measures.¹⁴ Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the BRE was at the forefront of many UK government-funded 'best practice' housing demonstration projects specifically to develop energy conservation and energy efficiency, alongside numerous European-wide housing demonstrator projects such as CADDET, While these initiatives monitored energy in use, they generally lacked input from the inhabitants, and any broader evaluation of ventilation, water use or air quality. They were not housing POE studies in the full meaning of the term, and others had to develop a more holistic approach.

The occupant survey

Mass Observation begins

With nearly four million homes damaged after the Second World War, the UK government undertook a bold experiment to understand what kind of housing its citizens would like, drawing on national Mass Observation studies which had examined people's lives in their homes in great detail during the war.¹⁵ The director of these Mass Observation studies noted:

'It is the experts who choose and build the house; it is the ordinary husband and wife who choose and build the home. Often the housemakers and home-makers plan their houses and homes separately, each with little idea of what the other is getting at and looking for. Mass Observation's job is to provide the link between expert and amateur, planner and planned-for, the democratic leader and the democrat.'¹⁶

This careful differentiation between 'house' and 'home' is important, as these terms (along with 'housing', 'household', 'dwelling') are used interchangeably in many housing ΒΡΕ studies without noting the difference. The former term tends to privilege physical and quantitative measurements, while the latter includes interpretations of social and cultural expectations and norms, as well as emotions and relationships.¹⁷ In this book, I favour the word 'home' over 'house' or 'dwelling', in order to capture this broader dimension of housing ΒΡΕ. At the same time, it is important to situate a 'home' within a societal 'housing' context.

The wartime Mass Observation report covered 1,100 detailed interviews¹⁸ and some results did eventually make their way into the 1944 the government report 'Design of Dwellings' (known as the Dudley report).¹⁹ This was perhaps the first example of housing design guidelines informed directly by inhabitants' feedback.

The BRS, which was mainly wedded to materials studies, branched out into human factor studies during this period.²⁰ In 1942, a study of a small development of modern flats (Kensall House, designed by Maxwell Fry) revealed that 61 of the 68 residents surveyed were well satisfied with this type of accommodation.²¹ The London County Council also car...