Sustainable Retrofits

Post War Residential Towers in Britain

Asterios Agkathidis, Rosa Urbano Gutiérrez

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781134985623
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architektur
• Categoría: Architektur Allgemein

Presenting the state-of-the-art in sustainable retrofits in post war residential towers, this book captures and re-informs the current intense refurbishing process that is taking place in Britain, which is part of a global phenomenon happening all over the world, as cities upgrade their building stock in an attempt to comply with governmental emission reduction targets. The authors present inspections of 20 sustainably retrofitted social housing towers, analysing their aesthetic and technical modifications, as well as the shifts occurring in their social structure. The authors use over 200 full colour plans, elevations, photographs, maps and illustrations to beautifully support the statistical and analytical information collected. Finally they include interviews with some of the architects who designed the retrofits, residents and key stakeholders to inform the conclusions.

Chapter 1

Public high-rise blocks in Britain

A brief review of their historic context

The origins of public housing and high-rise estates

The post-war period represented a very distinctive situation in the history of public housing in Europe. Obviously, the Second World War had left the continent devastated, with many cities bombed or in ruins, involving a massive destruction of all kinds of buildings. There was indeed an overwhelming demand for buildings, and most urgently, people needed homes. How the reconstruction of Europe would take shape in those years was very much affected by different trends, some of them had in fact started their trajectory decades before.

An important part of this process is based upon one overarching concept – modernity – which was profoundly focused on the pursuit of health, well-being and progress of society. Important theoretical movements across Europe underpinned this positive thinking. The provision of decent homes for the low-income population was fundamentally connected to these currents of thought: the moral crusade to improve the extremely poor living standard conditions of the working class brought about by industrialisation was very much led by the urgent need to eradicate the epidemics that still haunted Europe at the turn of the twentieth century.

The pursuit of health and well-being consolidated new lines of experimentation. These years would see significant investigations into comfort and the environmental control of buildings that led to important developments, particularly in Britain and France. Numerous designs for walls, floors and ceilings emerged, as multi-layered assemblies with cavities that housed innovative heating, cooling and ventilation equipment of all kinds. The invention or optimisation of new non-porous, easy-to-clean materials (glass, concrete and steel), together with new construction techniques was critical for envisioning the modern urbanscape, with large expanses of smooth non-ornate surfaces. The pursuit of health would also bring new building typologies (e.g. sanatoria, spas) or new ideas about how to approach old ones (e.g. the open-air school movement). This line of thought was also influential in theories of the planning of cities, establishing a new relationship with nature in terms of ventilation, sun exposure, views and landscape, while firmly based on a new understanding of civilisation as closely related to technology. These principles, the essence of the Modern Movement, were vastly promoted through the seminal works of Le Corbusier (Ville Radieuse, 1929), or Lewis Mumford (Technics and Civilization, 1934), which were highly influential in the following years.¹ In relation to housing in particular, modernity encouraged the generation of new social arrangements, proposing the concept of collective social housing and communal living, which is deeply rooted in the development of a critical concept: the modern welfare state.

The welfare state, as the proposal for an increasingly stronger role of governments in social matters, would definitely be a determining factor in the initiation of social housing. The industrialisation process that had taken place in the nineteenth century had attracted masses of people to the main cities, which were flourishing as industries were concentrated, beginning a depopulation of rural areas. Cities were ill suited to effectively absorb this massive and rapid growth, lacking not only the physical infrastructure to accommodate these huge flows of migrants, but also the regulatory and planning framework. There is abundant literature illustrating the extreme misery affecting the poor newcomers, stuck in overcrowded housing in tenements that could not cater to their hygiene and health needs, generating a breeding ground for the emergence and expansion of contagious diseases. The demand for housing was first of all provided by private initiatives in the form of high-density small dwellings for rent, that often failed to meet thermal and sanitary standards. Aggravating this situation, the commonest practice, as the quickest and cheapest solution for the poorest families, was to subdivide the existing conventional houses into ‘rooms’. Later initiatives to improve these conditions were also privately managed by companies, factory owners and philanthropists (following the concepts of model villages, utopian communities, and garden cities), who felt compelled to cater for the accommodation and education of the urban poor all over Europe. Nonetheless very few of the urban poor actually benefitted from these early forms of social housing, which represented a very small percentage of the existing stock, with the majority still left to live in precarious conditions.

A combination of factors paved the way towards engaging civil authorities in the creation of public housing. Primarily, the threat to health and safety: cities were not only dirty and unhealthy, they were also hotbeds for social unrest. The fear of riots, epidemics, and loss of economic profit due to debilitated labour provided the conditions for the generation of Housing Acts in all the European countries. By 1914, the crucial principles and instruments of the regulatory housing policy had been basically established in nearly all the European countries, with the aim of offering a combination of private and public initiatives to solve the housing problem. Housing became a key element in British politics: the building of homes through public agencies was a clear objective, and the civil authorities were the only ones in a position strong enough to assume responsibility for tackling the problem in a comprehensive way.

Despite the provision of a legislative framework, results would not be substantial until after the First World War; in Britain, the effect would not be visible until 1919. To create the space for the implementation of a comprehensive rebuilding programme, the eradication of tenements, cellars and back-to-back terraces had to be conclusive,² and this meant a clear trend towards massive slum clearance. Despite the extensive governmental support, by 1931, there was still evidence of both housing shortage and excessive overcrowding (Figure 1.1). Over those years, the number of areas labelled as slums and potentially to be cleared kept rising, prioritising the quick production of new dwellings over quality and well-planned strategies to optimise the use of the available land.^{3, 4} Of all the housing construction between 1919 and 1939 (nearly four million dwellings), over one million dwellings were supplied from public initiative (30 per cent of all new dwellings), and many of the rest had also benefitted from state subsidies.^{5, 6} On the whole, basing the strategy on slum clearance generated problems of social imbalance, not only because it privileged those who lived in the designated areas, ignoring others who might be in equal or worse conditions, but also because the massive destruction and rehousing did not take into account an understanding of and protection of the existing communities. This negligence would unfortunately continue in future interventions, and had a disastrous critical impact, as we will see in later discussions.

Figure 1.1

Slum in Glasgow, Lanarkshire, 1868

Regarding housing types, until 1930, both the public and the private sectors predominantly followed traditional typologies. In the British context, the government adopted the ‘cottage’ model in garden suburbs as the ideal home for the working class. However, after 1930, a new philosophy emerged, strongly promoting the ascendant progression in the design evolution of flats. Supporting this process, there was not only the pressing need to densely rehouse the slum population, but also, in some cities, the convenience of keeping the workers in the city centres. A critical influence in the creation of flats was the arrival of the new model of collective rental housing for workers promoted by the Modern Movement’s ideology. Multi-storey flats seemed the immediate answer to house large numbers of slum dwellers following the new sanitary standards.⁷ In 1930, the freestanding high-rise block was promoted at the third CIAM Congress⁸ as the typology that would incarnate the Modernist building principles of the functionalist, standardised mass-produced city. In line with these principles, in the Housing Act of 1930, subsidies were related to the numbers of people rehoused rather than the dwellings supplied, giving an extra allowance to developments taking the shape of blocks of flats. Both the European modern vision and the economic affluence he...